Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi
Joker/Clover/Heart no Kuni no Alice© QuinRose

The residence of the Country of Hearts knew, even if they hadn't wanted to believe it, that there would come a day that Alice Liddell would return back to her world. Back to where she belonged, she claimed; however, some held hope that she would be brought back by someone who dearly loved her.

They were wrong.

No one left to retrieve the girl that many had fallen in love with. It was back to the way things were before the foreigner came into their lives.

To say that the news of a different foreigner replacing Alice some time later was surprising. It was a well-known fact that Peter was absolutely smitten with Alice, and hadn't been the one to bring the new girl to the Country of Hearts. If anything, he would've brought Alice back.

Speculations of who might've brought the girl to their world circulated like wildfire. There were even rumors of what she looked like-having this hair colour or that, her eyes being so-and-so colour, and so on so forth.

No one knew where it was that she was, though. Few of the Role Holders had asked Julius if he had met the rumored new foreigner. To their disappointment, he hadn't met her.

Whoever had met her, was keeping quiet.

"How much longer am I going to be kept here?"

Nightmare tilted his head at the oriental woman, listening as she yelled at him in her native tongue, pointing at him, flailing her arms this way and that. The small smile on his face grew larger as he couldn't help, but give a chuckle at her temper tantrum with the shivers that it sent spiraling down his spine.

"What is with you? You're being rude, ya know!"

Was it wrong of him to admit to loving her temper and quick tongue? The incubus set his feet on the ground from his previous floating position, making his way over to the blue-eyed woman. The gray-haired male squatted down to look her in the eyes as she stared back at him fiercely from her place sitting on the sand, "You're quite amusing~"

She gaped at him, "Amusing? I'm not a toy!"

Nightmare closed his eye As he hummed in thought, "I know-"

"Then why'd you call me 'amusing?'"

"-and the foreigner before you hadn't been this fierce with her temper."

Blue eyes narrowed at the male, causing him to lose his grin and his upper face to be shadowed from the dark look she sent him. She crossed her arms as he started to shiver, looking slightly ill.

Her brow twitched tenfold as the incubus started to cough up blood, splattering her arms and upper chest before he retreated a small distance from her with his hand over his mouth as his other hand searched his pockets for a handkerchief.

The blue-eyed girl clenched her fists, opting to ignore the blood for now as she directed her anger at the man, "Am I a replacement for the previous 'foreigner'? I've already had to deal with being a replacement before, and I refuse to deal with the position again!"

Nightmare glanced over at the girl, taking in the tears that were welling up in the corners of her eyes. He gave a cough, before shaking his head, "You're not a replacement!"

"I don't believe you.."

"If you really want, I can bring you to the Country of hearts and have the Role Holders prove it to you that you're not a replacement for the girl that was here before you."

The black-haired girl looked down at the sand she was sitting on, not quite willing to take the incubus up on his offer, but a small part of her wanted nothing more than to agree and have herself proven wrong. Her arms uncrossed her bloodied chest, her fingers made miscellaneous patterns in the sand, indecisive about the offer.

"What's there to be indecisive about?" The eye patch-donning male asked, "I'm sure people will love you!"

A handful of sand was thrown in his direction, "If it gets me away from you and your creepy mind reading, I'll do it!"

Nightmare gave a weak cough as he started to laugh, "That's the spirit~"

Prologue is short, and I'm asking for the bare minimum of constructive criticism to know what I'm doing right and wrong with this series. I need to stop writing stories on my iPhone.. Give me a couple of days to remember where I was going with my stories on my other account, and I'll start to update them again—and it's no surprise that I've fallen out with Kuroshitsuji.