The hollow laugh was loud. So very loud and it beat in her brain, sticking needles in her and pulling. She felt torn apart by the shadows. He and the Devil would dine on the blood of the innocent and still beating hearts of their victims. The images flashed in her mind, taunting. Chains and blood and torture and pain. The toys, broken dolls, marionettes controlled by their strings. So many wanted to avoid Hell but Dark would go there and enjoy it. It was obvious.
The tickets were handed to her and she hesitantly took them, the ink and paper seeming to sear into her skin, marking her. The darkness was imbedded in the paper, spinning. But they were in her hand and she didn't know how or why or what to do. He had offered her two tickets on the boards because he found her intriguing and so it seemed that was still the case. Only this time, Peeta wasn't there to fight him off. Oh, River could defend herself. When her mind wasn't in chaos, but presently she was overwhelmed by the pain and darkness and she was being moved towards the tent despite her desire to get out. She couldn't see, it was as though the shadows of this place were thickening, blocking the exit so the only way she could go was forward.
It wasn't funny. They made her like this. Picking and poking at her brain. The memories weren't here. She didn't want the mission but it was there, burning in the back, waiting. She just wanted silence and not the darkness. The suffocating darkness. She saw the truth in things, she had even before the experiments. They stripped her of the barrier though and now she was open to it all despite medicines and pills and the Force. She needed the calm of Luke and Mara and she couldn't find it. Not in the ever growing darkness..
"Forward and back, time stops. Ticks forward, leading to death. Backwards is birth but at what cost. Lost..... the mirror distorts and shows the truth. Look inside where no one wants to look... No one can. Too open and raw...."
There were truths and tricks of the two attractions she was told of. Carousels... she had never been on one but the fake horses scared her. They looked wrong. And mirrors showed what no one wished to see but still they could not escape them.
"Said you show people their desires. But you feed on the darkness of the price."