“Sit there.” She motioned with the knife to the chair I had been in and I sat back down. She circled around the edge of the room, watching me. I followed her with my eyes.

“Look straight ahead!” she shrieked. The knife jumped in her hand. I looked straight ahead at the bookcase across the room. She came around slowly behind me and I had to fight against the urge to whip around and knock her to the ground. Every teacher I’d ever had was screaming at me from beyond the pale for letting an angry woman with a knife walk behind me. I heard her get something off the shelf and I imagined her braining me with it. She came close to me and handed me something over my shoulder.

“Take this, slowly.” It was a book. I took it from her and she whipped her hand back like it was on a spring. The cover said ‘Paladren, sketches.’

“Open it.” she said.

I did, and saw a faded book stamp on the first page.

“Go to a random page, any one with a picture on it.”

I flipped to the middle of the book. On one page was some text on the methods and time period of the sketch, and on the other page was a sketch of a man with a feudal era plated coat and a polearm leaned against his shoulder eating a bowl of something with his helmet on the ground next to him.

“Do you have it?” From her tone, she might have been asking about a murder.

“Yea, it’s a drawing-“

“Don’t tell me! Yes or no, do only what I tell you, do you understand?”

“Alright.”

“Focus on it, only on it, ignore everything else, and don’t speak, don’t react.”

I tried, but her breathing kept drawing my attention. It went from harsh exhales to steady deep breathing like she was asleep. I scanned the drawing over and over again until I felt it. I choked and almost fell out of my chair. This wasn’t the gentle nudge I had felt with Heldar, but a stabbing intrusion into my mind. It was like every thought took extra effort, even looking at the still sketch seemed to take something out of me. Then I heard a voice in my mind. It was a whisper but it roared.

“Raise your right hand.”

I did. It was like moving in a dream where all your movements are wrong and your punches land softly. Then the disturbance in my mind stilled and I felt numb and weak.

“Close your eyes.”

I did and almost fell asleep, but something else stopped me. I felt her there, and though she had been almost cute with the knife before, here she was brandishing something far more terrifying and I could barely breathe.

“Let me in.” The voice said, in her voice and mine. I felt her spread through me in a way I can't describe, and though my instinct was to resist her, to focus my thoughts away from what she was prodding against, to look for some way to rid my mind of the intruder, I overcame the urge and let her in, over and over again.

I could feel her in my breathing, in the sensation of my clothes on my skin, she was there in the ache in my sides, the uncomfortable form in my chair. I had never been that vulnerable, never that much at someone else’s mercy.

“Liana.” She said it in my mind and I saw her in front of me. All the distractions that hamper a memory were gone and I saw Liana like a vivid dream. I felt tears down my face and the sensation echoed as she noticed it.

“Remember the first time you met. From the beginning. All of it.” It was so easy now. The memories came like breathing.

I remembered seeing her from across the room, approaching her, our conversation, the night, the morning after, it all came flowing out of me and it was unrestricted by time. I relived the entire night in a matter of moments.

Then I first felt the change. The back of my mind was still like a lake in the dark, but I could feel something. At first, it was like standing next to someone in an empty amphitheater. The sensation stood out because it didn’t feel like the others, it wasn’t doubled and repeating. I knew it must be her. Somehow I was feeling her back. She must have sensed it because she came back stronger.

Liana.

It wasn’t a word this time, it was the idea of her, the knowledge of her. It was her face and voice and smell and it reached out into my mind and searched for everything about her. I felt like the person in the amphitheater had set themselves on fire, and the fire broke down all of my instincts to resist. My mind was stretched in a way I could have never imagined.

Every moment spent with her bled out of me. They rolled in my mind, one at a time, then all at once, then backward, then they jumped around. I had no knowledge of the existence of anything else in the world. My mind was all Liana.

A cold terror was rising outside of me. The person in the theater was screaming. Then there was the pain. She hit me with pain built from parts of my memory. The first time I had been stabbed. The feeling of extreme thirst at sea. A bolt in the leg. The loss of my brother. Finding Ethelyn in the dark.

Then, she showed me what had made her scream.

I was with Liana in the dark opera house, that night we had booth seats, our tickets forged, our hands finding each other in the darkness, our teeth biting our lips to keep quiet. But, something was different. In that state I didn’t understand what it was, so she showed me something else.

I was at the park with Liana. We were sitting on that old blanket, drinking wine from the bottle beneath the shade of a birch tree. She kissed me and whispered my name.

“Helena.”

Like an echo, I heard her say “Alany”, but it was wrong, and the wrongness of it spread to the rest of my mind like a sickness.

The memories rushed out like before, but they were different. The feelings wrong, the touch distant, the nights of lovemaking purely female. They separated themselves from me. When she had brought me to the dance house hidden in the stalls, now she danced with Helena, leaning down to kiss her, smiling into her eyes. The night after the storm, when we had found the nearest inn and left all of our clothes in a wet heap on the floor, and the sensation of the dry sheets on our damp bodies, Alany was nowhere to be found. All the words, all the promises, curses, pleading questions, now spoken to Helena. My memories went up in shrieking flames and dissolved into ash. My soul reached out to them, tried to find them, but there was nothing there, like grabbing empty air just before falling. I tried very hard to die then, but nothing came of it.

One memory remained, the night at the inn, the morning with the bird. It refused her and I felt her recoil when she touched it. So, I had spent one night with her, I had met her, had known her, if only once. I felt her anger rise up and she tried to break me for good.

She dug into the empty darkness where my moments with Liana had once been and showed me what was really there. She drew out my memories of the drunken nights alone, memories now standing tall where passionate nights of love had once lay smiling. She searched for something else, but didn’t find it. She sliced into the memories, my feelings, fears. The time Kal Arren had told me the name of my niece, the color of her eyes.

“I got a guy in that town. If it’s got a name, I got a guy. Remember it like that.” How he had smiled like a wolf. The night Madris had sprung the hit on Rolden. The way it felt to knife that kid as he was fumbling with his blade under his shirt. Then she moved on to something else, cutting deeper…

I felt something else that drew a part of my mind away, dimly aware, while she hacked away at the rest of it.

If Helena was someone standing in an empty theater, he was the theater changing form, as if the structure around me became soft, alive, full of purpose.

A memory came out of the haze and Helena turned on it like a drake.

I was standing in front of Liana, in a field kissed at the edges by frost. She was on her knees, tied up and beaten. There were men nearby in dark clothes. I knew they were Eyes, just like me. I felt Helena get still, now the only thought in my mind was this memory. I took out my knife and lifted Liana’s face up to look at me. One of the eyes spoke.

“Farmer found her on his grounds in a trap. The wound is fine.”

I spoke.

“Take care of the farmer if you haven’t already and I’ll take her to Throne. She’ll help us weed out the others.” She started to curse at me but my hand grabbed her tongue and cut it out with a single motion. I kicked her hard in the chest and she fell back writhing and choking. I tossed the tongue away.

“Load her up.” I said.

Then the laughing started. It came from the walls of my mind and echoed off Helena. More visions of Liana being tortured and sobbing, choking, begging. Helena screamed, her mind swelled in fury, the pain expanding her thoughts and cracking open her memories. He got inside her. I felt him do it, like having someone show you how to cut your food when you’re a child. He found all the memories of Liana and spread them open. It was like what she had done to me, in the way that the rising of the suns is like lighting a candle.

Then he found it. It felt different. She had tried to hide it, even from herself. That made him laugh.

I watched Liana standing there, in her room, in the dream, telling Helena about the cabin, about how she had found it in the mind of some dying invalid on the edges of the Complex. She had locked it down and wiped it from the mind of the old woman before anyone else could have seen it. It would be safe. She was drunk, asleep, sobbing. It had taken everything from Helena to close her off.

“Don’t drink anymore, if you forget this, at least remember, I love you.”

Helena had cut the memory out, blocked it off and let it wither and die, the way she had learned. Memories fade to nothing when the mind avoids them long enough, I saw, but it hadn't been long enough.

The Cabin. Northeast of the city. A forgotten trade route now superseded by the great roads, then a small path off that, up a winding brook, and there, a cabin, ravaged by the elements but still usable, nestled in a silent ravine with a narrow entrance and a wide forest behind it.

I felt Helena leap out, her mind reaching outward past him, and touching something for just a moment.

“RUN!” It was a brief thought, but it was all he needed. His mind forced open the contact and I felt her.

Liana. Her mind was like a wall of steel, but it was there. He didn’t try to breach it, but he danced in front of it. He laughed, gloated, taunted. He painted the walls of her protection with rolling thick waves of pleasure and animalistic glee.

Something rose out of the edges of it all. In the center was Liana in her fortress of steel, and around that, like a coiling serpent, was Him, but beyond that something crept in. It wasn’t Helena, and she seemed to not even see it, she was out somewhere else in the darkness, screaming and writhing. The thing gently came into view like a horizon coming closer, and I knew, somehow, that it was connected to Him, only exposed because of the reach of his mind, still dancing in excitement. It was like a million doors, and one by one I nudged them slightly, and they opened.

He was inside. His plans, memories, ideas, and other things; the kind of thoughts that can only exist in a mind that has learned to leave the confines of a skull, and has in fact adapted to such an expanded existence. The thoughts themselves were arranged, protected, organized. I couldn’t crack them or process them, but I could touch them, just for a moment, and I felt something I still can’t describe. Then the doors shut all at once.

He laughed. She screamed. It was over in a breath.