"Well that... didn't go like I had hoped." We were sitting around a small campfire, well past the time I typically would have gone to bed, and nobody looked like they were feeling great. I was embarrassed, Errod was wincing like he had a headache, and Katrin just looked baffled. The sparks drifted up in front of us, wood crackling, and for a moment the only sound was one of the moskar snoring.

"There were a lot more people there than I expected," Katrin said, "and at least three of you."

"Yeah. Most of them were wearing football jerseys too, I didn't really anticipate that."

"And Errod's glove. A lot of them were wearing Errod's glove, including one of you. But not Errod, funnily enough."

Errod shifted around, looking uneasy. "I didn't like it. Football is a sport I assume?"

I nodded, then realized he was too busy gazing into the fire to see it. "Yeah. Not sure why it would show up in my head though, I was never into it. For that matter I don't know why any of the rest of that happened either."

I'd just unlocked the ability to let others into my memory palace, and had held hands with Errod and Katrin and given it a shot. It had immediately gotten way more crowded then I was prepared for. "Maybe I should try again with just one of you? Take it slow?"

Errod threw his hands up in surrender. "Katrin is the one that wants to get all analytical with your memories. I think I'll sit this one out."

"Katrin, you want to give it another go? Or should we wait until morning? It's pretty late."

As if on cue she yawned, but shook her head. "No, no. Let's try it again - at least one more time, and then if it still gives you trouble we can try getting sleep and see if that helps."

"Okay, well... let me go back in on my own for a second, make sure everything is..." is what? Ready for guests? Was I going to light some candles and vacuum? Whatever. I closed my eyes, and opened them back inside my mind.

It was, indeed, a bit of a mess - there had been more people than had really fit in the room and things had been knocked over. I glanced into the other areas, and only found one straggler - the scarred version of me from my dream.

"Fuck. Are you going to throw another knife at me?"

"No," she said in that odd accent, "Did not work, you are still alive."

"Okay. Well. You're a figment of my imagination, and so you don't belong in here. Just... I don't know, climb out the window. That's where the dreams belong."

She raised an eyebrow, then ignored me and looked around the room. It was my childhood bedroom at my mom's house, complete with scribbles on the walls and stickers - half peeled off - all over my bedframe.

"I remember this room. Yes. And remember what you did here."

"Well that sounds vaguely ominous. Okay, so you're some sort of manifestation of guilt or something, cool. Great. I'm sure you'll be a real blast to have around. But I'm inviting a friend over and I don't want to introduce you to her."

"Katrin is coming in again?"

"Yes."

"Who were the others?"

"The guys in football jerseys? Your guess is as good as mine. Now go."

"What else do you have here?" She asked as she stood and shoved past me, into the hotel room. "Oh, this room. Yes. My... uncle?"

"Yeah, uncle Roy. Very good."

She nodded and stepped out into the hallway.

"No, no, don't go poking into my memories. Not cool."

"But I am your imagination, you said."

"Yeah but I don't... I don't know how any of this works. This seems super fucked up."

"Fucked up?" She tilted her head and squinted at me for a moment, looking genuinely baffled. "You have strange ideas. The things you have done, and this is what is fucked up?"

I rolled my eyes. The scarred, strangely accented clone of me felt cliched somehow. It was the kind of thing I would expect from some ham-fisted student film, this twisted part of my subconscious manifesting itself just to... I don't know, give me shit.

"Okay, yes, I'm a terrible person. Happy? I'm awful and should feel bad."

She nodded, but then held up a finger. "But."

"But?"

"But. You returned the little girl to her parents. Why?"

"Because I'm not a monster. Jesus. Look, can you just... fuck off? I know you're some shadowy NPC from my dreams that wants me dead and thinks I'm a piece of shit or whatever, but can we agree that right now since you can't kill me and I already know I'm a bad person your job is done? Hmm?"

She shrugged, and opened a door.

"No. No, those are my memories. Stay out."

"I have seen them before."

"That's... as it may be, but right now I want you to -" But she had already ducked through. I followed her in, and found myself in the woods. Little me was there crying, and the scarred one was looking down at her.

"I know this feeling," she said, "being scared and sad in the woods and wanting to return home. Wanting your mother back."

"Yeah, it was fucked up. Can we not? I've been trying to avoid this shit. I'm out in the woods with my friends and when they wanted to go into town for supplies I just..."

"You thought they would abandon you and never return?"

"I... no. No, I didn't think that, but I felt it. And feeling it is bad enough. Anyway I don't need to re-live this shit. I still like camping, somehow, and I want that to stay true. Come on, out of the memory."

She walked past me back into the hallway, but before I could stop her she darted through another door. I charged after her and ended up in a group home - my first one. When I'd originally unlocked the ability to search through my memories, they'd been organized - roughly - by year. But it was clear that was only a loose suggestion, since I was eleven in this one and had been probably six when I was bawling in the woods.

"Tsk. You steal, from the other girls."

Sure enough, pre-teen me was digging through someone's stuff. I tossed aside some clothes, pocketed a bag of goldfish crackers, put on a cheap bracelet. Then I found a photograph of the kid with her parents - I mean, presumably that's who they were. It was creased, like it had been folded up to be shoved in a pocket, and the corners were so dog-eared they were almost fuzzy. There were some stains on it, a spot of what looked like maybe blood and some places where it was slightly bubbled up like the photo had gotten wet; maybe it had been near a spilled drink, maybe someone had cried all over it, it was hard to say. I looked at it, then got up and walked to the window where I promptly rolled the photograph up and shoved it through the metal mesh that kept us from sneaking out. It dropped out of sight, ruined.

The other me shook her head, sneering. "Of course. Breaking things. Ruining things. Hateful."

"No, I... I don't know, I was... maybe she had been mean to me, and..." And what? And so I'd destroyed some treasured keepsake? A precious memento that was clearly the most important thing she owned? Besides, I remembered well enough even if I didn't want to - she hadn't been mean to me at all. She had invited me to sit next to her. "I don't know why I did it. I don't want to be here. Just... fuck you. Get the fuck out of this memory."

"This is my life," she said, "and you ruined it. I will take it back, I will fix it. Undo what you did, if I can."

"Oh, no. No way. We're not doing some bullshit multiple personality thing. I'm the real me, and you're some fucking nightmare caused by eating something spicy before bed."

She looked at me, and her eyes seemed to be smoldering like hot coals. There was a rage there, that I hadn't seen even when she threw a knife into my eye.

"You are the real one? You? You are a monster. I will pin you down and cut that face from your skull so I can feed it to you. You will beg. You will cry. You come to me on your knees, asking me to shit in your mouth so you can choke on it and feel the release of death rather than continue in the agony I have in store for you. Never say you are the real one, you pathetic shadow. Life stealer. I saw, when you killed that man in the car. I had to watch, when you stole your mother's teeth. I was there, behind your eyes, powerless, when you committed all of your sins and then felt sorry for yourself. You look surprised. Did you think we were having a nice chat? Were we getting friendly? Did I slip, for a moment, and praise you for doing the right thing with that girl?"

I had backed up without realizing it and startled as I thumped into the wall. The eleven-year-old version of me was gone, somehow, and everything was oddly still and silent like the memory was waiting for something to happen.

"Uh. I mean mainly I was just thinking your English was improving all of a sudden."

She smiled, a feral grin. "Yes, it works both ways doesn't it? We share everything, wether we want to or not. But I will not share this face with you any longer, and I will not listen to you claim it as your own. You want to be a new person? A better person? You want to pretend you never tortured animals or lit the school on fire? Then when you wake up, darling sister, do me a favor and march out into the jungle until you find something large enough to swallow you whole. Prove you're better than you were by removing a great evil from the world. Otherwise, I will do it for you. Because no matter what you say, the 'real' you is the monster and you know it."

I hadn't ever tortured animals, or killed some guy in a car. Had I? Was this some sort of repressed memory? No, she was insane. Insane and imaginary. I mean at a minimum I was certain I hadn't stolen my mother's teeth, what the fuck could that even mean? Granted, I had lit the school on fire - but it wasn't a big fire, and they put it out. She was just making up random things, like some sort of Mad Libs for psych patients.

"Okay, miss creepy. That's enough. I'll admit, that was a pretty good speech. Maybe a bit far with the whole 'you'll beg me to choke on my shit' thing, I don't know if that's scary or just silly, but overall it was a solid eight out of ten. But we're done now, this is my brain and you're not in charge. So uh, begone. I banish thee. Fuck off."

She shook her head, and walked into the closet. I waited a moment, not sure what to do, and then peeked in after her but of course there was just the expected collection of junk - some board games that were missing half their pieces, and old humidifier, and a moth-eaten old quilt. I headed back into the hallway, then into my normal rooms. They were vacant.

"Okay, cool. Yeah. And stay out."

But of course I wasn't sure she was gone, or even if she could be gone. After all, if she was a part of my brain there wasn't anywhere else for her to go. Though that still felt a little... trite. So if 'evil manifestation of guilt or shame or whatever' isn't a plausible explanation... is it possible this bitch came from outside? She'd been speaking English, though with the speed at which that improved it was possible she was siphoning the knowledge out of me. After all, if she was from outside she would need to be some kind of psychic or whatever, right? But that would be ridiculously powerful, especially since she would somehow need to be doing it remotely. No, the best explanation for everything was that she was exactly what I had assumed - a figment of my imagination, mistakenly pulled into the memory palace by me fucking up the new ability.

Still, it didn't seem like a great idea to bring Katrin in until it was sorted out and just to be absolutely safe I wanted to get that mind security in place. So I popped back to the real world, told them I was too beat to try it again, and packed it in while Errod put out the fire. For once, I didn't feel like staying in the memory palace as I slept and so I got my first night of proper dreams in a long time. I didn't remember any details, but they were all bad and I woke up feeling almost as tired as when I'd gone to bed. I untangled myself from the sheet I'd somehow been mummified in, washed up at the little basin of water, and then went out to get my morning chores done - normally that relaxed me, the comfort of having some very straightforward jobs to do with no boss and no timecards and no case workers... but it didn't help this time. The mana levels were getting lower too, not just in the camp but reaching out around us. Even with Katrin and I burning through as much mana as possible every day it was crazy to think we were having a lasting impact on the jungle around us, but there was no way to ignore it. With that in mind, I was shocked cities existed at all - surely there would be a strong incentive for people to remain nomadic, if magic dropped off this quickly.

Once the moskar were fed and the mana wells were set up and I'd gotten the fire going I just sat and stared while I waited for my hands to warm up. The confrontation in my brain the night before had somehow ruined everything, and I suddenly wasn't enjoying the camping anymore. I wasn't enjoying anything. When Errod got up I was annoyed with him for being too nice, and during our training exercises I headbutted him right in the nose. We'd been sparring, I was supposed to try to hit him, but that had been a complete foul.

"Sorry," I said, unconvincingly. I could feel it, see it from inside like I was watching a slow motion train wreck. Why had I done it? Well, he'd left himself open. Sure, but... what the fuck was wrong with me? I was too mad at myself to apologize properly, so I went and sat in the mana well and cranked my detection abilities all the way up. No enchantments other than the one holding the mana well in place, no manipulations of probability. Those fucking fate strings, as always, but nothing new. The next thing would be to go into the memory palace, but of course I didn't want to do that.

"You okay?" Katrin asked, finally out of bed. I wanted to just ignore her. She was always just following me around, asking questions, giving unsolicited advice. She had called me reckless, but she was the one that on a fucking whim had just headed off with some stranger. What gave her the right to act like the responsible one? She was younger than me, and had randomly decided to tag along because... why? What was in it for her? The Duminere thing, sure, and then I guess having people to train with, and... fine, but she didn't act like it was that stuff. She acted like we were best friends somehow when we actually barely knew each other. Well that wasn't true. Even if I argued we'd been too busy on the road it had been a month of camping and spending every minute together. But...

"No. No, I'm trying to justify being mad at you for some reason. I'm... fuck. Katrin, It's a low empathy day and I didn't sleep well and I'm in a shitty mood and I think I hate everyone right now. And there's some memories I should probably look at but don't want to, and I just know that now you're going to want to offer to help and frankly I don't want you to. I don't want you seeing that shit. But I also don't want you to be all understanding and reasonable about it, because you're pissing me off with how calm and rational and friendly you are. And Errod is making me angry by being nice and pure and shit, and the moskar are pissing me off for shitting too much, and I'm going to burn this whole camp down."

She nodded, and sat down. I braced for her to say something calming and mom-like and be an overly good friend for no fucking reason. "You're a bitch and I want to slap you."

What. "I... okay fair, but that was not what I was expecting."

"You're moody, and you just gave my brother a nosebleed, and twice now you've eaten the last of a meal after watching me put away some for later."

"I thought you were just putting away leftovers."

"Bullshit. You're a bad roommate. You make a mess in our wagon and I end up cleaning it all up. Your blanket was on the ground this morning, and you got water everywhere washing your face. You keep putting natta flakes in the stew when you cook - "

" - it was my turn to cook! I thought that meant I got to make it my way!"

"Callie, you know damn well you're the only one that likes that shit. Do you think that I always cook things the way I like when it's my turn, or do you think I maybe consider you and Errod?"

"I... well, I mean. That's your choice, you could... aw, fuck. Okay. You're right."

"I know I am." She sighed. "But I also know you would risk your life for us if you had to, and I know you let me order you around and make a list of memories you had to check on even though that's not really any of my business, and I know you hate it when I sing while I'm cleaning the wagon -"

"Hey, no, that's cute. It's just that one fucking song, with the yodeling."

"I don't know what that means even with the bracelet on. Anyway. You're a good person in a lot of ways, and we're all shitty and selfish sometimes. And right now, this is all just minor stuff that's feeling big and annoying because we've been cooped up here too long. So. I'm going to take a wagon, and Errod, and I'm going to go into town for supplies. It's my turn. And you're going to stay put and not get into trouble and when we get back you'll be happy to see us again. Deal?"

I nodded, and then even though I wasn't really feeling it I pulled her into a hug. They packed everything and in less than an hour they were gone, leaving me all by myself. Watching them leave all I could picture was my mother's car, tearing away from the campsite. I knew it wasn't the same, knew they would be back, but knowing wasn't the important thing. It was deeper than that, like having a fear of heights. It didn't matter if you knew you were safe, if it was ridiculous to not be able to climb a ladder. It wasn't logical. And so I sat, and I had a very quiet panic attack, and then I pulled myself together and made some lunch. Within a few hours I was feeling better - one of the upsides to a low empathy day was that the emotional trauma didn't hit as hard - and was even looking forward to a few days by myself.

But of course, they never did come back to that camp.