Gaoler's Honey

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Gaoler's Honey

Blood is not red in the way that this honey is red.

This succulent drop will allow you to enter the memories and dreams of helpless innocents. Perhaps you have your reasons.

A drop of Gaoler's Honey.

Gaoler's honey is colloquially called red honey, because, well, look at the illustration. This is a more sinister breed, whose consumption allows one to experience another's memories - which is incredibly painful for the unfortunate victim. It's made from a flower that is a cross between the exile's rose and a flower from Hell, pollinated by bees that have consumed a victim's tears. It seems the hybrid has existed since the days of the Fourth City. The name likely refers to the practice of capturing prisoners in order to harvest their minds for this valuable drug.

It is said that a contaminated batch made the Empress's children into monsters. (See The Shuttered Palace and the Empress's Court for more info.)

The Chambers of the Heart

The Chambers of the Heart. Art from FL.

Those seeking their murderous rivals may prepare and take a drop of this honey, and be transported to the Chambers of the Heart. This is a mysterious dream location where the honey consumer picks and chooses from intense, pleasurable snippets of memory, but also senses the distant victims screaming and pleading from the pain this causes. Other users of red honey are present in the Chambers, though everyone's face is obscured.

A Garden of Cages

The Garden of Roses and Cages

Some of the red honey that is not gathered in Hell is produced on the Isle of Cats by the Pirate King, Leopold, who himself is a red honey addict. The people whose memories are used to create the honey are kept locked in cages, and are almost comatose due to the amount of pain they are experiencing. There is also a Cage-Garden in the grounds of the Shuttered Palace.

Several important figures are implied to be addicted to honey, such as the Captivating Princess.

To the Skies

"We are democratising art," she says, loftily. "Thanks to our cage-garden, a writer need not speculate about the sorrow of a lover as their beloved dies; they can taste our honey and know it themselves. We are no longer subject to the tyranny of experience."

With Hell being off-limits, the production of red honey shifted to Titania, where the Midnight Rose runs an operation. Most of the red honey is sourced from caged artists: they can leave anytime, but they also believe that to create art, one must seek misery.