Memory eaters were curious creatures. They enjoyed snuffling around personal histories, looking for the choicest bits of remembrances with a steadfast dedication that would put any expert craftsman to shame, and yet, they just as easily found themselves distracted by the very events they sought out, captivated as they played out across the darkness of a person’s shadow, alive once more even if only for that single moment before consumption. Some memories, however, danced so vividly and inspired such a welling of emotion within a person’s soul that even a memory eater lost all taste for it. Just a glimpse, and all that potential sweetness, the bitterness, the salt and spice of rage and love and loss known without even a flick of their tongue. All of this with just a look into someone’s shadow.

After all, one’s shadow made for an easy gateway into all that they were. So very oft-forgotten and yet inextricably tied to one’s existence. 

To most people, however, a shadow was nothing more than a thing cast by light. For the more observant among the populace, a means to better acclimate themselves to their surroundings, and for the more wary, something to watch for should new threats arise in their environments.

Those who knew of the memory eaters either treated them as myth, tales spun to make old gods seem more dangerous and sinister than they usually were, or they assumed a dabbling in magics far too dark to allow you to call yourself a decent human being. 

Eli liked to believe he was a decent human being. Especially for a thief. 

But, he might also have been called a friend to things better left forgotten. The memory eaters could be argued as one such thing. 

They weren’t harmful in and of themselves. Most of the time, the memory eaters slept in the darkest parts of the world, the places little thought of now, such as the gaps between major historical events, where a nation and its people might easily recall this battle and that one but rarely of what happened between them, though it wasn’t only prolonged peace that made the everyday mundane, but prolonged hardship as well. One more day of winter in a life that had only known the cold and ice ended up as unremarkable as every other day around it. Those sorts of memories stretched further across time than most humans cared to think of, but it made for easy enough meals. A few bites here and there, and rarely were the memories missed all that much.

The doors rarely opened into these forgotten places, leaving the memory eaters to sleep and pace in the dark of time. Sometimes, though, a person might call upon them, not in this world, but in the one between worlds, where everyone went when they slept, and dreams burst as vivid as a field of spring wildflowers. 

Everyone dreamt. But not always of wildflowers. 

It was the dreams that crawled up from the depths, dripping horror and shame and dressing themselves up as fears renewed, that tore across the meadows and screamed at the ever-blackening skies as they turned the ground to ash and caused it to bleed. These were the dreams that made people beg to forget in the shadows of their hearts and so, unknowingly, woke one memory eater or another. 

They wouldn’t always answer the call. And they wouldn’t always eat what had been offered for their feast. But, they might take a big enough bite to let the heart breathe once more and allow other memories to form in their place. No different than a forest finding new growth after its razing. 

However, to think the memory gone would be akin to lying to yourself. The memory eaters ate. They did not digest. Instead, they lived with the memories, growing in size the more they consumed, making them a fabric for their construct rather than fuel for their growth. They could just as easily regurgitate what they had eaten down to a precise moment. Sometimes, they could be coaxed into releasing a particular memory. Other times, they simply let it go, no rhyme or reason to the act. 

Some memories they kept for the eternity of their being. 

Eli knew how to have conversations with them. Just as he knew the depths of the darkness around him and what lurked within the unseen spaces beyond it. He knew that memory eaters were as much a part of the dark as the magic he had sought command over and that he had paid enough in price to buy their services when he needed them. 

Fortunately for him, most memory eaters simply couldn’t turn down a free and easy meal.

“So, they bind this dragon to the crown prince. What of the others, then? It’s the first one that’s…”

As the conversation looped once more, Eli focused his attention on the carriage. The memory eaters clamoring over it had been one thing, as no magic currently embedded in its defenses would have accounted for their presence. Or, that was the gamble Eli had taken, assuming no one would anticipate, much less believe in, the use of such creatures when it came to stealing the egg. When most bandits would have left the guards for dead, when they might have even aimed to run off with the carriage whole, what use would the loss of memory be in such a situation? 

Unless you happened to get yourself caught, which Eli did not currently have written into his plans for tonight.

Or you lacked a good exit strategy. Also not something Eli had left to chance. 

And it wasn’t as though the leaving-the-guards-for-dead scenario had evaporated as a distinct possibility. Eli merely hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Not that he carried any particular qualms about the idea of killing, but a good thief should be able to leave all as it was save for that which they intended to steal. The less one left disturbed, the more likely one would get away with the act. 

It was really quite simple. 

Balancing himself on the branch, Eli swept his hands before him and began scrawling across the air with both in complete synchronicity. 

With his left hand: Bring silence to form.

With his right hand: And let this darkness meet the earth. 

The shadows crawling over the tree trunk trembled. Eli glanced below him. As he watched, the shadows began to lift away from the bark, spilling out into the air like tentacles, all seeking one another blindly until they made contact and locked themselves together. Just like this, they wove themselves into black stepping stones that spiraled down and around toward the back of the tree.

Before taking the first step, Eli cast one more look toward the carriage.

“What for? He’s bound tighter than a Stone Row merchant’s purse…”

No disruptions yet. Inevitably, something would change as even when given a second, third, fourth, an infinite number of chances to replay a scene, another choice would always come into play as the mind ran through the variety of responses each moment presented to it. It could be as simple as another word substituted, a new gesture for emphasis, or a bug rerouting its flight pattern by an inch, but whenever they happened, there remained the chance that further things would fall out of sync. As much as Eli liked to think he had time, he knew he was playing with borrowed measures. 

“Down we go then,” he murmured. 

He took each step lightly, the shadow stones dipping slightly under his weight but never sinking completely. As he moved from one to the next, the shadows reabsorbed their wayward fragments in his wake, reeling them back in like a fishing line gone slack until nothing hovered in the air behind him. By the time his feet hit the ground, his midnight stairway had completely disappeared. 

“That’s what I was trying to tell you!”

Eli mouthed the words of the conversation as an echo as he glanced around him, arms carefully relaxed at his sides. His position behind the tree kept him out of the guards' sight, the ones still awake, at least. Not that being sighted concerned him at that moment. No, this was simply about standing in the darkest patch of forest he could find at the edge of the clearing. All of it to steep himself in shadow as he began to speak in a bare whisper, “Bind me to thee, and through our embrace, let me make you an offering of a living dream.”

He knelt on one knee, dragged his fingertips across the earth, and felt not moss nor root nor dirt but a liquid as cool and smooth to touch as the silver of starlight promised to be. When he stood back up, an inky blackness dripped from his fingers. One drop after another, slow to abandon its hold on his skin. 

When he stepped into the firelight, positioning himself toward the back of the carriage, his hands no longer carried a faint purple tint but had turned a complete and conscienceless sort of black. No shadow trailed in his wake. Instead, it pooled directly beneath him despite the light’s best efforts to throw it free. His steps carried no sound. The memory eaters paid him no mind. He was a ghost wandering the borderlands of the living. 

Eli stopped only when he reached the carriage’s side. Up close, with its defenses laid bare, he could see the intricacy of the magic woven over it. Symbols sunk into its frame to strengthen its structure, effectively turning wood into iron without all the added weight, thus still allowing for the two-horse team that usually pulled most merchant carriages. More magic to alert the drivers when someone unauthorized attempted to touch it, all while ignoring the natural world around it so that things like rocks flung up from the road, mud splattering, rainfall, or birds looking for a momentary respite wouldn’t set off the alarm. Still another set of symbols linked together to react to various magical attacks. Then there were the symbols dictating the current styling of the carriage's trim and the ones for the lock’s new code. 

All in all, a complete defensive system, leaving little to chance. 

Careful not to touch the carriage, Eli wrote through the air once more, his fingers spilling shadow with every symbol. 

To those feasting above, a polite announcement. To the one below, repose.

This time, when his incantation took to smoke, it gathered itself together in the semblance of a bird and flew up over the top edge of the carriage. He waited. 

“Seli’s all right…”

Neither memory eater lifted its head, jaws still sunk into the shadows of the men, but the largest one turned a milky eye toward the smoke-bird hovering by its shoulder. It flicked its tail as the bird broke apart, its fog-and-soot remains swept away by the breeze as though it had been no more than a dream. A few seconds later, a single solid knock resounded as the memory eater balled up the tip of its tail and thumped it once against the carriage. The man with the scarred face answered with a knock of his own. 

A pause. 

“They’re worried about the vertniell.”

The head guard placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. At his feet, the memory eater laid down with a yawn and settled its head atop its taloned feet. It looked curiously in Eli’s direction. 

From the box seat, the conversation continued as before between the two guards unabated. 

Eli lifted his hands and let them hover in the air before him. His lips formed his next words, but no sound issued forth: Together now and snare what is sought. The drops of shadow that had fallen from Eli’s fingertips swam toward one another, gathering rapidly into a thin line of blackness that stretched forward from the tree he had left behind and shot toward the carriage, linking one shadow after another along its way. For a brief moment, the line disappeared completely as it was engulfed by the carriage’s hulking shadow, then thin tendrils emerged from the other side. A tangled mass of blackened vines that probed the ground like a multi-headed anteater blindly searching for its meal. 

The head guard took one careful step after another toward the back of the carriage. Above, the two guards continued their conversation. With every step the head guard took, the lines of shadow gathered closer together as they slithered toward his foot. When they finally hit the side of his boot, they recoiled as if surprised by their success. Tentatively, they reached forward again. 

Satisfied with their findings, the shadow-vines climbed up and over the guard’s foot. Some dove back into the shadows on the other side, while others crept up along his boot, sliding in and out of the laces that held it fast around his calf. 

The head guard lifted his foot again, and this time, the vines traveled with him. Not pulling but allowing themselves to be guided, elastic in their give, all while anchoring themselves in the surrounding shadows. And all the while, they climbed higher up his leg, coiling around his knee, his thigh.

As the guard rounded the back of the carriage, Eli positioned his hands before him and smiled.