Re: [Orion]
As you swallow the memory berry, you feel something in your stomach clench and your mind seems to fray at the edges for a split second as you experience the memory unfolding in your consciousness.
[[It was only a random intervention that kept you from it. You WERE that close. It had taken most of the night to wind your way through the masquerade.
So many twisted visages, formed of paper, feathers and wood... you knew that the faces beneath them were no better. Twisted, unnatural mixtures of man and beast, the worst of a mad god's dabbling. Animalistic by their very nature, these creatures had the intellect of a proper high man, but the cruelty and caprice of the low beasts they were twisted with.
It was hard not to shake with rage, but such an emotion would carry on the air. Some of them would smell it... you knew you had to get a little bit closer.
In the next turn of the dance, you glide, the bow perfect, you reach out, smile warmly at the duke's tusked face - marks of its dirty lineage. You have the blade ready in a moment, poised, snakelike to strike. You revel in that moment, the dawning look of comprehension and fear on the noble's face. You knew you'd get this strike, and then be set upon. But... maybe it would be enough to show everyone that these things were just as mortal, that they COULD rise up... they could fight back rather than just be massacred like your husband, like your children.
It was just.. in that instant, the music changed. A plumbed jester pranced by at just that moment, taking the blade meant for the thing that had taken so much from you.
The outcry is instant... you feel your arms wrenched back, twisted until you scream in rage and pain and drop the knife.
The duke strides over and sniffs at you, tilts your head up with one thick finger. He sees something in your eyes and gives a half smile...
"Don't kill her yet."
A wretched pain lances through you, starting at your shoulder and rattling your skull until mercifully, everything goes dark.]]
As you return, the memory settles, interlaced with the rest of your recovered life, as if that was just another part of the world and people you left behind. It's hard to shake any of the conviction that it was real and it had happened to you, any more than you would a normal memory.