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"Look, can't we try this again?" Sealed asked. She wasn't going to give up. Not now.

She wasn't someone that gave up easily anyway.

"Fine." It said. "But you must answer another riddle: What kind of plant grows but never dies?"

She stared at the cat, looking entirely baffled. "I don't know. Seaweed? Mushrooms? A really tall tree like a sycamore?"

"The answer is poison, thick and prevalent in the heart, it will poison a soul for eternity and then move to the next." It said smugly.

"It doesn't make any sense." She sighed, crossing her arms yet again. Sealed was certainly starting to wonder if her choice to stay and banter with the cat was the right thing to do.

Hades tried.

He really did.

He couldn't put the crying tree out of his mind, and so he decided to explore about in an attempt to find its glasses, and found himself absolutely lost. He wasn't even sure if he could call it that, because he technically wasn't even sure where he was in this entire forest.

And then he saw it. That grin upon the tree that he had seen twice before.

"Um, hey there!" Hades called out to it, hoping it wouldn't spew random words and disappear entirely away like the last time. And it didn't!

"I don't need a story or a riddle." He said, scratching the back of the head. "Actually, I'm looking for something--"

The cat interrupted him by introducing itself and posing him a question, offering a gift in return. Hey! Maybe he could get it to help him find those darned glasses!

"What can I hide but always find?"

What.

He stared blankly at the cat. "Your heart?" It was the only thing he could think of.

"The answer for this one is your shadow. It follows you everywhere, and hides anywhere. Quite tricky, that shadow."

.............Oh. His shoulders slumped.

He couldn't figure out how he'd gotten here, but either way the cat was rather terrifying. attmeptdmurder shrank a little as he stood in front of it, willing it to disappear because maybe if it disappeared he would too, and then this whole thing would be over.

Or maybe not. He fiddled with the sleeve of his coat and shifted his feet a little, trying to get his balance - and his sanity - back into place, because the cat had disappeared but then it had kept talking and then it had reappeared and then it had disappeared and now he was just plain confused, not to mention frightened.

He wasn't built for this sort of thing after all.

Wings fluttered a little as attemptedmurder opened his mouth and croaked out, "P-poison."

He was not creative. He had no idea how to do this, no idea how to come up with something clever enough and witty enough to be able to fool this...thing...or something, whatever it was. attemptedmurder shuffled his feet and looked helplessly around at his surroundings, as though they might be able to give him some sort of hint as to what to say.

He finally managed to drudge one up from memory, his voice trembling as he said, "I-I am the b-beginning of the end, the e-end of every p-place.
I am the b-beginning of et-ternity, the end of t-time and sp-space."

Time was most certainly the answer to everything, and the reason why he couldn't possibly be managing to get anything done at all. attemptedmurder wondered, not for the first time (and not for the last) if he would ever manage to get through this place and survive til the end.

Probably not. He tried another riddle.

"G-give me f-food, and I will l-live.
G-give me w-water, and I w-will d-die."

He waited, on edge, convinced that he'd gotten it wrong again - but it seemed his luck was finally putting itself to use. The cat faded away, replaced by a chest, and attemptedmurder let out a breath he had not realized he was holding.

Then he promptly scampered away before anything else terrible happened.

It was only a matter of time before this happened, because.. well, because Wonderland wouldn't be complete without a grinning feline of some sort. If this one wanted a riddle instead of scritches between the ears, so be it.

Maybe this is my cheshire cat, she thought absently. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

The cat purred pleasantly, and looked at her with eyes half-open.

"What turns around and around and around but quite rather slowly?"

Eventually, Shadowstep found himself at another tree that spoke. Similarly to one he had found earlier on, it wasn't the tree itself but the space above it. He tilted his head as it asked him if he wished for a riddle or a story. Closing his good eye, he let out a sigh. Fine. He'd humor the thing.

When he opened his eye again, the speaker had revealed itself. A broken up cat of sorts.

Shadowstep crossed his arms and waited.

"Alright. Tell me a riddle then," he mumbled.

"What kind of plant grows but never dies?"

For awhile, he stood there in silence, thinking it over with a slight tilt to his head. He murmured a few possibilities under his breath. After some time, he looked back up to the chesire cat.

"Poison. Isn't it?"

The cat grinned at him.