Chapter 189: Ch187. The Professor’s Guide To The Library of The Unwritten
The Professor smiled again, and this time it was both proud and sorrowful.
"Alright, Sarissa. Let’s start with what remains."
He gestured, and the air in front of her shimmered. A translucent image emerged, two overlapping shapes, flickering with color and meaning. One was shaped like a chess piece crowned with a thorned halo. The other was a jester’s mask cracked down the middle.
"These are your fragments." He said. "Alice and the Hatter, each representing core traits. Order through madness, and madness through clarity. Two sides of Wonderland’s most peculiar and inherent paradox."
Sarissa reached toward them instinctively, but stopped herself just short of touching.
"They’re inside you now." The Professor said gently. "But fragmented. You have to recontextualize them into your narrative, give them a home inside your Story, or they’ll pull you apart."
"And how do I do that?" She frowned ever so slightly.
"You ask yourself. What do they mean to you? Not to the world, not to the System. You. Why were they drawn to you? What do they want from you? What do you want from them."
Sarissa stared at the flickering fragments.
"I think... Alice saw I was lost, broken, and on the verge of giving up. She told me to make sense of the nonsense inside me. That I had to find my own logic, my own rules." She fell silent for a moment, and then her eyes widened as if struck by lightning. "Wait... That’s what the description of one of my Attributes said... The [Treasure’s Nature], it said that my nature was to question the nature of everything."
The image of the chess piece crowned with a halo of thorns pulsed once, vividly, and Sarissa felt as if it was pulsing in sync with her heart.