Alice waited for Killer to talk again, but, for some reason, the mysterious being stayed silent.
Alice, then, looked at the Golden Door in front of her. She wondered for a while what kind of trial awaited her on the other side of it, before giving up. Apparently, predicting that kind of thing wasn't possible for her... yet, at least.
Honestly, her Name had been pretty useless so far. Sure, she was able to saw in the darkness, and she even found a password in one of her dream, but it was far what it was supossed to be, according to what Nikoletta and Mirror said about it.
Hell, Mirror had been capable of something completly crazy thanks to her copied Name. Alice did not understand what that last attack was, but it was powerful enough to make the opponent kill himself.
Alice did not show it, but she was impressed by what Mirror did. If she had been the one to fight Lotus, she would have died, for sure.
She needed... power.
Finding a way to improve her Name's power was going to be extremly important... But Alice had no idea where to go to do that.
Well, no idea... that wasn't really true.
Nikoletta, back in the Forest of Glass, advised her to go to a place called the "Temple of Light" or something similar, to meet the other Lightbringer.
Alice had absolutly no idea where the Temple of Light was, and didn't even knew the Name of the other Lightbringer (she tried to use her Name to find it somehow, but she failed.) Going to the Temple of Light could potentially be a long and arduous trip...yet, Alice was ready. She really didn't have any sort of long-term goal until now, and having one was important.
Or was it... ?
In any case, if Alice never had any long-term goal until now, she had a sort-term one, and this one was possibly even harder than finding the Temple.
Surviving.
Alice was nothing more than a young thirteen years old girl armed with a dagger. Sure, she had a Name, but using it in battle was hard. She was pretty sure she had some kind of innate talent for sorcery, like Mirror, but she wasn't willing to pay the kind of price required to do it, except if it was a life-or-death kind of situation.
Alice was also hungry. Very hungry. There was nothing to eat in the never-ending staircase, so of course she was hungry.
Dying because of starvation wasn't something Alice wanted to do. For now, at least.
Worse than hunger, the girl was infected. That much was obvious from the fact that Brandon's blood was black, just like her blood. Alice didn't knew if there was a similar creature to Lotus growing in her body, or if it was Lotus himself that was the one trying to take control, or if it was something else she hadn't thought of.
But that... was just a small detail.
Alice didn't want to end up like Brandon.
Therefore, she needed to find someone capable to stop her from becoming... like him. Alice really hoped that there was a person capable of doing that in the Temple of Light but if it was not the case, she would be forced to ask the help of... Isa.
And her instinct, something that, thanks to the Seer's Sixth Sense, was extremly reliable, was screaming at her to stay far, very far, from that little girl.
Sorry, from that abomination.
"I hope I never meet her in person." thought Alice out loud.
Alice threw a glance at the dead body of her friend for the very last time, wondering if what Killer said was true.
Did she suffer from any kind of mental illness ?
After all, Alice had the background of a person messed up in the head: a mother abusive and irresponsible, a father that was never her, and a brother....
Better not to think about him...
But even though her family was... well, her family, that didn't mean that Alice was crazy, did it ?
The young Lightbringer thought about her behavior since she entered the Sky: when she almost jumped to her death, when she met Nikoletta, when she had to fight against a Two Mouths while seeing nothing, when she lost an eye....
Was any of what she did crazy ? Alice felt like the response was no. Even though her reaction upon Mirror's death could be considered way too calm, feelings and emotions were a very cmmplicated thing, and she spent less than a month with Mirror.
Alice stopped trying to establish if she was a bad person, or a sociopath, like Killer said.
Thinking about that kind of stuff wasn't productive. And it was also... weird.
Instead, she walked towards the Golden Door.
She was leaving that cursed city behind.
She was leaving Brandon's and Mirror's body behind.
Alice was in front of the Door, now. She looked at it.
The most shocking thing about that Door was it sheer size. It was so large even Stranger and Brandon were kind of small in comparison.
Like all of the Doors Alice had seen so far, here, there was also a demon-like man with a sword on one side, and a beautiful woman holding some kind of weird orb-like object on the other.
This time, however, both the man and the woman weren't taking more than half the space.
Instead, Alice saw some engravures depicting six medieval weapons.
A Bow.
A Sword.
A Spear.
A Knife.
An Axe.
And finally, a Hammer.
All of these weapons were placed in a shape that cirled the body of someone that Alice immediatly recognized. Isa.
She was taking even more space than the demon holding a sword and the beautiful woman, which was... kind of unusual, in a way.
Below Isa's feets, something was written. This time, there wasn't even a single letter of some strange language: it was just english.
It was a fairly short text.
It read:
"This Golden Door was made by Lady Isa the Genderless in the goal of making the City less isolated."
Alice stared at the Door for a moment, before finally opening it, and walking into the darkness that was inside.
And thus, she left the City of Flowers.