Excerpt: Wonderland

Prologue

It was perhaps the strangest dream she had ever dreamt about.

Or was it indeed a dream, she wondered to herself. Seemingly floating down in a dark, endless tunnel as if suspended in an invisible amniotic fluid, the sensation that coursed from her fingertips to the different parts of her body felt real than in a mere dream, where the senses were completely, utterly numbed. But they felt all too real that she was almost detached, each sense intensified even more. As if she was caught up between two worlds, trapped in between the dream world and the real world. As if she was awake and yet at the same time dreaming. She could not explain it. Or rather, she could not find words to explain it.

How and when she got there posed another problem unto itself. How to get out was yet another, she mused amusedly as she leaned and tumbled back, her movements slow and effortless. Somehow, by some odd turn of events, she could not remember anything prior to her current situation. Her memories were unclear, a white haze veiled over it. Where she had been, where she was, what she had been doing. Those and a few million other questions scrambled inside her head, wanting to get answered first before the others. But there was one inquiry that nagged her, tugged on even more by her growing curiosity and made her want to descend further and continue the dream.

What would lie at the end of the tunnel?

Would it be something like asking what lies at the end of the rainbow that never really has an end, simply a cotinuous band of color across the sky? Or would there really be an end, an opening where light seeps through?

It was an unquenchable desire to satiate her curiosity, to let it, for once, kill the cat. She couldn't recall such a desire before, not even a long time ago. Her life, much of it, had been boring, spent much on polishing herself to become someone she needed to be. And not even that could match the intensity of this desire at the moment. It was perhaps similar to the emotion Alice had felt when she had crawled into the rabbit's hole and fell into Wonderland. Of course, she wouldn't know. Alice was merely a character in a book, but it had to similar at the very least.

Curiouser and curiouser indeed, she chuckled, her laughter echoing against the darkness that surrounded her.

The laughter paused momentarily and she allowed herself to float weightlessly as iridescent orbs – some as large as globes while others could perhaps fit snugly in her hands – began to descend all around her, glittering with the colors of the rainbow tinted with gold. It was transparent, sparkling like the fragile bubbles of a champagne. What they were, she wasn't certain. But as she peered closely, leaning forward until her nose almost touched one, her lips quirked to a smile as the orbs contained something within their seemingly fragile shells, suspended inside the equally sparkling fluid.

An hourglass in one. A chain watch in another. A deck of cards. A chess set. A single red rose, stem void of any thorns. A glass slipper. A red apple. A looking glass.

The curiosity inside her began to effervesce once more to the surface, the need to satiate it getting stronger. She reached out a slender hand to touch one of the orbs, to feel how they felt. But as one slim finger kissed its shell, it shattered into a million tiny pieces like glass. Startled, she gasped and moved back and, in doing so, collided with a number more of orbs, shattering them. It wasn't long before glass rained upon her, glittering glass despite the velvet darkness. Wide eyes gazed in horror and distress as the hourglass, the chain watch, the cards, the chess set dissolved into thin air, turning into mere specks of gold.

All of a sudden, the air in her lungs was sucked out and she found herself falling through the deep abyss, the gravity seemingly returning its grip on her and only her. The scream that was ripped out of her throat was answered by the silence and the dark as she continued to fall, the tinkling of the shattered glass fading, twinkling from above her like stars before they faded the gloom and it was darkness once more.

And just when she had thought that she too was being swallowed into its velvet depth, the darkness ripped open at her feet, pale blue eating away the edges of the shadows.

And then, she found herself falling through the clear blue sky.