[MEMORY] Man's life is but the morning dew
Huo had almost put the memory crystal aside. No - he had almost placed it in its wicker basket and left it in some corner of the Bazaar.
To sleep in peace, and to want no more. It was such a humble, simple wish. Not to know great truths, not to dig up secrets, not to change the course of life, any life, any place. Only peace. The Farm by day, the books by night: wheat and summer haze, fresh rain, pure snow, candles, models, the scratch of pen against paper. Block the passages, shut the doors,
and till the end your strength shall not fail.
Almost; but not quite.
He lay back on his bed, holding the basket, stared up at the ceiling and pictured the thatched roof from his dream, but something else always rose to banish the image. The flickering shadows of flames. Edges smeared in ash and charcoal.
When I wake, the world will burn.
He closed his eyes, opened the basket and reached in.
~*~*~*~
Nighttime.
He was not prepared for the silence, though perhaps he should have been. Huo blinked - no, remembered blinking. Remembered straining his eyes in the darkness, standing a little bit apart from a great crowd of men. Soldiers. Clad for war, arranged in ranks, solemn, unmoving. He thought that they were silent, but he could not truly know - he could hear nothing, only see -
And smell.
The sudden, unspeakable assault of smells would have caused him to choke, had he remembered choking. But he did not: only standing still and breathing in the smell of human flesh in ruin. Up ahead, directly in front of him and the other soldiers, innumerable human bodies were arranged on wooden ramps. Towers of bodies. Dozens. More. Young men, all of them - soldiers themselves, no doubt - reaped in their prime. Bloated, waxy, wasted.
Burning.
It happened as he watched. Half a dozen soldiers, all carrying torches, rushed forward, and each put a torch to one of the towers. The fire caught on hungrily and smoke billowed into the air, scattering in its wake that worst of all smells, the kind that turned one's stomach even while it set one's mouth watering. Huo did not remember gagging. He didn't even remember flinching. Just watching, watching from the sidelines, as calm as a pool of still water.
And then walking, moving further away from the crowd. A soldier handed him a torch of his own, and he knelt and set it, not to another tower, but - he realized with even greater horror - to a paper lantern, very much like the ones he'd made for Krile's party just days before. There were dozens of these as well, white and beautiful, and he walked among them, lit them and released them into the sky like doves. And now he remembered another emotion, a numb, struggling sort of... confusion. Shock. Heaven, this is not how -
~*~*~*~
He came to like a man rising from a nightmare, sitting up with a gasp. The crystal was still clutched tightly in his hand, though it had lost its shine, and he raised it to his eyes and stared into it. Why this? What did it mean? Did it mean anything at all?
There was no hope of sleep now. He rose from the bed, suddenly parched, as though the memory of smoke was refusing to leave his throat. Only when he sat up did he notice the price, if it could be called that. The costume was ridiculous, and an irritating jab besides - but shaken as he was, it neither amused nor angered him. The contrast was surreal, instead. Lurid. Sick.
He needed water. He needed time.
He needed to sleep.
[OOC: Scene taken from Red Cliff Part II. OH THE ANGST.
Huo will be kicking it dragon style in his big green jammies for the next three days.]