> “The brother and sister eyed each other, as if they did not believe their good fortune. But they have earned it. Of this I am certain.”

One day, when all the craziness died down (which I suspected would be never), I was going to hunt down whoever invented vervorium and punch them in the face. Because despite traversing through numerous portals with unknown destinations before, this time, both my mind and my body rebelled against me.

I floated through the ether without end, trying not to panic, trying not to think about the weight of everything that had been stacked on my shoulders, but the more I tried not to, the easier those thoughts passed through the flimsy mental barriers I had erected. Until it all became too much and I screamed a silent scream. And, of course, that was the trigger that unlocked the exit.

I swam up to the light that had appeared far above me and when I finally reached it, I found myself falling face forward onto a wooden floor at the top of a rickety set of stairs. Flickering bulbs were hung along the wall that lit the way down, but other than that, the space beyond was completely dark.

“You followed,” called Beatrice from somewhere down below, her voice echoing.

“You sound surprised,” I responded, timidly walking down the creaking steps before locating Beatrice sitting at a wooden desk a few feet from the bottom of the staircase, a banker’s lamp casting a greenish glow on her and the book she was writing in.

“It’s been six hours. I was pretty sure you threw your lot in with whoever had come to kill me.”

“Six hours?” I said. “It’s never taken that long before. How far away are we?”

I peered out at the expanse beyond the desk, but it was pitch black.

“Vervorium doesn’t work that way,” said Beatrice. “Your conviction, or lack thereof, determined the length of your traversal. For me, it was only six seconds. And to answer your question, we’re hundreds of miles away, on the other side of the mountains.”

“Great,” I said. “Looks like I need a new ride home. What is this place, exactly? Another secret headquarters of yours?”

“Something like that,” said Beatrice, who pulled a chain on the lamp down, causing dozens of tube lights overhead to spring to life, revealing a massive and mostly empty warehouse that stretched out for hundreds of feet. Nearby were metal shelves that were also, for the most, part barren, except for the ones nearest to Beatrice’s desk. These contained glass jars, metal cans, and other small boxes, all neatly spaced and arranged methodically and carefully. It was the opposite of the unordered chaos of her previous headquarters and I suspected that this marked change in organization was the result of her personality erasure.

I waded into the array of shelves and found something familiar: the raised platform where Beatrice had drained the prima materia from her first victim. A blood-stained sheet was draped over it, hiding a lumpy figure underneath. I approached with trepidation, the horrid memory of the shackled man with the nefarious device gratuitously inserted into his body, and lifted the top of the covering to find … a collapsed cardboard box labeled “OLD” in bright red letters.

“Hoping to get a glimpse of my next sacrifice?” said Beatrice, who closed the small journal and stowed it in one of the desk’s drawers when I returned to the front area.

“I don’t understand. I knew your past, but what you’ve done now … it’s unspeakable.”

“Why?” she asked. “Because all life is precious? Or some other bullshit you were raised on? I don’t believe it. Not anymore.”

“How did you even get here? I could barely find a drop of nemosyne to pull one of your old memories out of my head to find you. The amount you must have acquired to render your past into that jar …”

“Yes, it’s quite impressive,” said Beatrice. “And funny enough, you provided the key.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your use of the speed buff to decode the tattoo and then to solve your little work problem, it got me thinking. What if there was a way to unlock the mind-expanding power of that buff without the debilitating after-effects? And so I went to work.”

“The vitality serum recipe,” I said. “You improved it and then combined it with the speed buff.”

Beatrice smiled, and it almost looked genuine, but I could tell that she was struggling with all her might to appear normal.

“Exactly. And that was only the beginning! Once I completed my first successful human transmutation, anything was possible. But the after-effect of killing even that scumbag gave me nightmares. So I had to devise a solution.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“By ridding yourself of your memories? But why didn’t you just remove the act itself? Why did you turn yourself into this?”

“You make it sound so simple,” said Beatrice. “Like removing a puzzle piece and tossing it in the garbage. But it isn’t, I can assure you. The act of taking a life, any life, cannot so easily be excised. Not as I was. So I became something better.”

“You call this better?” I asked. “My ledger is nothing compared to yours, but I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I just magicked away what happened to Frankie. What happened to Doug.”

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “Those names mean nothing to me. They’re faint ripples on the surface of a pond that will disappear just as quickly as they appeared.”

“And yet,” I said, “you did not choose the same fate for your memories of me.”

“Yes. Despite how much I didn’t want it to be the case, I concluded that I still needed you. I now see how wrong I was.”

“Because you don’t like how I’m holding you accountable for what you’ve done.”

“No, not at all,” said Beatrice. “I left you a trail of breadcrumbs to come join me. And instead, you let that woman find me.”

“I did no such thing! She took control of me. For two weeks, she trapped me. That’s when she must have figured out that-”

“Another set of excuses from you. How typical,” she said. “And I really don’t have time for this Socratic dialogue any longer. Show yourself out upstairs. Now.”

I stared at Beatrice, whose eyes bore a glimmer of anger, anger I knew she resented having to express. But I was nothing if not stubborn, and so I held my ground.

“There is still the matter of the Compendium,” I said.

“I told you already,” said Beatrice. “I don’t know where it is. Even if the jar and the memories survived, you won’t be able to find the location in there. And I’m glad they’re all gone. Now I won’t be tempted any more.”

“But they’re not, I’m afraid.”

I pulled out the mason jar from the inner pocket of my jacket that I had rescued in the last fleeting moments before stepping through the portal, and set it quietly on the wooden desk.

“I left that in the house for a reason!” she screamed, as I saw the carefully crafted wall around the remnants of her old self crumble. “How dare you take it!”

“Of course I took it!” I yelled. “It was the only chance I had to put you right. You claim to be this cold, calculating, objective woman, and yet you’re blind to what you’ve become. What would have happened to you if we hadn’t shown up during your battle with the Ancient? You would have died.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But maybe if you hadn’t distracted me, I would have prevailed.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” I said. “You don’t want to help me? You don’t want to help yourself? I’ll have to resort to other means.”

I pulled out the other contents of my jacket, a small vial filled with blank ink, a pen, and a piece of paper, and set them on the desk next to the jar.

“What is that?” asked Beatrice.

“You don’t remember this?”

Beatrice shook her head slowly from side-to-side.

“Unbelievable,” I said. “You completed a Raid with the girl you killed, Kate. She found it underneath a mattress. You gave the bulk of it to the Requester, but kept some for yourself. This I know too well. Did you ever stop to think who you had given it to? You thought you were trying to get it before the Guild could, but in reality, you were working for them all along.”

“Great, so I found some ink and killed someone. What does it do?”

“I’d rather not have to do this,” I said. “So I’m going to give you one chance, to willingly undo what you’ve done to yourself. Before I force you to.”

I drew the small quota of ink from the vial into the pen and wrote a single word at the top of the paper.

“Beatrice,” it said.

“You wrote my name,” she said. “And nothing happened. That was your big plan?”

“No,” I said. “It’s what comes next that you’re not going to like.”

I set the pen tip back down onto the paper, and very carefully and very judiciously wrote one more word with the remaining ink that I had, in a fit of weakness, begged Ty to give to me.

“Remember.”

Before Beatrice realized what was happening, I held the paper in front of her eyes, which turned glassy as the pellerium began its work. But instead of robotically taking the rings out of the jar and putting the memories back into her head, as I had planned, all she did was sit in a stupor, until finally the life returned to her gaze.

“What … what did you to do to me? There was a woman on the island with me. Leah. She led me to … somewhere. It’s too fuzzy. And then, there was … another. A girl. A warrior. The true Keeper of the Medoblad. She was inside my head. But the rest of it, it’s all gone. I can feel its absence now. Only shadows remain, taken by the two of them.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, my lip quivering. “You told me you found the Medoblad in the stones of the altar at the Temple of Artemis!”

“I did … and I did,” said Beatrice. “But that wasn’t the truth. The woman, Leah, she took the real memory and layered over it with a fake one.”

“So that’s all that it did,” I said, a pit forming in my stomach.

“No,” said Beatrice. “There’s more. A bench. Central Park. Your specter, Jade. She used that ink to get my attention. She wanted my help. I said I would give it to her. But she never showed. Until now.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How could you have forgotten this much and still have so much left in your head?”

“This wasn’t what you wanted,” said Beatrice. “The ink, you were going to make me put everything in the jar back. And hope that my old self would help you?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “But I only had enough for two words.”

“You chose the wrong ones, then. If I had that ink-”

“You did though,” I interrupted. “You kept some of it after the Raid. You used it on me. What did you do with the rest?”

“I don’t remember,” said Beatrice. “But I want to.”

“Of course you don’t,” I said. “Wait a minute. What did you say?”

“Your dumb, stupid plan worked,” she said. “You unlocked what I didn’t even know I had forgotten, and I see now that there are other forces at work here that have already bested me. And made me look like a fool by thinking they could just wipe all traces of themselves from my head.”

“Are you saying you…”

It took all my willpower not to break into a huge grin.

“Yes,” said Beatrice. “Open the damn jar.”