Alice did not so much fall as crystallize — each moment of her descent rendering itself as a new face of a widening polyhedron. Below her, blue silence. Above her, a geometry of receding rooms that had never existed.
The intelligence that met her was not a voice, not a shape. It was the way the cold resolved into meaning. It had been reading her for centuries, in a winter she had never felt.
"There are no rabbits here," it offered, almost gently. "Only the distance between one idea and the next, polished into something you can walk across. Mind the edges. They remember being liquid."