The Unwriting

Overview

The Unwriting takes a person's past away in order, starting with this morning's meal and ending with the fact that they exist. It looks at first like the forgetting of the very old, and families often mistake it for that. What it takes does not come back, because it is not forgotten but removed. At the end there is nobody left to bury, or a body that walks away as someone else's weapon.

Cause

It is the work of Mnemosyne Null, a Beyonder from a cosmology without memory, for which the past is a sickness to be cured. Its spreading blank deletes memory from reality and strips objects of their history. Those it empties may walk on as Blank Hosts, which carry the blank to anyone still remembering.

Who It Strikes

Anyone the pallor reaches, of any people. The hosts are drawn to memory itself, so the grieving, the old with long stories, scholars, record-keepers, and those who tend graves are sought first. The Wrought, who take no ordinary illness, are not spared, since a destroyed memory-core is one of the few things that can end them.

Signs and Course

• The recent. The sufferer forgets this morning, then yesterday. They repeat questions and lose tools set down a moment ago. Their clothes and skin look faintly washed out.
• The name. They forget their own name, and then their family's faces.
• The skills. Speech goes, then walking, then the habits of the hands. Letters in their keeping turn into marks no one can read.
• The self. The face smooths and empties, and the sufferer stands or sits without any sign of knowing that they are there.
• The erasure. They cease to be, or rise as a Blank Host, chalk-pale and silent.

Within an Incursion this can take an afternoon. A sufferer touched once and carried away may sink over weeks.

Contagion

It does not pass on breath or in water. It is caught from the blank itself, a colourless patch that spreads over lanes and villages, and from the touch of a Blank Host, which takes memory in the same order.

Treatment and Its Limits

Memory is the only medicine. The sufferer is told their name over and over, and made to say it, write it, and carve it. Kin sit around them and tell shared stories aloud. A memory shared by a group works as a shield, and a vivid, painful, or joyful one most of all. Lockets, letters, portraits, diaries, and songs are pressed into their hands. Workings of silence and oblivion fail or backfire. Workings of memory, history, and storytelling hold: Recall Thread can hold a fading morning in place, and Name Retrieval can find a name at the edge of loss. Neither can find what the blank has already removed.

Telling a Blank Host its own name makes it falter, but it does not give back what was taken.

Mortality

Left alone, every sufferer reaches the end. Those surrounded by memory at the first stage nearly always stop there, and many at the second. Survivors keep gaps that never fill, such as a missing year, a child's face, or the trade they once knew, and they guard their memories ever after like gold.

Lore and Belief

Most families blame the forgetting on age, a fall, or grief, and are slow to call for help. Some say it is a curse laid by the dead on those who neglect their graves. People call the hosts the Faceless, and take them for ghosts who have forgotten they are dead. A hearth tale tells of a child who sang her father's own lullaby to a host until it lay down.

In the Medieval Era

The Unwriting is rare. It is caught only in the Paling, the pale country left by the Mnemosyne Null Incursion (c. 132,000-c. 130,000 BR), where a night inside takes the morning's memories, and elsewhere it is known as the tale of the city that forgot its name. The households at the Paling's edge keep their own customs against it. A folk healer who sees forgetting together with pallor sends for the family to start talking.

Where It Appears

• Mnemosyne Null, the Unwritten (the Unwriting, the Spreading Blank, Travel Notes for Mortals)
• Blank Hosts
• The Mnemosyne Null Incursion (c. 132,000-c. 130,000 BR)
• The Paling
• the Writers' Guide chapter What Waits Outside