Some of their memories were hard to watch, and as I dredged up traumas from deep in their psyche, there would be a flicker of panic, pain or sadness tinging their auras.

The most difficult to watch were the memories of the group's youngest's sordid short life.

No more than a child. She had been used and abused by many different people from a young age. I tried to collect all the painful memories together; scrunching and crushing them into a tight ball with all my mental might, trying to erase them.

-: You have acquired a new spell: Mind Wipe (Acolyte).

Mind Wipe: Erase the mind of your target. :-

It was a simple enough description to understand. I activated it and watched as the mental landscape was bleached white. Like the wind scouring the mountains, everything was ground down—the psychic wind blowing the sand away.

She was a blank mental slate.

Her aura shifted in distress, and I opened my eyes in time to see the face of the young girl in front of me turn deep red, then blue and finally collapse to the ground convulsing while the others just stood there blissfully watching.

She died so easily because I had made a simple mistake.

I didn’t regulate the scope of my ability.

I took it all; her memories; her emotions; her conscious thoughts and even the unconscious thoughts that controlled simple bodily functions like remembering to breathe.

I stripped her mind of all of it.

The empty shell of the poor girl lay there still among the leaves. My stomach gurgled inappropriately followed by the echoing rumble of other empty bellies, completely breaking the tension of the moment.

(‘So we need to eat and dispose of the body’)

It was just a simple thought, me arranging the jumble in my head, but I felt a ripple spread across their minds and watched as they descended ravenously upon the fresh corpse of the comrade. Within moments they had picked apart limbs; torn open flesh; devoured any meat and slurped up what little fat she had.

They sat serenely around the carcass gnawing bones.

For one, I was thankful I hadn’t eaten in a while, or I may have flavoured their meal with the contents of my stomach, weakly I managed to swallow down what rose in my throat.

I came across the long forgot spoils of my earlier battle buried at the bottom of the body pile in the chaos.

As they sat calmly, I searched back through their memories one by one; it’s a singular process that needs to be made more efficient. I don’t have the time to do this every time I need information. For the moment, this ragtag group of individuals is eight men and six women strong.

Most of the men were serfs, and most of the woman were sold into slavery. The break down is something like this; Serf (4 men, 1 woman), Slave (2 men, 4 women), Beggar (2 men, 1 woman), Deceased (1 female slave).

After scanning each separately, I found what I needed in the serfs and beggar's minds, just enough knowledge to survive in these woods. For a little while at least.

The problem is now explaining what I need to the others, I tried to take the knowledge with me, but after a gentle mental tug, images, sights and smells flooded down the link assault my mind.

With great mental strain, I managed to push back against the wall of information, just hard enough to force it back down.

My toying with these things is still far too crude. Too blunt.

Another thought that scares me is that I have adapted to well. Maybe watching memories of this world’s darkness had desensitised me to it. I can only hope that’s the case.

But a couple of things are clear with mind probe I can move memories around, and with mind wipe, I can sever them from the consciousness completely. It stands to reason that I can do more with more refined control and finesse.

I choose the next most wretched of the group; a female slave in her late twenties. She still had most of her good looks, give or take a nasty scar or two. A few of her teeth were missing, several cigarette-like burns were on the underside of her semi-pert breasts, and a particular twisting brand marked the small of her back.

Her front had been shaven clean, and several old whip marks striped her legs.

I had seen the things they’d done to her not just the marks they left.

This time I would be more delicate in my approach.

Through the link, I entered her mind as though I was going for a stroll, gathering up all the fundamental parts necessary for her to function into one portion of her conscious, before compressing it to take up the minimum amount of space.

I stripped away useless emotions and compartmentalised everything else, detaching from her consciousness but not erasing it. This sex slave; this broken human had now become a real doll-like existence.

I left her with a desire to serve. That was about all that remained behind those glassy dead eyes.

Satisfied with my handiwork, I mean she seemed to have survived the ordeal, I moved on to the others. Detaching memories from their consciousness but leaving their emotions intact, they were like new lined jotters for me to write on.

I moved all their memories to my blank doll; categorizing and organising as I sorted them into storage and subfolders.

I was pleasantly surprised by a strange reward.

[“You have created a Repository: a Psi-construct for the express purpose of storing information.”]

Roused for my mental dive, momentarily, I noticed several changes had come about since the slave woman became my memory dump.