Bitter Fountain || GMEvent
The dreams had only been getting worse. She woke up in the middle of the night, screaming fit to wake the dead, and her neighbors had pounded on the walls, glared at her in the hallway in the morning.
She couldn't help it. And though she woke without memory of what had happened, exactly, it seemed as though the smell of smoke had been burned into her nostrils. She couldn't seem to escape it, no matter how hard she tried. For days, she had barely been able to write. Every time she went to set pen to paper, to expose the truths she was beginning to learn, her mind skittered sideways into half-remembered images of flame and ash.
And then the images began to linger: golden statues, a man's leering face, a body dragged behind a chariot, a giant horse looming in the middle of the city, the face of a beautiful girl whose lovely features looked only like death to Cassandra.
The name was not hers, though it lingered. And like the images of flame, she couldn't seem to be rid of it. They were pieces of a puzzle, unsolved, floating in her memory. The harder she tried to gather them together, the more quickly they seemed to escape.
It was torment, and if they thought her crazy before, they certainly would believe it now. Often, at work, her eyes would glaze over, caught by the images playing out in her mind. She would look down at her paper to see symbols that, though they seemed familiar, made no sense. Symbols she couldn't remember ever seeing before, much less writing.
And then, suddenly, everything changed.
She would not be able to pinpoint, later, exactly when it happened. But as she passed Hannah Homer in the street, with her usual, strangely violent surge of dislike, she remembered. And it hurt.
They were screaming in her ears, all of them: her family, her friends. And her city was burning all over again. She remembered pounding her fists against the tower door until they bled, she remembered tearing the veil from Helen's pretty head, she remembered her brothers and her sisters, her mother and father. And all the while, in the background, the city was burning and people were screaming. She stumbled into the side of a building, shoulders hunched, hands clawing at her ears in attempts to stop the horrible noise. Every memory moved so quickly, barely there before it was replaced by a new one: Ajax's hands on her body, Apollo's anger at her refusal, Hector dragged behind the carriage of Achilles, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus' murdering hands.
It was all blood and fire, memories which tore at her until she was reduced to tears, there in the middle of the street. Even the memories of days before could not soften the pain of what she could see, now.
The memories were still there, lurking, but their intensity had abated, and Cassidy - Cassandra - found that she could breathe again. But it lasted only a moment: next came the future, that cursed gift.
"They're all here," she murmured. Hector, Achilles, Helen, Apollo: they were all here.
Suddenly, it all made sense.
germansingergirl
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