Styak expected little of interest in Baronston. It was a city, but a very small one, more of an overgrown outpost at the edge of a small kingdom. True, Styak had never visited: without a host, slave or mortal vessel to inhabit, it couldn't leave the area to which it had been banished, tied down to a dozen miles surrounding Fishmouth. This was a considerable improvement in opportunity, but not enough to pull it out of Parry's memories. It was content to keep a single eye and ear on the boy and whatever he saw, leaving the town to him.

The seemingly infinite plane depths of the boy's memories began as a prison for the demon familiar, but it saw things differently now. In exploring, Styak had found plenty of vignettes from Parry's previous incarnations, lists of memorized facts, spells, locations. It was a vast, fragmented and subjective map of the mortal world--and even the Hells and elemental planes and beyond--spanning the past twenty years and, most amazingly, the next one hundred.

Over and over the entity that was always Parry had lived some time in those decades, somewhere in the world. His experiences, memories and impressions formed essentially a library of the past, present and even future. A demon could really use that, if only the damnable thing was organized. The chaos of it, the lack of any principle or scheme, made navigation nearly random. Adjacent cells could have information separated by a century, a continent, a plane of existence or all three. Against all reason, occasionally several in a row were connected, part of a single flow of a lifetime's experience. Then suddenly it would end without resolution, the rest of the memory lost or waiting somewhere else.

There were some trends. Memories closest to the planar "surface" tended towards the most recent lives, usually of Overlord Parry. Subjectively at least, these were the most "fresh," with fewer memories lost to time or to whatever forces jumbled, reordered and broke up the cells. As Styak "dug" down things became chaotic.

In general, the surface-most top ten cells contained memories of Parry's most recent twenty lifetimes. Sadly, they were utterly out of order and featured gaps and frustrating dead ends.

Even worse, only half of those recent lives were in this mortal realm and on this continent. What good would it do them to learn all the court intrigue in Pthythus forty years from now? That was three oceans away, had no trade with anyone from this this side of the world, it might as well been gossip from the moon.

Two of Parry's most recent lives were here but as an animal: a roc and a lizardian. A bit of interesting magic there, even a relic or two, but there was little useful information. The boy would have to grow feathers or scales to use half those spells.

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There were tantalizing hints of incredible power, even in those top-most layers. One cell showed a studious Parry, a master alchemist in a southern city (palm trees out the window) laughing while holding up a vial of some tar-thick amber fluid seething with eldritch energy. He grinned in triumph through exhausted eyes. What is that stuff? Damnation, can't he glance at his notebook...? The memory boiled with Parry's fantasies of drinking the liquid, then enslaving the whole city by force of will alone, marching them down upon his enemies. Great, perfect, we'll take six, have them gift-wrapped, and by the way, what is it? How do we make it? Stop celebrating and cough up the details! But that's not how memory works. It was useless without the rest of that thread, and none of the adjacent cells were even from the same incarnation.

At least Styak would share the memory with the boy, reminding him of the moment, helping him relive it, hoping to ring a bell.

"Huh, some sort of philter of power or elixir of command?"

"Obviously, but can you remember making it? Or how you made it? Or when?"

"It must have been some lifetime when I studied alchemy."

Fighting not to scream, Styak would try, "Yes, that's a very good guess, now, can you remember?"

"I've been a master alchemist over fifty times, Styak, and at least dabbled in thousands of lifetimes."

"Does that one look familiar? Can you name the country, at least?"

"Every alchemical laboratory looks the same: a chaotic mess. Um...um...?"

"SOME PLACE WITH PALM TREES?!"

"Sorry. Still, I seemed really happy making that stuff. Good times."

Other times, Styak would uncover something helpful but unusable. While the boy had an uncanny knack for adding classes--he was already a shaper, a tamer and a priest--he couldn't be everything. At one point, a mid-level firebolt spell came ready-made, all the incantations in place fully memorized, taken from a life spent on another continent as a dungeon-crawling fighter-mage. Parry actually remembered that incarnation when presented with the memory. But he wasn't a mid-level mage now, and one can't just become a mage by forcing through a mid-level spell. Maybe if it had been something basic and simple, something used in wizardly training, it might have sparked open the new class. As it was, they had to just acknowledge he knew how to cast a firebolt but couldn't actually do it.

Styak found itself growling with frustration. "You don't need a familiar, you need a librarian."

"Do your best. You could discover something critical in the very next cell."

"Or I could find another fried dumpling you remember savoring."

Strangely, the next memory had both dumplings and critical information. And best of all, this memory was complete...