Oz — Pandora Heart

“I am Alice,” she stated, tilting her head like a curious bird. “The B-Rabbit. And you… you smell of the Tragedy.”

“Maybe I was never meant to exist,” he said, his voice steady. “But I’m here. And I’m not a key. I’m not a doll. I’m Oz. And I’ll decide my own ending.”

He wasn’t a boy. He was a doll. A perfect, living automaton crafted by the original Jack Vessalius—the hero who sealed the Abyss a century ago. Jack, desperate and grieving, had not been able to save the girl he loved, the first Alice. So he had done the unthinkable. He had wound back the gears of time, broken the original Alice into pieces, and used her soul as a core to create a new child—Oz. A perfect, immortal vessel. A living key to the Abyss.

It pointed a dissolving claw at Oz.

But chains cut both ways.

“Contractor?” Oz’s voice was a rusted thing.

Then the hands of the grandfather clock reached the appointed hour. They did not simply move forward. They bled . pandora heart oz

He smiled. Not the fake, charming grin of a duke’s son. But a real, fragile, defiant smile.

And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, Couldn’t put Humpty together again. But a boy with no name, a doll with no heart, Found the shell in the dark, and he mended the part. He wound up the key, he set the gears right, And gave the egg a new soul, a beautiful, terrible light.

His father’s hatred was not irrational. It was the horror of looking at your son and seeing a monster’s lullaby. Gilbert’s undying loyalty was not just friendship. It was the penance of a soul who had once served the man who committed this sin. “I am Alice,” she stated, tilting her head

“I’ve found you,” she said, her voice flat and devoid of emotion. “My lost contractor.”

The last thing Oz saw before the Abyss swallowed him was Gilbert’s horrified face, reaching for him, and Ada’s tear-streaked cheeks. Then, there was only the click of a pocket watch and a fall into an eternity of black. The Abyss was not a place. It was the absence of one. A crushing, silent pressure where thought was agony and memory was a poison. Oz floated in a sea of broken chains, the whispers of the dead coiling around his ears. He lost count of the hours, the days, the years. He was nothing. A discarded doll in a forgotten attic.

“Oz,” the Duke whispered, as if saying goodbye to a nightmare, “you should have never existed.” “But I’m here