imeeji; registry

[forgottenmercy]

memories POSITIVE NEUTRAL NEGATIVE POSITIVE 3/## MEMORIES REGAINED The tiniest shrine maiden WRITE-UP Baby's First Calibration WRITE-UP The best wedding gift WRITE-UP MEMORY DESCRIPTION WRITE-UP MISSING MEMORY [ RETURN TO TOP ] NEUTRAL 3/## MEMORIES REGAINED two Appearance 5 deathknights walk into a bar WRITE-UP What does a 12-year old shrine maiden do when not working? WRITE-UP sick shrine maidens and out of season fruit WRITE-UP meeting, interrupted WRITE-UP MEMORY DESCRIPTION WRITE-UP MISSING MEMORY [ RETURN TO TOP ] NEGATIVE 8/## MEMORIES REGAINED A bad ending to a bad sugar daddy WRITE-UP How (not) to meet your husband WRITE-UP Wedding night WRITE-UP First Age: She Who Lives burns the world WRITE-UP First murder/first mercy-kill WRITE-UP Jealousy and averted murder WRITE-UP The most coincidental rescue that he really didn't want WRITE-UP Can witnessing a sufficiently transcendent performance kill the viewer? News at 11. WRITE-UP MEMORY DESCRIPTION WRITE-UP MISSING MEMORY [ RETURN TO TOP ] 13/## TOTAL MEMORIES REGAINED

Comments

Memory #13 (NSFW-adjacent situation, cw: agegap, murder, domestic abuse, slavery)

[forgottenmercy]

You are sitting on the lap of your latest lover - a highly-placed merchant prince. A Guildsman with money to burn and a desire for an expensive, beautiful lover to show off, to keep close to his side and in a pretty, gilded cage, just as much an ornament to show off as an object to desire, to be pleased by, to have in his bed. Draped in blue, clinging silks that show nothing and reveal quite a bit (the difference between a concubine and a courtesan, though you were and are kept by a man, then and now), quite a lot of delicate silver jewelry weighing down your wrists and your ankles and your neck. You smile demurely and gently and accept his caresses, do your best to please him, and pretend not to see the third always in the room, what he does not see. The ghost girl in a blue wedding dress, who looks barely older than you, silent and with her head forever at the wrong angle, watching, always watching. Pretend not to see, not to know, about the blood on his hands, about what he does to get his money, his position, the living bodies he trades in, sells to labor or to the fae, about what you've traced back to him. About the murdered bride, and another dead lover, and all the enslaved people whose lives filled his coffers and who the fae made into husks.

But you know. And you smile demurely and dance, sing for him every night, do your best to please him but make him stumble., disrupt his ventures as best as you can. Disrupt, distract, keep his eyes on you and not suspect what you know. He wants you to perform for him again, tonight: for him alone, this time, and not for any of his colleagues, as venal, money-hungry and life-destroying as he is, though you do not comment on their greed. And behind him, behind him, is the ghost girl, always silent, always watching, her eyes wide and lightless, with the shock of her death, even now, even though she was dead before you were ever born. You smile, always demure, always gentle, and agree, your eyes delicately lowered.

(Tonight will be the most beautiful performance he has ever seen. And the last.)

Your performance is transcendent, perfect in every possible way, and his eyes are on you, hungry and possessive. You dance close enough to be alluring but not quite close enough to be touched, fuse the sacred dance you learned as a shrine maiden and the dances you learned in the pleasure quarters into a delicate, graceful whole, sing in a language he never learned despite all his dealings with the Fair Folk, the raksha, pour every ounce of his guilt and betrayal and the heartbreak and final horror of his victims into your performance, distilled into purity of voice and motion and body, into a performance he can neither ignore nor look away from. And he dies gasping, as you and his ghost bride watch, falls to the floor, dead, at last, finally knowing guilt.

You take a moment to close his eyes before you sing, an elegy in shattered crystal notes. Less for him, though you will give him the necessary rites, and more for all his victims - so they, maybe, will be able to rest. You hold your hand out to the ghost girl: she shakes her head and smiles, and mouths 'thank you' to you, before she begins to fade away, moonlight filtering through the window to illuminate where she was. Finally able to rest.

Notes:
White-haired Persephone in this memory
So apparently witnessing a beautiful enough performance can kill someone? (Persephone knows, though it's not obvious to a viewer unless they're really familiar with Abyssal Performance Charms, that he used magic here)
Raksha/the Fair Folk are awful. They are from outside Creation, essentially pure chaos that chose to take shape, and they eat emotions. And can totally eat all of someone's emotions and leave them a husk of a person that can never feel or dream again.
The Guild is awful too.