Chapter 3 opens with a chirp from the mori forest. It's the summer after Alice starts first grade, and she's going to remember it forever. The chirp is from a boy who's been scratching his hair and looking like a "cat" . He's not talking to Alice, though, because he's nowhere to be found. Alice tells the boy that she can't go back to the forest because she isn't supposed to be there, but she does have permission to talk to someone. She tells him that when she gets older, she'll find him and marry him. Alice says that she still dreams about the prince, even though he looks like a boy. When she was a little girl, she used to play in the forest with a prince who looked like her. The prince must have been important to her, Alice says, because she was crying when she ran off. She's sorry she ran away so quickly, and Alice thanks her for saying so. Alice asks the boy if lightning was a god, and the boy says that it was just a flash of lightning. Alice wonders if this is the "kyoto" , or the "world of dreams," that she has read about in books like The Secret Garden of Good and Evil. She says she still looks the same as she did when she first stumbled into the forest, but that it's different from person to person.