The Chromatic Chord

Memory-Fixation

The sickness of the zones and planes of memory, which fasten a mind on the past until it forgets to eat, sleep, or live in the present, and which can leave it holding a past that never happened.

Overview

Memory-Fixation takes its name from the Veil's own trick at the Memory Palace, where memory erosion is replaced by fixation: the present is forgotten as the past takes hold. The zones of memory give what people go to them for, perfect recall, a lost face, a past set right, and the gift is the sickness. A sufferer comes home with a mind that keeps going back. Some come home remembering a life they never lived.

Cause

At the Memory Palace the past is easier to stay in than the present is to return to; a memory stored wrong there spreads its error into others, and too many at once overload the mind. The Lost Archive bleeds its books' memories into the reader and can rewrite a reader's past. The Mirror of Regret holds the eye on the life one did not have. The Eternal Record crushes a mind with the weight of history. All four fasten the mind on what is past and loosen its hold on what is now.

Who It Strikes

Scholars after lost knowledge, the bereaved after a lost face, and anyone with a regret, a trauma to lock away, or a past to recover. Grief makes it worse everywhere. Long-lived peoples with deep memory, Elves and Dwarves among them, are said to sink deeper, having more to sink into.

Signs and Course

At the zone the sufferer stops attending to the body: meals forgotten, sleep skipped, breath held through a long remembering. Those who leave in time come home distracted and absent, answering questions about now with stories about then. They repeat one memory, often a single day, and grow upset when it is interrupted.

What follows depends on where they went. From the Palace, some cannot keep a new memory for long and must be told the day's news daily. From the Archive, some insist on a childhood or a loved one that never was, and some have forgotten one who did exist. From the Mirror, some wake believing they are the person in the reflection, and most carry its "what ifs" for life. From the Record, catatonia, or a mind that remembers everything and has lost track of itself.

Contagion

No one catches it from a sufferer, though a household that lives with a sufferer's false past sometimes comes to half believe it.

Treatment and Its Limits

Care begins with the body: someone to put food in front of the sufferer and see it eaten, and a day kept to the same shape. Kin put present things into their hands, a tool, a child, and tell them the true story, gently and often. Recall Thread can hold a new memory long enough to keep, Burden Shelf can set a crushing recall aside, and Wash Memory softens fresh turmoil. Each spends the caster's concentration and reserves, none tells true memory from false, and Burden Shelf may delay grief that has to be done. A memory locked away at the Palace may never be retrieved.

Mortality

At the zones it kills by neglect: travellers starve or die of thirst while staring, and the Palace and the Mirror keep the bodies of those who never turn away. At home it seldom kills. What survivors keep is a false or locked past, a narrowed present, and sometimes a lasting grief.

Lore and Belief

Scholars call it the scholar's sickness and blame greed for knowing. Families say the zone kept part of the sufferer, and some leave the room of a fixed person as it was in the remembered year. Those who honour Stewards as saints pray to the one remembered as the keeper of bearable memory (see the Warden of Bearable Memory).

In the Medieval Era

Memory-Fixation is rare and belongs to the learned, the bereaved, and those who can reach the Palace before it fades, or the Archive's Book-Gates in abandoned libraries. Record mages and their teachers know it best and warn their students; physicians meet it as a melancholy that will not lift, and treat it so. Most sufferers are kept at home by family, fed and talked to.

Where It Appears

See Also