Memory-Thieves

Overview

The Memory-Thieves are the predators of the Whispering Trace, counted among its Keepers of Dust but working against them: they steal memories to feed their own existence. In a plane where things fade unless memory holds them, a memory is life, and the Memory-Thieves take it.

Appearance

A Memory-Thief is small and quick, about the size of a child, a hunched shape of shadow with long, thin fingers and a face that is a patchwork of other faces, stolen, overlapping, never settled. Its outline is ragged and seems to fray into the mist. Its eyes, when they show, are bright and greedy. It moves in sudden darts from cover to cover, and it murmurs constantly in many voices, fragments of other people's memories, half a song, a name, a laugh. It smells of a room long shut.

Habitat and Range

They lurk in the misty woods and ruins of the Whispering Trace, and follow travellers, who carry far more memory than the faded things around them.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Memory-Thief follows a traveller, waits until they are distracted, and steals: a face, a name, a day, a skill. It takes the brightest memories first. It does not fight, and flees at once if confronted, but it comes back.

Abilities

It draws memories out of a mind, by touch or from close by, and lives on them. What it takes is gone from the victim, who may not know it was ever there.

Life Cycle

A Memory-Thief lives as long as it has memories to feed on, and fades when it has none. Whether they are born or grow out of stolen memories is not known.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. Their danger is to the traveller's self: one fed on for long enough fades, and becomes one of the plane's Faded.

Lore and Belief

Travellers say to bring things of personal significance to the Trace, to anchor who one is, and the Memory-Thieves are a reason. Tales on Caeldon of a thief who steals a sleeper's memories may come from them.

Bounty-takers say a thief who has gone into the Trace and come back can rob a house and leave its owner unable to remember what was taken, and some lords' halls have paid hedge-witches to ward their doors against him.

Where It Appears

• The Whispering Trace