This is the character plot of Bathasar, a Memory Sculptor.  Bathasar is an elderly, half-mad mendicant healer, who wanders the outskirts out past Hallandren, using his Memory Sculpting talent to remove unpleasant or traumatic memories from passers-by, in exchange for alms.  

Long ago, Bathasar used his Memory Sculpting skill as a spy for the Kingdom of Idris. In fact, he was King Dedelin's most talented spy, eventually becomming the linchpin in the King's spy network.  Bathasar was even trusted to remove the nightmares of the king's daughter, the young Princess Vivenna.  Bathasar was also clever--leveraging Memory Sculpting in creative new ways-- so clever some of the King's spies did not remember they were spies until their reports, and the network arranged so that no one person or found object could expose any other.  

But Bathasar was perhaps too clever for his own good.  

One day, in one of their secret meetings, King Dedelin ordered Bathasar to hide something for him.  Something so important, it needed a plan and level of skill and finesse only Bathasar could weave together.  Bathasar was instructed to take it far far away, let no one follow him, and to hide it.  He was to tell no one, and to use Memory Sculpting to hide even his own memory of the location, in a small oil lamp he could bring back to the king.  Bathasar set out to do so, and completed all of this--and more.  

For reasons even Bathasar does not--and cannot--remember, he did not simply store the memory of the hiding place in the lamp and return it to King Dedelin for safe keeping. Instead, he stored it in a vast chain of objects, each one hidden, and each leading to the hiding place of the next memory.  Further still, he melded parts of this chain into the most trusted parts of his spy network and other loyal contacts, with meticulously crafted instructions to ensure not only would they protect it with their lives, but also present challenges to any Memory Sculptor who might try to follow the chain--even if it were one sent by the king, or even if it were Bathasar himself. 

This, too, Bathasar no longer remembers.  

His task complete, Bathasar discretely returns the oil lamp to King Dedelin, neither none the wiser, and Bathasar resumes his duties.  

Time passes peacefully... until one fateful day.  King Dedelin summoned Bathasar. When he arrived, the king had the lamp. Bathasar took the lamp, as instructed, and was filled memories, flooding his mind like a dam burst open into its valley below.  The memories, his carefully cherry-picked memories for just this occasion, caught him off guard. He did not know what to expect from them, having forgotten by removing them, but he did not expect this. It would mark the turning point, towards Bathasar's fall from grace, a first step down the stairwell of madness.  

The memories did not tell him everything.  He was always cautious like that, and far too good at his occupation.  A need-to-know basis. A spy's life. In place of what the king sought, these memories instead gave Bathasar plans, instructions, and contingencies.  And they told him to trust no one.  There was a plan for if the king asked for his important hidden thing, though these memories did not reveal just where that was, much less *what* it was.  

There were even plans for if he were coerced, or if some other Memory Sculptor was brought in.  He could see it unfolding before him, various contingencies for using BioChromatic Breath on an adversary, a technique he picked up from a misfit Awakener with a talking sword,  during his time tending the Idris spy network in Hallandren.  He nearly shuttered at the thought, for this had been a memory he had hidden covetously--these techniques are banned, even heretical in Idris--one of the many privledges, but also necessities, unique to a spymaster sitting above the law.  

Unfortunately for Bathasar, his earlier self had not thought to include a plan for what actually happened next.  

Rather than asking Bathasar to retrieve what he had Bathasar hide, King Dedelin wanted Bathasar to *take him there* to the hiding spot.  Visions of various escapes and magical assaults on the king seeped into his mind like holes in a dyke, a new gush springing up for every one he thumbed back.  Another step down the madness stairwell.  

It was just then that young Princess Vivenna saved him, pulled him back from the brink, even if only for a moment.  She was just a little tyke back then, had a nightmare, and sobbing, she had just found her father and Bathasar there in the drawing room.  Seeing the innocence in her face calmed Bathasar's mind, and brought a compassion in him he thought he had lost in the years of cloak and dagger dealings, or from the wormwood mental rot of prolonged Memory Sculpting.  

Bathasar offered to cure the child of her nightmares.  King Dedelin assented, not wanting to break Bathasar's cover as a healer, while also hoping it would ease Vivenna's sleep in his absence during the upcoming journey.  

So Bathasar took little Vivenna to the garden pond, put her nightmare in an oddly colored pebble, and had her throw it--and her bad dreams--into the pond.  

Or at least, that's what Bathasar remembered for a time.  

What he no longer remembers, is telling her a secret, in the form of a soothing bedtime nursery rhyme, and putting that memory--along with the nightmare--into the pebble.  Nor does he remember the pebble was not from the pond's shore, but an Awakener stone, from Hallandren, by way of his pocket--one of a few he kept for dire occasions.  This particular one, would make itself known upon being desired to return.  It would be safely lost at the bottom of the pond until it was needed, since little Vivenna most certainly did not want her bad dream back anytime soon, and neither did poor Bathasar want it or any more burdens on his breaking mind just then.  

Bathasar relished the peacefulness of the moment, the quiet night, the dewy garden, and the innocence of a child finally drowsy.  But this also meant his time in the princess's soothing presence was waning-- he needed a plan, before the madness of his predicament returned to overtake him.  Not some cock-eyed scheme of a fragment of his former self, but a real Bathasar plan, in the present of that moment, built of his full faculties--what was left of them anyway. 

This, too, Bathasar does not remember. 

In fact, Bathasar remembers very little of anything these days.  Whether that's due to Memory Sculpting, or madness, trauma, shame, or even just plain senility, no one knows, least of all Bathasar.  It may very well be all of the above, as everyone says he's mad or senile, and he can see the scars of interrogation on his body, and he bears a trapped collar with the inscription of a traitor to Idris, though he does not know how either came to be, or even where Idris is.  

And of course Bathasar still makes his way Memory Sculpting, though no longer in espionage, rather as a wandering mendicant healer.  Perhaps he found some way to sneak back that calming memory of helping a little princess with her nightmare; or perhaps it's just out of reflex or convenience Bathasar fell back into the same profession he once used as cover--no one questioned a healer for traveling, loitering, or for private meetings with the king.  Possibly muscle memory is also why he finds himself on the long road beyond the outskirts of Hallandren, the nation where the bulk of the Idrian spy network was focused at its peak; or it could be this is merely the only place tolerant of a banished traitor from Idris. 

Or, perchance, Bathasar thinks, maybe it is Fate, or even the good graces of this God King the locals speak about, looking favorably upon him--whether it be by pity, or for his efforts healing the troubled.  Or even for brave things he does not remember.

Indeed, favorable or not, Fate isn't done with poor Bathasar. For the God King was just inadvertently involved in the cause of two travelers finding each other in Hallandren, and setting off together  out of the city-- the very same Princess, all grown up now, and a certain Awakener with a talking sword. None expected this, but hearing the rumors of a mendicant Memory Sculptor nearby, the two cannot resist hastening down this road in search of him, though each for very different reasons. Painful memories locked inside Bathasar's traitor collar may be the key to a world of secrets.

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