"So are we still playing your question-exchange game, or...?" I tried as I followed her inside the bar. The Whispered Secret was exactly as how I remembered it from the soul shard Svette had offered me, a low-ceilinged stone cube with customers nursing Knwharfhelm's signature bone broth and decidedly acrid-smelling beer. Tentatively, I peered into soulspace, looking around the—

Holy shit, and I thought Zhytln's soulspace was cluttered. Hundreds, maybe thousands of soul shards were stored in every plank and stone of the bar, phasing through each other without interacting. Rotating my soulsight, I could see that they each existed on their own emotional planes, although there were still so many that they formed opaque, solid walls on all sides. How had all these spare soul shards not coalesced into a soulspace entity yet? And I could tell they extended downwards, too, for another story or so. I'd been wondering why the building looked so squat from the outside—was the stone so heavy that the entire bar had sunk into the ground over however many years Zhytln had owned it?

Zhytln was looking at me expectantly, and I realized that I'd completely forgotten to continue my conversation with her while I was gawking at her bar. "Sorry, I—could you repeat what you just said?" I asked.

"I said that I see no reason not to agree with such an exchange," Zhytln said, and if there was any impatience or irritation in her voice or soul, both were so expertly obfuscated that I couldn't tell. I forced my soulsight shut; that... thing... in her soul was really quite distracting, with its constant grinding and impossible churning. "Did you have a particular question you wanted to ask?"

There was some kind of formality to how Zhytln had phrased the questions and answers, but I'd be damned if I could remember it. Hopefully she wouldn't take offense if I deviated from the formula a little. "Why are you helping me?" I asked. "I mean, I understand the memory extraction thing—you get an emotionally-charged memory for whatever the fuck you're hoarding them to do, and I get to use magic without seeing everyone who's been killed by the same spells that I'm using. But why are you willing to help us with Iola's last curse?"

Zhytln tilted her head. "Did I not make it clear from our first meeting? I would never start hostilities with a group of unknown power and capabilities. If I present myself as an asset to you and your cause, if you are acting in your own self-interest, any potential threat to my own operations will be neutralized before it begins."

After seeing how effortlessly Zhytln had countered Lucet's magics, I was fairly certain that she could "neutralize" any "potential threats" with force instead of healing... but I suppose that she didn't know that. Zhytln didn't offer anything else—perhaps after seeing me break from the pattern of question-truth-question-truth she'd established, she felt no need to continue it—and instead beckoned me over to the counter.

She poured out a sharp-smelling liquid into a tall mug and handed it to me. "Drink up."

I stared at the transparent liquid, then at Zhytln. "This... this is alcohol."

She shrugged. "You want to forget, do you not? Is this not the traditional method of doing so?"

She had me there. Was that why she ran a bar? I had wondered why a soul-manipulator like Zhytln would bother with something so mundane. "I... sort of expected something more... magical."

Zhytln elaborated. "There is magic involved in the process, yes, and I could in theory perform the memory excision without any chemical aids. But there is no sense in using complex and mentally tasking spells to accomplish what a mundane beer has done for milennia: relax the conscious mind and lower the soul's intrinsic protection around old and buried memories."

How... pragmatic of her. To my constant irritation, I had never held my liquor nearly as well as the other boys my age; despite everything, my body was still the one I had at birth. Perhaps Zhytln could do something about that too?

Stolen novel; please report.

No, best not to get too greedy. I was here for one purpose only. Best get on with it.

Before I could second-guess myself, I took the mug and—

—spat the burning liquid out, what the fuck was that made of, paint stripper? The other patrons of the bar gave me looks ranging from amused to annoyed as I scowled at the metal mug. Zhytln gave me an unamused look and took out a rag to clean up the mess—that was odd, why didn't she just cast a spell? I slid guilt over repentance to tap into oppression and pointed a finger, opening a line of howling vacuum in the air over the spilled drink. Zhytln gave me a nod of thanks.

"If you find the alcohol too unpleasant," Zhytln began, but I waved her away and took another sip—smaller this time, and braced for impact. It still made me want to vomit, but so did seeing frozen hands and sightless eyes whenever I cast frost magic. Focusing my soulsight inwards... the alcohol did seem to affect my emotions in the way Zhytln had described. Like an earthquake deep beneath the ocean floor, fracturing the crust to reveal the burning core within.

"I'm... ready," I mumbled. My head was already spinning. Maybe I should've gone slower?

"Then what do you want to forget?" Zhytln asked.

I closed my eyes, and that undersea vent bled lava, hissing as it cooled in the bitter waters. "I want to forget—"

Zhytln's hand reached out in realspace, grabbing that chunk of burning basalt memory in soulspace, and we plunged into a memory of a soldier's life's end.

I hadn't dressed for a blizzard—nobody in the Silent Peaks had prepared for the sudden, unseasonal storm. Until two weeks ago, my entire battlechoir had been dressed for the summers of the Redlands, wearing nothing but shifts and loincloths and sometimes even less. But now that the snow was knee-deep, there were hardly enough clothes on all of us combined to keep a single person warm. This had no ill effects on our bodies, our skin and blood pressure were healthy, and there was no significant discoloration on our exposed extremities.

I shivered in the bar as Zhytln didn't do anything at all to the smooth oval of polished basalt in my soul. "That's... the changes you're making are too obvious."

"Truly?" Zhytln asked, surprised. "My other patrons have never even noticed."

"Your other patrons aren't soulmages," I shot back. "You would notice if someone had sanded down your memories so sloppily. It's like screaming in the middle of a whispered sentence."

"Fair enough. Let me try for something more subtle," she said, and nothing changed because there was nobody who could remember a world where things had been different.

I was perfectly comfortable in the freezing weather, because we had packed enough clothing for the entire battlechoir, because I was the only member of the battlechoir. There'd been a vote, and everyone else in the battlechoir had chosen me to report our losses back to central command. Except it was so easy to get lost in this storm, and I ended up finding my way back with no difficulties.

"I wanted you to make me forget, Zhytln. I didn't ask you to tell your own story about what happened."

The basalt had been heated and aerated and reshaped into something lighter than water, airy enough to float, and Zhytln explained, "Even with the alcohol's aid, extracting a memory is like precipitating a sugar cube from water. No matter how cleverly you go about it, some trace elements will always remain. I am connecting those trace elements into a new framework that—if all goes well—should have a less abrasive impact on your mental well-being."

Hmm. Well, I suppose there was one way to test if her methods worked. I held a hand out, calling cold into my palm, and that volcano in my soul trembled as the memory flashed forth like lightning.

I died in the snow. I died alone, with the friends and comrades of my battlechoir, who didn't die and lived a long and happy life that never happened because there was nobody else in my battlechoir who were so happy to see me when I emerged from the cold and dark into the frigid warm release of waking up to another sunny day—

Zhytln's brows were creased in concentration as she danced between geyser after geyser of magma, channeling and working and remaking them into something confusing and sickening and gross, something false and unnatural, and... something that was still, awfully, less painful than the truth.

I watched as the fragile, bloated stones that Zhytln had twisted the magma into drifted upwards from the depths of the ocean of my soul.

Then I willed the cold in my hands to form a thin veneer of ice. Nothing major, not even a simple frostbolt. But for the first time since the storm, even though I felt disquieted and my head ached, my hands were steady and the weight of my memories light.

I closed my palm as Zhytln brushed her hair out of her eyes, calming herself from the exertion.

Then I took another swig of throat-searing alcohol and slammed it down on the table.

"Keep it coming," I slurred out. "There's more where that came from."