Curators

Overview

The Curators keep the Memory Palace, the Resonant Zone in which a traveller's memories become rooms, corridors, and objects that can be walked through and touched. Each traveller's Palace has its own. They are not visitors and not natives: they are constructs of the traveller's own mind, made to organize and protect what it holds, and they have no sentience of their own. People call them guardians of the self, and they guard it from its owner as well.

Appearance

A Curator looks like someone the traveller knows best: a younger self at five, or fifteen, or the age of some turning point, or a parent, a teacher, or a lost friend as the traveller would like to remember them, kinder and steadier than they were. It is spectral, solid enough to look at and not to touch, with a faint warm edge to it like candlelight through paper. Curators wear robes of woven memory, whose folds hold half-seen pictures that shift when looked at, and carry rings of keys to the Palace's rooms; the keys chime softly as they walk, in time with the Palace's low ticking. Around a Curator the air smells of whatever the traveller's oldest safe place smelled of, beeswax, old paper, bread, or rain.

Habitat and Range

Curators live only inside the Palace and go no further than its walls; a traveller who leaves leaves them behind. A small Palace may hold one; a scholar's vast library-Palace may hold many, each with its own wing. They are thickest near the vaults where painful memories are locked and the shadowed rooms of what has been pushed away.

Behaviour and Temperament

Curators are helpful and rigid. They find what is asked for, file what is brought, and keep the rooms in perfect order, and they will not open a restricted room, a repressed memory, without the traveller's permission, even when the traveller insists it has been given. To someone from outside the Palace, a psychic or a scholar come to study another's memories, they are cool and obstructive; they view outsiders as intruders.

They are not people, though they speak like the people they resemble. A Curator in a mother's face will answer as she might have answered, but only from what the traveller remembers of her.

Abilities

A Curator knows where every memory in its Palace is kept, and finds it at once. It can lock a room so that it stays locked and open one so that its memory returns whole. What it cannot do is lie, or know anything the traveller does not; the Curators are the traveller's own mind, ordered. The only keys that open what they guard are the ones they carry, and they hold those keys for the self that made them.

Uses and Dangers

The Curators are why people go into the Palace at all: to recover a lost memory, lock away one that hurts, or store what they must know, and to find it again without fail. The danger is that they are so good company. The deeper a traveller goes into their own past, the harder it becomes to form new memories or come back, and a Curator with a beloved face will gladly show one more room. Those lost in the Palace are not trapped by their Curators; they are kept by them.

Lore and Belief

People who know the Palace believe the Curators are the true dead come to keep their memory, and grieve when they leave them. Scholars who study the Palace hold that they are what the traveller's mind makes when it must keep order, and that a Curator in a dead friend's face is a picture, not a presence; the zone's own nature bears the scholars out, but few who have met one believe it. Some say that a person's Curators change as they age, and that the day a traveller meets their own present self as a Curator they will never leave.

Where It Appears

• The Memory Palace