Memory is a Traitor

I look upon the immortal Witch in awe, standing with feet spread to shoulder width and hinged low at the waist. My hands drape low, hanging limply against the stone ground.

“Please, forgive me,” I say smoothly.

The Witch scoffs in her rumbling, foreboding way. “It is too late for that.”

“Ah, but you must understand my family’s situation,” I continue. “We do not kill because we enjoy it.” I raise myself to standing again and look upon the wretched being across from me. It is curled and mangled, jammed into a space too small for it. The flesh is sealed within this space to contain the power within it.

Every thousand years, the Witch emerges to judge the denizens of the valley—her, along with all the other immortal Witches around the world. All life is judged, and its course is corrected according to their shared will.

“You kill to upset the Balance. It is your family’s way. Reprehensible human.”

I rest my hand on the sword at my hip. “We kill to save those we love. There has not been one judgment in the last thirty thousand years that any but the Damned have survived. He have the Damned themselves to tell us as much. We kill only to avoid that fate.”

The Damned: those condemned to eternal life to sing the cautions against going against the judgment. We have long since ignored their warnings.

The wretched Witch does not respond, instead turning in her place, grinding the spines growing from her leathered skin against the grooved stone all around her.

The glyphs in it sealed her, as they sealed all the other Witches, until the thousandth year. Until the judgment.

“I ask only that you spare my family,” I say. “And not through Damnation. We do not wish to be shackled to this world.”

The Witch laughs lowly. “Ah, but you would so love to be Damned. I know your brand of greed, Darza Bordal. No—I have a much more fitting fate for your ilk.”

I draw my blade without another thought, dumping my enchantment into it. With a roar, I throw myself at the immortal being before me.

The world slows to a crawl. All except the Witch.

“A curse, wrought just for you…” crooned my enemy before me. “You will survive the judgment—that I can promise. But you will not enjoy what awaits.”

My limbs flow through molasses, completely restrained. My blade swings at the pace of a leaf tumbling in the faintest breeze. I cannot react.

I can hear the smile in her voice as she continues, “Perhaps your bloodline will one day understand.”

#

“Marco, you’ve done it!” cries my father. He strikes my little brother hard on the back and shoulders again and again, chuckling to himself. “Well done!”

Marco had striven to modify the magic on the blade—we all called him mad. And now, as I watch, he has succeeded. Its new form guarantees the deaths of the newborns, by Marco’s estimation, but adds something far greater to its capabilities: the power to steal memories from those it cuts.

I hope he is wrong, for my daughter’s sake. She will be the first to test his theory. But if he isn’t…

I shake my head. If it can defeat that wretched Witch … Sarah will understand.

I’m sure I can convince her before the baby arrives.

#

“Brother, I do not understand,” I say softly.

“You will. That Witch will finally free us,” Marco replies. “Today, we will earn our freedom. I will earn it.”

“But …why? How? The Memory Curse has plagued our family for generations now. Marco. What use is there in trying to break it now?”

My younger brother stops a few paces ahead of me. We scale a mountain, lush with trees growing along these lower slopes. A river burbles along a small ways to my right. We have been tracing it for miles now, but if my intuition is right, we will need to turn away from it soon.

“Brother, you wanted to know my plan, yes?” he asks me.

I nod, though he can’t see me. “I suppose I did.”

“Now that we are moments from it … I will tell you.”

He kneels down, setting his pack before him, and begins rifling through its contents.

“You told me when I was a boy that the Second Remembrance will eventually kill our family. I am approaching that day.”

“But I survived, Brother. You will too! We inherit the memories of our ancestors—you will inherit exactly those I have.”

He shakes his head. “You don’t understand this at all. I’ve dedicated almost every waking moment of my life to the study of this curse. Your Second was before Father’s death. Now…”

He draws a sword from the bag. A sword so large it could not possibly have fit in that bag without a complex spatial enchantment. His abilities far exceed mine—that much is clear.

“You are wrong,” Marco says flatly, standing. Holding the sheath in one hand and the handle delicately in the other, Marco clicks free the sword that heralds our family’s doom. “The curse will kill me. Father…” He trails off. The blade clicks free from its sheath.

“Father is dead, Marco!” I shout, rage boiling up from nowhere. It exploded free before I could arrest it, but I don’t care for this briefest moment. Why bring up our father at a time like this? “I lost my wife and only child! Enough has been lost to this! Perhaps our family should submit to our fate.”

“You killed your wife, brother,” Marco's mouth cracks to a crooked smile as he draws the blade fully. “Using our family’s enchantments.”

“You will never understand!” I snarl. “I—”

The blade whistles at my head before I can react. 

#

As my eyes peel open and the cold water of consciousness rushes across my crag-filled mind, the primary sensations that reach me are two.

First is a terrible grinding, echoing off the stone walls of my prison and driving me deeper into the hole that serves to restrain me. It comes from my chamber’s door. Who is visiting me in this year—at this time of this year? My emergence is not to be for another two centuries, at the least, so I find the intrusion most unwelcome.

The second sensation is the thrumming beat of my own magic, mirrored onto me—like encountering someone speaking to you with your own voice. It comes not from anything I recognize as mine, but rather from an old curse. One that I wrought.

I recognize it, searching deep through my long, long memory.

A curse derived from my power. A bastardization of it, as it was somehow altered. Its origins had been that it was forced upon a trespasser: a lone man, nearly a millennium ago. His sins were to be known to his entire bloodline—such was the nature of his punishment. It had been centered on an artisan blade the man carried.

Along with the latter sensation is the sight of a boy—perhaps, a man—padding across the stone floor before me. That very blade is clutched in his hand. His rags hang loosely from him, but are clearly smothered in the soot-filled dirt from just outside my prison: the ashen remains of those that weren’t so lucky as his ancestors were.

“You trespass—”

“Quiet.” He raises the blade. “At last…” It feels as though the words are addressed neither to me nor him, but to someone else.

“Stop, boy. Or I will be forced to stop you.”

He does not reply. The door finishes grinding shut behind him.

My arms are not free to move. This will be a problem, I quickly realize: I cannot defend easily. My magic will be near-useless in a head on assault at this range.

“You are immortal, as I understand,” he mutters. “This won’t hurt you like it would me.”

The blade flashes forward.

#

I was back in my body. Or, back in my current body.

The memories that streamed into my mind were my own. But they were also mixed with a specific few otherwise that enshrined within them the knowledge that had been missing.

The memories locked in the blade had been a fragment. Now, as I looked at the man before me, my mind automatically sorted memories back into their rightful channels.

And I realized I knew his name.

“Marco Bordal,” I crooned, smiling. “It was a clever ruse.”

He turned up his nose, nostrils flared in indignance, as I invoked his true name.

“When Darza came to me all those generations ago,” I began, speaking easily as my own true memories replaced themselves among their like, “I cursed him and all his descendants.”

“I…” Marco trailed off, his eyes darting to the sword still suspended in the air at my side.

I tutted at him. “Now, now, Marco. Patience. The blade will be returned to your family in time.”

“You will kill us all!” he shouted suddenly. “I am days from my Second Remembrance, and—”

“Ah, Marco, patience, please. I understand your plight. You, and your family’s descendants after you, are doomed to a fate you cannot escape. I understand.”

Marco blinked in surprise. “What? You … understand?”

I hummed my assent. “I’m sure you see that it was never my intent to cause death. The curse, put simply, allows your family to always remember the sins of your ancestors—in perfect detail. As if they were your own.

“The death is a side effect of your weak human constitutions. That is a problem I can address,” I said, stretching out my arm to wriggle freer of my confines. “Your blood binds you to a past of sin. Thank your forebears for that—a perfect generational memory is the distinct right of your kin.”

Marco’s face turned to horror as he realized my intention. He, after all, shared almost every memory I now possessed, except my own.

“No,” he said, stepping away. “You can’t.”

“The solution is simple.” I smile, pushing my head out of the gap in the stone confining me. “I will simply Damn you all.”

My finger touched his forehead, and he screamed as a brand curled out across his face and scalp to reveal the ancient glyph of my name: Adnusa. It marked him as condemned to eternal life by my hand.

He collapsed to his knees, panting as the brand spread past his chin onto his neck, and up over his scalp to singe off all his hair. Every strand fell to the floor around him.

“Your sin is the greatest of all, Marco,” I said softly. “You tried to upset the natural order. Rejoice! For your infidelity, I reward you with eternal suffering.”

His only response was an angry groan.

“As you say, the cascade of memories is far more than the human mind can handle. Being Damned does not change that fact, unfortunately.” I smiled at him, picking him up with my hand and drawing him closer to me, so I could reach him with my other hand that had come loose moments before. “Now, though, your mind and body cannot die! Wonderful, isn’t it?”

My finger brushed his head, and I instantly replicated the curse in the blade. “You shall be the first to experience this new fate, Marco. Your Second Remembrance begins now.”

Marco’s eyes rolled into his head against his will. He screamed in agony, hands flying up to clutch his head.

I cast him aside.

This man, now writhing in agony on the floor of my ritual chamber, had come so close. Too close.

Humans had come further than I thought possible. To think that this boy had drained away my vast memory, nearly duping me, daunted me to no end.

My clawed hand pushed the man aside. He didn’t break his convulsions even as I did it.

Humans… They threatened to upend the natural order. Correction was needed. Two centuries until the next judgment was too long to wait.

I pulled myself free, emerging into the chamber and rising to my full height, I said to Marco, though I knew he couldn’t hear me. “Your family will survive, as I promised, Marco. But your rebellion has shown me something important. For that I thank you.”

Pushing open the stone door, I walked free of the chamber.