Alice was never a girl

They called her Alice, but perhaps her true name was Smoke, rising slow and silent from letters never sent, from altars crumbled beneath the cold gaze of forgotten saints, from lips that kissed her only to still her breath. She did not fall. She transcended. There is a sacred difference, between shattering and choosing the void. She stepped beyond the back of her own reflection, where silver fractures whispered secrets older than time’s first prayer, and her eyes held the quiet sorrow of gods who have forgotten mercy. The wormhole was no place, but an unspoken hymn, a rift in the fabric of becoming, curved like a question too holy for a mother’s voice, too fragile for an angel’s touch. No rabbits greeted her, only warnings draped in silence, clocks weeping timeless tears, knowing the pain of counting souls that vanish between moments. In that other world, she wore her scars like relics, held her shadow like a prayer, whispering softly, “I forgive the absence of your surrender.” She met herself, not in cold mirrors, but in the trembling hush of ancient trees, in the ache beneath forgotten songs, in the boy she once was, before the world demanded she choose between breath and belonging. She bowed not to queens, but unstitched their crowns, thread by sacred thread, until all that remained was dust, and the infinite silence of grace. And when she reached the edge, there was no light, no voice, no door. Only her own heartbeat: steady, eternal like the first drop of rain falling on a city that forgot her name, but still remembers her soul.