[HappyHappyHierophant]

She glanced to the side out the window at a peaceful silky black night, violet clouds passing by overhead shrouding and revealing the moon. The bright orange second hand of a chrome clock, bordered with neon clicked at 12. 3:00am.

Wasn't she the one always longing for some experience? For some kind of mysterious easier times in the past where she hadn't seemed to be pushed down two increasingly forking paths, lifestyles that she had at some point unknowingly committed to, tearing off the stupid wings tattooed to her back off like those of a fly? She ate, she shit, and she reared her ugly head, with those bulging eyes and that hungry mouth, dreading people and the world.

"Okay."

[HappyHappyHierophant]

-3-

The tab hit her tongue, the white rabbit first dissolving before the background around it. Her eyes dilated into thin blue rings. Her stomach seemed to lurch as she felt herself be abruptly lurched away from the table and booth, through the windows in the front and into the night. Hector, now watching her, was shrinking smaller and smaller in the distance. Everything around her seemed to melt away into a warm, viscous liquid.

She paused, floating into another blurry image. Pink and blue lights flashed around her and she saw Hector standing next to herself at the bar, and again he turned to her and met her eyes before she was dragged backwards through it again. The bathroom of her apartment, herself on the toilet, appeared and spun around her, switching wall to ceiling, ceiling to floor, floor to wall.

It again melted away from her. She felt herself spinning and being pulled into patterns of sharp angles and hair pin turns. She came to screeching halt, spinning head over heels, until she found herself in an inky, black void.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

Familiar places appeared around her fiery spheres around her before burning out into wisps of winding colored smoke. They wound around each other, the calligraphy of some unknown language, before disappearing into the blackness beyond. The void seemed to hum around her. Her mind seemed to hum in tandem, and she found her self unable to think, only to perceive the flames of images around her. Finally, the darkness seemed to cool, the wisps of smoke being pulled away suddenly.

The darkness was blank for a while. A glassy sphere flew towards her with a mysterious phosphorescence. It divided into smaller and smaller spheres and morphed into an oblong figure, than grew a head, feet, small ears. With a quickening pace, it morphed, until, standing before her staring straight into her eyes, was an enormous white rabbit.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

She had never considered herself a spiritual person. But nothing short of revelation, or something that felt like it, reverberate through her body in layers of cold and hot as she gazed into this creatures four eyes. She felt herself stretch into even waves and undulate gently, serene, and his long tufts of fur drifted likewise, opalescent in soft unearthly light that surrounded them. It was ecstasy; it was paradise.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

"Who... what are you?" she replied to it. The sounds leaving her lips were diffused and inaudible to her.

She felt some sort of current in the fluid space around them and spiral in a perfect circle. The rabbit spoke. His voice was deep, and seemed to both resonate and echo around them as if they had been trapped in a glass sphere and to emanate from within her.

I AM THE WISDOM YOU DESIRE. I AM THE ESCAPE YOU SEEK. I AM WHAT YOU ARE, AND WHAT YOU WILL BE.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

There was only one way she could think of to answer.

"What?" she asked. "Wait, wh-"

"-assail, wassail, all over the to-ooown, our toast it is white and our ale it is brown!"

She turned towards the commotion and like that inky black world was pulled from her like a sheet over her head. Her head was whipped back and she was horizontal.

And she was moving, though not nearly as smoothly as before. She watched as stoops and neon signs moved and bobbed to her left and her right. And a head. No two. No eight heads, shiny with sweat in the neon light, flushed and red, with happy and unaware grins, carrying her along merrily, hoisted on their shoulders.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

"Our bowl it is made from the white maple tree, with the wassailing bowl we'll drink to thee!"

"She's awake!" a shrill slurring voice said to her left, that could only be Hector. "Our savior is re-b-born!" he cried and throwing his hands in the air, letting go of her left shoulder and causing his adjacent fellow drunken carriers to jerk towards him losing their balance.

Fortunately, they were close enough to Hector's home that their assistance was no longer required. They let her down to her feet and she gripped a nearby rail, her head flopping forward, feeling incredibly nauseous.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

"I to-old you. It's... it's some shit isn't it." Hector, intending to giver her an encouraging pat on the back, instead flopped defeatedly over the rail and half of her, like limp laundry. His breath was still pungent with the sour-sweet smell of apple cider.

"Yeah. More than I was expecting," she replied groggily, grabbing Hector's key from his pocket and arising, causing him to roll down the railing and collapse onto the sidewalks, looking up dazedly at the skeletal branches of the white maple trees above him.

[HappyHappyHierophant]

-4-

It seemed that mystical entrances had less than mystical exits in her private world.

Morning, the real morning that is, came as it always did. Her eyes felt as if they had retreated to the deepest recesses of her skull. Yet, somehow the light still reached them, painting her vision over with a shade of deep scarlet.

She pulled a strand of hair from her lips, sitting up with her eye still closed.