Ramblings of Cassius

[Short sad drabble for n_overstreet for the surprise of offering Lorrie Hesperidean Cider! An AU in if Lorel had come back. Screenshots on {{Tumblr}}.]

---

Nigel Overstreet has offered you a tiny sip of Hesperidean Cider. Splendid!

You took a sip of the Hesperidean Cider Nigel Overstreet (Nigel Overstreet in Fallen London) gave you. It tasted of the Garden and the time before men.
You now have 1 - A Meagre Aftertaste x A Taste of the Garden

A Taste of the Garden 1 - A Meagre Aftertaste The taste still lingers. The smell of earth and grass when you sleep. What will it bring?

@LS_Cassius Accept at your leisure, Ellis. And there is plenty more where that came from!

— Nigel Overstreet (@N_Overstreet) December 10, 2015

---

Cassius sits, no longer Lorel, no longer as pavonine as before. Everything aches in this dreadful, damp place, but it is only flesh & bone. Sinews & organs held onto her slight frame. The invitation surprised her, a welcome surprise of many that weren't. This silly fop, this client that took off before his ridiculous quest's completion, she never expected to see him again. She frowns slightly as she lifts the glass. Before…before she would have been adverse to drinking the fabled Hesperidean Cider. Even though the claims of it were most likely false, immortality was nothing to risk. She'd seen paths it could lead to, where bodies would be hard-pressed to any longer be called human. Rotting corpses, exposed skeletons, only their spirit continuing to animate them. She wouldn't really call it "living". Before she considered that no kind of life for herself, but now she may as well be. Her own will being what continues her on, the duty she still had to complete. Murdering Scathewick was going to be marvellous. And that pledge, and that wish is what animates her own broken body. At least it isn't Venderbight's screecher wards.

It took awhile to process he was referring to her as "Ellis", the name processing over-and-over in her head. She hadn't heard it in so long, and the ridiculousness brings amusement which flickers in her eyes. With a smile resting on the edge of the glass, she inhales--it smells more of orchards in sunshine than any sort of alcohol. Memories of a home she can never return to again until she is truly, truly dead. Her only ever home. It is nice sitting here, and now all this time later she knows the why of Red Honey, the physical thirst to feel memories such as this home smelling cider. Before the nostalgia can turn to regrets she shoots the drink back. Letting all feeling go to the experience.

[So basically one of my *sits down and just types what comes in one big, rambling session*! This on the honey-dreaming, and OF COURSE contains spoilers! Also it is mostly just a vomit of words, that follows roughly "Nemesis" 25-29.]

( SPOILERS FOR 'NEMESIS' PARTS 25-29!!!!! )

The page is not dated and is out of the usually style of the diary

"That was an incredibly wretched night.

I laid back to place the drop upon my tongue with all the fear that I may die, never able to return to my home in the light again. I feared learning something I would be unable to comprehend and I would lose all sense of myself. I contemplated giving-up on finding this 'Scathewick'. I finally gathered all my resolve and tasted the sinister substance. The red honey seemed to radiate of infernal origin even in the glass vial I held carefully between my fingers. 'For ******.'.

I felt as if I had been ripped off my bed and away from this world. If a Prisoner's Honey dream is a breeze, Gaoler's Honey is a hurricane...or more. I wasn't myself...and yet I was. I wasn't really...there...And the taste...ash, and intense sweetness, and--and---I must not remember! I can feel it there still in my bones, running through my mind, in my very core. I must not think on that taste. I fear I really will lose myself.

This world was full of doors. And people that seemed permanently obscured as if the shadows and moonish 'Neath light had become one. And yet they were people. I knew I must appear the same. I stopped to try to talk to them, and it was as if my voice was not my own. Some knew people I knew, of the same circles. I parted myself from them and it felt that I was following the taste itself. It led me to a door. 'The taste is the key' I enounced, but it wasn't me.

I saw, but yet it wasn't through my own eyes. I saw the sky. I smelled straw. I was laying on my back looking through a crack in...in the shed...yes I was in a shed wasn't I? It wasn't me that knew this, but yet it was. I was looking at the sky absentmindedly though the cracks in the roof of a hay shed. It was quiet. It was lazy. The weather was so nice and so clear... Seemingly miles away I-myself-could hear someone screaming in pain. Screaming at me! Screaming at the pain of me crawling in their memories.

I pulled what I could find of me-***** Cassius-from this person's world and mind. I was back in the hall again. I felt as if I had just experienced something not many have ever before. The taste again led me along. I lost track of how many worlds I entered...Each time I heard my lips utter that phrase...One 'memory' was passionately mid-kiss, one was of running through The Flit; I place I had only run through once, and yet here I knew everywhere to vault and scrabble-up, the one I remember the most was one of feeling small and loved, I saw a bright and happy glow. It was so delightful and I reached out my clumsy fingers to pull it into my mouth. Vaguely I myself knew it was the colour yellow, but yet I didn't have any concept of colours. This was something I had never seen before. The screaming here was the worse, it was dire, there was no understanding of pain or of anything. I do not think I should think on this much longer as it is unbearable.

That was the last place I could take and I pulled, and pulled, I fought my way from the taste and wherever it was directing me. I felt my body again. Myself. I felt my laboured breathing, I felt my own arms, I felt the sheets under my fingers. I finally snapped my eyes open and the cold atmosphere of London flooded and clouded back. The taste still curled around my mind and tried to draw me back, but I held on to the ceiling and the bookshelves of my shack and finally won the battle."