4.29: Answers

I’d never had much use for many of the actual physical books in the library. I did most of my reading electronically, or from textbooks purchased from the store. The huge, towering shelves full of dusty tomes looked cool, but didn’t promise a great reading experience.

Fortunately. Despite the size of the library, I didn’t have too much I needed to look through. The potion books were mostly old recipe books, some of the recipes tagged with helpful little notes reading things like ‘demonstrated ineffective as of 1986’, and only about ten per cent of the collection was in English. I skimmed the table of contents of the English ones to check for recipes for memory erasing potions and was surprised to find that a few of the books actually had some. Wow. ‘Oh, you can’t make these dangerous potions, so we won’t tell you even the theory in potions class, but you can totally just go and get a recipe for them from the library’. Yeah, that made sense.

The recipes all looked extremely complicated, not to mention impossible to make in school since they all contained certain dangerous potion ingredients that the store wouldn’t sell (I’d checked for other potions), but that wasn’t important; I didn’t want to make the potions. More exciting was that a couple of the memory potions listed antidotes. Yes! I hoped we’d been dosed with one of those.

In the end, I found what I needed tucked away in some random book about magical medicine. A brief overview of memory-erasing potions and a list of the most common ones.

Uses: for the elimination of very recently acquired acute distress and the circumvention of certain types of geas.

Hmm.

I looked up ‘geas’, and it meant basically what I thought it did – a restriction or compulsion resulting from contract magic. That… made sense, I supposed. Several contract spells relied on the victim having some kind of knowledge or viewpoint. Max’s spell could only redress debts that the victim felt were owed, for example, so presumably one could kill somebody, use a potion to forget it had ever happened, and thus be immune to Max’s spell. Or truth spells. Or compulsions that relied on the victim remembering their instructions.

I put my hand over my mage mark. Over the invisible scars there, where I’d been cut and healed and not remembered.

Was that why I’d done forgotten? To avoid some kind of geas?

The idea that the binding had been done without my knowledge made less and less sense the more I thought about it, but I could definitely see a younger me, reckless and desperate to bind a curse and without any obligation to stay alive to save the world, doing something like that. Finding someone who’d bind it for a terrible price enforced by a contract spell, then me dodging the consequences by taking a potion to forget. Yeah, that was something I probably would have done.

The problem with that theory was that it necessitated me having a whole lot of knowledge that I simply didn’t have back then. It meant that I’d have had to understand contract magic enough to know that forgetting would counteract it, knowing that memory erasing potions existed and what they could do, and having some way to access them. And then forgetting all of that information, too. That seemed… unlikely. Oh, I could theorise ways it could have happened, but with magic involved I could theorise ways that anything could have happened. You can keep adding layers of conspiracy and complexity to anything to eventually make a conclusion make sense. But usually, things were a lot simpler than that.

So far as the binding on my chest went, I felt like I was missing or misunderstanding some fundamental, simple thing that should make all the rest make sense. I felt like I had as an initiate, struggling to make sense of my spell and the circumstances that activated it, only to eventually learn that it had never done anything at all and all of my reason was just chasing butterflies.

But that wasn’t what I was here to look into right now. I kept reading.

Categories: Memory erasure potions fall into two categories; preventative potions and removal potions. Preventative potions prevent memories from being recorded in the first place. These are the safest potions to use when possible, as they leave no risk of stray memories or improperly erased memories. Removal potions remove previously recorded memories. They are complicated to use and carry high risks of improper erasure, leaving untouched copies of memories (‘ghost memories’), severed mental connections, and the influence of erased memories on other memories, which can confuse or distress the patient. For maximum success, removal potions should be administered as soon as possible after the events to be removed.

Yes, great. This was all good news. I dismissed preventative potions out of hand; to stop us from making memories, we would’ve had to have been dosed before going down into the Labyrinth of Dreams, and that just didn’t make sense. ‘Ghost memories’ or bits of memories connected to other memories would be great. Anything we could recover would be great.

There were a few different types of memory removal potions. There were concept-based potions, where the potion would just remove everything related to a specific concept (such as going to a place or doing an activity), provided the concept was small and recent enough not to be connected to too many other memories. I didn’t think we’d been dosed with one of those. It was possible, technically, but it didn’t really match what had happened to us. Given what we did and didn’t remember, it was far more likely that we’d been dosed with a time-based potion.

Time-based potions simply cut out all memories that were recorded within a specific span of time. They were much simpler and less prone to error than concept-dependent potions, but not foolproof. The human brain wasn’t always all that good with time, and there was almost always some crossover. All three of us should have some fragments of memories thinking about what we’d forgotten, made after we’d been in the Labyrinth and before we’d taken the potion.

Because the thing with time-based memory potions was, they only worked for things that had happened in the past. They couldn’t be used to just ‘forget up until the moment you’re drinking this’. You still remembered actually taking the potion. And they were all orally administered; you had to drink them.

We’d passed out in the Labyrinth of Dreams, done things that we couldn’t remember, and awoken in hospital. So, we couldn’t have taken the potion before waking in hospital, or we’d remember that part, too. Malas must have dosed us in hospital – he had plenty of opportunity to do so, we were there awhile and he’d given us lots of things to drink – meaning that there was a period of time after waking up in hospital where we should know everything.

I searched my (admittedly shaky) memories of those first few days after waking up. I’d been thinking a lot of our future, of what we’d seen, of nearly dying and being Kylie’s familiar and everything. I was pretty damned sure that if I had memories of finding something cool in the heart of the Labyrinth, I would’ve been thinking about those, too. I had no memories of doing so.

Perhaps there had been two memory potions? Perhaps we’d woken up in hospital, been given a preventative potion so we wouldn’t remember what was happening, then been given an erasing potion and put back to sleep? Mm. Possible, but complicated. Malas didn’t like using potions at all. He certainly didn’t like experimentally combining them in weird ways. That sounded too complicated to be his style.

Still, if he was protecting something important enough, he might, There were a few combinations he could use to –

My eye caught a potion description on the list. My heart sank. That was it, I knew it. It fit the situation too well not to be.

It wasn’t good news.

I borrowed the book along with a couple of other random potion books, and left the library. Twenty minutes later. Kylie, Max and I were sitting in the valley, passing around my tablet with photos of the relevant pages (Max had balked at the idea of physically taking an old, delicate book outside to read on the grass.)

“It’s Lilith’s Veil,” I explained, tapping the screen. “Or something very much like it. It fits what we experienced perfectly.”

Kylie frowned at the dense text. “I only understand about half of these words.”

“There are two kinds of memory-erasing potions,” I explained. “Those that erase memories, and those that stop you from making them. I really, really wanted us to have been dosed with the first kind, since they’re messy and leave bits behind. But the fact that we all later took a recall potion and you guys remembered nothing at all and I just got a flash of prophecy and handful of related sensations suggested that that wasn’t the case.”

“But we couldn’t have taken one that stops us from making memories,” Max pointed out. “We would’ve had to have been dosed before going down, and the timing for finding the heart of the Labyrinth would have to be perfect, and – ”

“That’s what I thought. Until I saw Lilith’s Veil.” I tapped the description again. “This little baby is one of the simpler memory potions. You take it, and all it does is stop you from recording memories while you sleep. Your body metabolises it over about a day, so it’s generally only good for one night. Anything you did on the day you took it is just… gone, when you wake up. People forget the vast majority of what they actually do anyway and fill in the gaps with stuff the brain invents, so unless there’s something really important that you expect to remember on that day, it’s practically seamless.”

“That sounds… so easy to abuse,” Kylie said. “That has to be illegal.”

“Yes, it’s illegal. They’re all illegal. Unless prescribed by a professional, of course.” Like Malas, who’d never shown any particular concern for petty things like patient consent, or providing accurate information.

“Okay,” Max said, “so this means…?”

“We can’t do anything about memories that were never recorded,” I said. “The memories aren’t being magically suppressed, and they weren’t removed in some way that’s going to leave copies or connections or evidence behind. They weren’t recorded in the first place, so there’s nothing to recover. We have whatever random scraps were linked to the bit of that prophecy I still have, because of...” I gestured at the familiarity mark on my arm. “That’s it.”

There was a pause.

“Okay,” Max said. “That’s not… great, but it’s not the end of the world.”

“Literally,” Kylie chimed in, unhelpfully.

“There are other avenues of research. Whatever we learned down there, we can relearn.”

“Don’t go back into the Labyrinth,” I said.

“We have to, at some point,” he pointed out. “I have to imagine that that’s where the ‘heart’ that we have to ‘prepare in offering’ is.”

“Okay, well, don’t go charging down there prematurely in a blind grab for nebulous answers.”

“I’m certain that I’ve already promised not to go back alone.”

“Well… good.”

Mas was right. I could keep trying to see if my subconscious had anything useful, and as for everything else… there were other avenues of research. Other ways to find things that would be useful.

We just needed to keep working at them.