A memory-form is a person as they were remembered, not as they were, and since nobody remembers them, they are faint. Most look like figures drawn in pale ink on the dust-gold air of the stacks: a clear outline, a face whose features come and go, clothes that are only the idea of clothes. Lines of script drift across them like reflected light on water, and those who have read the script say it is the person’s own record, too small and too fast to follow. They walk at an unhurried pace, often stopping to lay a hand on a shelf. Their footsteps make no sound, but the pages near them rustle. They smell of the Record’s dust and old paper and, faintly, of something particular to each: smoke, lamp oil, the sea.

They are found only in the Record, among the stacks rather than in the guarded deep sections, and most often in the long aisles where little is consulted. No one has counted them. Visitors meet them alone or in small, silent processions.

The Forgotten seek. Each moves along the shelves as if looking for the place where it belongs, the volume or tablet that holds its life, and lingers wherever a visitor is reading, as though hoping to be read. They are quiet and courteous and do not hinder anyone. Some answer questions in a whisper, slowly, as if remembering themselves while they speak. The Archivists who keep the Record neither help nor hinder them.

A memory-form is all record and no Pattern, so it cannot act on the world beyond turning a page or pointing. What it holds is exact: under the Record’s law nothing kept there fades or is falsified, and a Forgotten can tell what it was and what it saw with perfect accuracy, if it can be brought to remember. Echo restoration draws on what survives in Record, so a Forgotten is in principle the material from which someone lost might be reconstructed, though no one is known to have done it.

Scholars of lost history seek them as the only ones left who saw what the world has wiped out. The danger is to the visitor. A traveller who listens too long and reads too much may lose the will to return to the present and stay, as the Record-Lost; that is a different fate, since the world has not forgotten them.

In the few traditions that know of them, the Forgotten are taken for the damned, punished by erasure; the Record judges no one, and many of them were simply the weak, the defeated, or the inconvenient, struck out by others. Some mourners and singers of the struck believe that a name spoken again on the Material Plane calls its Forgotten home. What is so is that remembrance strengthens an Echo, and Ennor the Grave-Watcher is said to set such memories deep into Record, beyond the reach of those who would strike them out.