Memory is a Prison

“You must go to her, my son,” creaks the old man before me. My father, of course. He feebly stretches out a hand. “She can free us…”

His body is a nightmare, mangled beyond recognition. The bones of his arms jut this way and that, and I can see even through his vest and shirt that his ribs are thoroughly shattered.

The handiwork of that … monster. I look down at my own body. It is hurt, but not broken like my father’s—I can feel that much. I look up the ridge.

#

“You did this!” she screams in my face. I hardly recognize her now. But this madwoman, kitchen knife held high above her, poised to strike, is my wife.

“I tried to tell you.” There is no use struggling. She is the one making the mistake.

“Shut your fucking mouth, ████! Your family is a bunch of fucking murderers!”

“No. Not us. A curse—like I tried to tell you.”

“Ah, yes! A curse!” She slaps her head with her free hand, chuckling manically. “How could I forget? I hope that fucking curse kills your brother, too!” Then, with a scream of fury, her judgment falls toward my neck.

I reach up my hands. My power bursts free.

#

“We must go to the mountain. We must free ourselves, my son. For Marco. After what happened to your daughter…”

#

“Look at her, ████!” whispers my wife, Sarah, with the exuberance only felt when new life is birthed. It is as though her voice cannot bear to be brought over a whisper, but her glee is set to overflow in spite of it. It is, of course, because she now holds her infant daughter—our infant daughter—in her hands.

Perhaps she will survive. The First Remembrance is coming for her within days… But perhaps it simply isn’t strong enough yet to take her.

“She is as beautiful as I’d imagined. Even more beautiful than the others.” In that moment, though I do not know why, my heart was overcome with a sadness I could not describe. My eyes turned to the window at my right. The city looms high even far away as we are to obscure the horizon. It feels like the omen of my future.

“Ah, those ones you see in your visions?” Sarah chuckles to herself. “I’m sure it’s nothing, love.”

“Sarah…” My voice was barely a whisper. “There is something I must tell you.”

#

“The child will die,” my father says grimly. “As will all our family’s future children. Soon enough, even the second round of Remembrance will kill—not just that at birth.”

“No, surely not.” I grab his shoulder. “You don’t mean that, do you?”

He solemnly nodded. “I’m afraid I do. The mind has only the capacity for so much. Infants will be the first to fall to it, but our older members are not safe. Within the span of a generation—your generation to the next—it will no longer be possible to survive it.”

“But…” I look at him, and then glance at the sword enshrined on the wall. That accursed blade. “Then, Marco…”

#

No, “gone” was the wrong word. I had been … elsewhere, living a dozen past lives in an instant, a thousand rivers of memory falling from nowhere onto the island of my mind. However, I finally regained my own mind and body, trapped among the stone walls.

Some of the information had come back distorted—half-formed. It was as if the memory was just beyond reach, and whenever I grasped for it, it wriggled free, like water through spread fingers.

I threw the sword aside, sending it clattering against the wall. The sheath fell to the ground. Smoke hissed from where the blade had stuck into the wall, with just the handle remaining exposed on this side.

“What the hells, boy?” I demanded, mustering all the power I could in my voice.

The man flinched, but did not kneel—perhaps he ought to have. “I—”

“You knew what would happen when I touched that blade. That is why you wanted to force it upon me.”

“I did not mean to force you, Great One,” he stated evenly.

“Then why bring it?”

“I … didn’t think it would affect you just from touching the blade, Old One. I haven’t—” He cut himself off, teeth clicking shut, and bowed his head.

It was a lie, as far as I was able to gather. The blade served no purpose but to show me his family’s pain at the hands of this curse. A curse of memory, it seemed, much in the same way that the sword itself was enchanted.

And why had he cut off his own speech?

“Whose memories have I seen?” I rumbled, shifting in my place to free my arm further.

“Those of my family. My bloodline. And…” Though his head remained bowed, his eyes turned up to me. They judged me, and the depth of my fury. “Me.”

I stared back at him. “I will not help you.”

He sighed deeply, blowing the breath out for a few seconds. “Even after seeing? You see the suffering it has brought on us. My wife and daughter…” He trailed off, and I could hear the choke of his throat at the words.

His wife and daughter … I could not hear that father’s name in the memories. It evaded me, as though not wanting to be seen. And … how had his own memories ended up in the blade?

“They are not your wife and daughter.”

“What?” He turned up his head, indignant. “They are! I swear it.”

“You mistake me for being on equal footing with your kind. This is the hubris that led to this exchange.”

He fell to his knees. “Please, Great One,” he began, returning to the moniker he’d used before. “I cannot bear to see more suffering at the hands of this curse. Please try to break it.”

“Perhaps, if you tell me about your childhood, and about your experience losing your wife and daughter.”

“I…” He looked up at me, and I could practically see memories running across his eyes. “Why?”

I smiled widely. “Because your memories should be in the blade, not your mind.”

An expression flitted across his face, emphasized by the shadow cast across it by the failing light: horror. It was brief enough that one of his kind might have missed it; not me.

“So, who are you?” I asked him casually.

“I am…” He breathed out hard. “I cannot remember. It is as you say—my memories are locked in the blade. I know only what others have told me.”

I nearly laughed. “That is flimsy, boy. Stand tall, and tell me who you are.”

“I am telling you the truth.”

I reached out my free hand, about the size of the man’s entire form, and placed my index finger against his body. Instantly, a burning power repulsed my hand back toward my body.

He staggered back in surprise, rubbing his chest where I’d touched him. “What was that?”

“You tell me, boy.”

He shook his head, still massaging his sternum uncertainly.

I chuckle. “It feels so familiar, yet I cannot place it. It is not mine, and you say it is not yours. You call yourself a user of magic, and yet couldn’t smell on you a spell of foreign origin?”

“I am like you—my memory is in pieces.”

My memory was not in pieces. That description was wrong. It was like a maze of dried riverbeds, crying out for water. Missing completely, where the impression had once been.

Fascinatingly, that touch had been revealing. The magic on his body had felt just like the magic on the blade—except, it matched only one of the parts, not both.

“You are lying. You are an enchanter of some kind, though I do not remember you.”

“I—” He sputtered for a beat, before continuing, “I am an enchanter, yes: I can use my family’s techniques. But nothing more.”

“Lies.”

Using the power was as natural as breathing. I pulled the sword toward me and it promptly jerked free of the wall, blade still smoking where it had been buried.

This time, without the scabbard present, the powers in the sword were clearer: one in the blade’s core metal body, and one in the crossguard. The latter matched the man’s exactly as I touched it.

“You are a liar. That much is obvious. Perhaps your story should have been better conceived.” The blade floats before me, and I place my hand beneath it. “Now, it is time for me to see the truth behind it.”

I shattered the foreign enchantment in the crossguard, then curled my fingers around the blade.

I was gone again.