"I think you should do whatever makes you feel most comfortable," she told him. "I you want to drink it here or somewhere else, or if you want someone to be there with you, it's all up to you."
"I," he said, then he bit his lip. It was a silly fear, but if it would make him feel better… "I want to drink it outside," he said. "In the gardens. I like it there. It's peaceful."
"Then that's what we'll do," she said with a pat on his shoulder. "You're already dressed, but I think putting your boots on would be a good idea," she winked. "You can't go outside barefoot. People will think you're poor."
The absurdity of her statement struck him, and he laughed despite himself.
After putting on his boots, Tarrin stood up and steeled himself. It was time. All the agonized waiting was over. No matter what happened next, he didn't have to wait for it anymore, and for that, at least, he was glad. He looked down at his little sister, wondering it if was her or the Keeper staring up at him with those beautiful eyes, and he nodded grimly. "Let's get it overwith," he said with surprising calm, belying the turmoil in his mind.
He simply could not remember the trip out into the gardens. Even much later, no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember. It seemed to him that one second he was walking out the door of his room, between the two Knights stationed there to defend him, and the next he was standing in his favorite place in the gardens, by a lovely rose bush surrounded by assorted flowers of every shape, size, and color. It was a place where two widely travelled paths converged, and there was a large white marble bench sitting on the edge of a grassy flat, one of the many grassy lawns interspersed through the gardens to give people somewhere cool and relaxing to lay. Tarrin was sat down on the bench by his sister, and he looked up at them. Jenna was there, with Sapphire silently sitting on her shoulder, and Phandebrass stood beside her, in dirty robes and still wearing that stupid pointy hat, but it was the surprisingly small black stone cup in his hands that had Tarrin's attention.
That was it. That was the potion that was supposed to restore his memory, and could very well destroy everything. But the time to worry about it was over. It had to be done, because if he didn't do it, then nothing would ever get resolved. Besides, he just had to know. He had to know who he had been, who he was, and if that was what he wanted to be once again.
"Drink it quickly," Phandebrass warned him, holding the black stone cup out to him. "Just to warn you, it's going to taste absolutely vile, it will. You have to drink it all, Tarrin. I say, you can't spill a single drop. Do you understand?"
"I understand," he nodded, reaching out for the cup with shaking hands. Jenna reached out and put her hand over one of his, and she gave him a reassuring smile. He felt a little better with her display of compassion, and his hands didn't shake quite as badly as they had just a moment before.
The stone cup was hot, strangely hot, and the blackish liquid inside it smelled acrid and unpleasant. This was it. All his worries and fears would either be dismissed or justified in just a moment. All his almost neurotic fear over losing his identiy would either be confirmed or denied, in just a moment. No matter what, things were about to be settled, and the moment had already passed.
It was time.
He couldn't let himself dwell on it anymore. With a gulp of air, he raised the cup to his lips and let the potion pour in. Phandebrass was not lying about how terrible it tasted, but almost as quickly as he drank it, it seemed to numb his tongue, and then his throat. He felt it wash down into his stomach, like hot, acidic water, burning his belly just before that strange numbness began to creep in. His mouth and tongue felt weird from where they had touched the potion.
"How long will it take to affect him?" Jenna asked.
"I say, there's no definite timeframe," he answered. "It depends on how well the potion was made for him and how accepting his mind is to the magical effect. It could be seconds, or hours, but it will work. The time is the only variable, it is."
"How do you feel, Tarrin?" Jenna asked in concern.
"Strange," he answered. "I don't feel any memory coming back yet, but the potion is making my mouth and stomach feel weird."
"That should pass," Phandebrass told him with calm assurance.
The numbness took full hold of his stomach, and seemed to run its course in his mouth and on his tongue. Then, the strangest sensation replaced it. It was a strange kind of hot buzzing sensation, like pins and needles in his mouth, and it travelled down his throat and gullet and started taking hold in his stomach.
"I feel pins and needles now," he said with a slightly slurred voice. "It's almost tickling."
"What was that?" Phandebrass asked with sudden, intense attention.
"It's tingling," he repeated, then there a very real sense of pain in his mouth. He put his hands over his mouth and winced. "It's burning me!" he said in sudden fear, as that burning sensation seemed to sweep down his throat, following the path of the potion.
"It shouldn't do that," Phandebrass said with sudden worry, looking at Sapphire. "The formula neer mentioned anything about it causing pain!"
"Sometimes formulae leave out the unpleasant side effects," the dragon said calmly.
The burning sensation turned out to be a pittance. All the sudden, Tarrin felt like someone had stabbed him in the stomach with a knife. He doubled over and let out a cry of pain, snapping his jaws shut so tightly that he felt like his teeth were going to shatter. But even they hurt from inside, by whatever it was the potion did to him, filling him from the inside with a burning pain that swept through his body like wildfire. Red haze filled his vision as he struggled to figure out what was happening, what had gone wrong, but conscious thought was scoured away as a pain unlike anything he had ever experience all but consumed him. It roared through him like a flood raging down a canyon, infusing itself into every tiny bit of him inside and out, suffusing him with its searing, burning agony and tearing a scream from him so mindless, so elemental in its conveyance of his pain that it made the two humans cringe and step back.
There was only one thing that touched his mind in that eternal moment, as the vestiges of the potion actually did manage to perform its task.
That he had experienced this once before.
Sliding off the bench, scrabbling at the clean, neatly arrayed white walkway stones, Tarrin tried to writhe, tried to think, tried to stop what was happening, but he knew that it could not be stopped. He cried out once more, but it was not a cry of pain, it was a cry of outrage, of indignation, of fury, before the pain of it descended his cry into a mindless shriek of absolute mindless agony.
His right of choice had been denied to him.
Lost in the completeness of the internal fire, the pain of the changes did not touch him. Lost in the unending scream torn from him, he could not stop what was happening. The bones in his back split, grew in number and grew smaller, and every bone within him shifted, grew longer, became more dense. The bones in his hands split, cracked, thickened and then reset, enlarging his hands. The comfortable boots on his feet stretched grotesquely, then were split asunder as the same process took hold in his feet, lengthening and enlarging them as the balls of his feet widened unnaturally. Skin split and then resealed as the bones continued to expand, longer and longer and longer, blasting shockwaves of pain through him as the flesh was torn and the organs violently displaced.
But the changes to body were not the only ones. The Cat was released from its prison within as the first sweeping wave of the change took hold, as the body began to become accommodating to the mind. With it came the memories, two years of memories, a lifetime of memories. The bad and the good, the horror and the joy, the pain and the pleasure, it swept over his pain-maddened mind like pouring salt into an open wound, assaulting him from within as the pain shattered his body. The memory was there, all of it, every bit of it trying to sweep the others and the pain aside and take hold inside him all at once, augmented by the memory-kindling potion that was still in him, whose magic had not lost its potency despite the betraying extra addition to it.