Epilogue The Hatter’s Reflection
The Hatter sat where the corridors of the in-between knotted together, in a room that wasn’t really a room—just a pocket of dark so thick even echoes dragged their feet. The last traces of Elise’s defiance still clung to the air, thin as smoke after a house fire, the kind that leaves its taste on the tongue long after the flames are gone.
He felt the ache of her absence like a pulled thread behind his eyes. One less voice in the chorus. One less weight on the scales. One more hole in the madness that kept the rest from eating him alive.
A glint on the floor cut through the murk. He tilted his head, hat brim sighing as he leaned down, fingers brushing dust until they found it—a shard of mirror, small enough to lose, sharp enough to matter. He picked it up, and the glass bit deep into his palm, carving a bright, deliberate line. Silver-no, red-no, something between both welled up and slid over the edge.
In the cracked surface he saw not one face, but three trying to share the same skull. Wee Willy Winkle with ink under his nails and mercury in his blood, the Wizard who once hid behind curtains and machines and called it truth, and the Hatter with his grin like a fracture that forgot which side of itself was supposed to hurt. All of them staring back, crowded into that tiny slice of glass.
Behind him, the air bent. The temperature dropped with the lazy cruelty of a closing fist.