The brass nameplate on Madame Cordelia’s door had begun to tarnish, much like her reputation in the city’s underground circles. She ran her fingers over the engraved letters one last time before stepping into her parlor, where velvet curtains blocked out the gaslight from the cobblestone street below.
Her final client sat rigid in the wingback chair, hands trembling as they clutched a leather satchel. The woman appeared to be in her thirties, though grief had aged her beyond her years. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and her auburn hair hung in disheveled waves.
“You understand this is irreversible,” Cordelia said, settling into the chair across from her visitor. Between them sat an ornate table bearing crystal vessels, each one containing swirling, opalescent mist. “Once I extract the memories, they cannot be returned to you.”
The client nodded, her voice barely a whisper. “I cannot bear to remember his face anymore. The way he looked at me before…” She trailed off, pressing her lips together.
Cordelia had performed this ritual countless times over the decades. Heartbroken lovers, traumatized soldiers, guilt-ridden mothers—all seeking to excise the most painful chapters of their lives. She had built her fortune on human suffering, one extracted memory at a time.
“The price we discussed,” Cordelia prompted gently.
The woman opened her satchel and withdrew a small fortune in gold coins, setting them on the table with shaking hands. “Everything I have left.”
Cordelia studied her client’s face, noting the determined set of her jaw beneath the desperation. There was something familiar about those green eyes, though she couldn’t place where she might have seen them before.
“What name should I use for the extraction?” Cordelia asked, reaching for the largest crystal vessel.
“Thomas Whitmore,” the woman replied. “My brother.”
The vessel slipped from Cordelia’s fingers, shattering against the wooden floor. Decades of harvested nightmares dispersed into the air like smoke, and suddenly the parlor filled with the phantom screams of long-forgotten horrors.
“You’re Eleanor Whitmore,” Cordelia breathed, recognition dawning like a cold sunrise. “But that means…”
Eleanor’s grief-stricken expression hardened into something far more dangerous. “Twenty-three years ago, you took memories from a desperate young man who couldn’t live with what he’d witnessed in the war. You extracted his trauma, yes, but you took something else too—his ability to recognize danger, his caution, his survival instincts.”
Cordelia’s mouth went dry. “The extraction was clean. I followed protocol—”
“Thomas walked into traffic three days later because he’d forgotten to fear carriages. You didn’t just take his battlefield memories, you harvested his capacity for self-preservation.” Eleanor reached into her satchel again, withdrawing not gold this time, but a silver blade that gleamed with unnatural light. “Do you know what it’s like to watch your brother die because he’d forgotten how to be afraid?”
The memory harvester pressed herself back into her chair, understanding flooding through her. “You want my memories.”
“I want you to forget,” Eleanor said, rising to her feet. “I want you to forget every technique you’ve learned, every client you’ve destroyed, every life you’ve ruined in the name of relief. I want you to wander these streets with no knowledge of who you are or what you’ve done.”
Cordelia glanced at the remaining crystal vessels on her table, each one containing fragments of extracted pain. Her life’s work, her legacy, her power—all of it meaningless in the face of this woman’s grief-fueled vengeance.
“The blade,” Cordelia whispered, recognizing the silver’s particular sheen. “Harvested moonlight. Where did you—”
“The same black market where you buy your crystal vessels,” Eleanor replied. “Amazing what people will sell when they think they’re dealing with just another grieving sister.”
As Eleanor raised the blade, Cordelia found herself thinking of all the clients who had sat in that very chair, desperate enough to trade their most precious memories for peace. She had never considered the weight of what she took, only the gold she received in return.
The silver blade caught the gaslight, and Cordelia saw her reflection fractured across its surface—dozens of tiny versions of herself, each one about to forget the others ever existed.
“Please,” she whispered, but Eleanor’s green eyes held no mercy, only the same desperate determination that had driven so many to Cordelia’s door.
The last thing the memory harvester would remember was the sound of her own nameplate falling to the floor outside, brass letters scattering across cobblestones like forgotten words.
Leave a Reply