Mnemeir

Legends say Mnemeir began as a scholar of mnemonic rites in the city-state of Vorul, obsessed with perfect recall. When his experiments drew the attention of a dreaming entity beneath the city, he bartered his future for the ability to hold every memory he could touch. That bargain warped him: he became neither fully living nor dead, sustained by the memories he harvests. Mnemeir drifted away from Vorul; ruins, asylum wards, and ancient libraries now mark places he has passed through — their patrons speak of missing years and photographs that show people no longer present. Scholars of the Occurrent Archive call him by name in warnings: the Archivist Tholen wrote “Do not feed him a life; he will return that life with its teeth.” The anti-magic order the Quiet Hand keeps a sealed dossier on Mnemeir and claims his lair moves with crowds — he favors marketplaces, funeral processions, and remembrance vigils where memories are plentiful. Hunters report that Mnemeir hoards the most vivid recollections as phantasmal glass orbs and can craft them into constructs called Mnemei Wards, which emulate an environment from a victim’s past to trap new prey.

Mnemeir is a tall, spare man whose skin shows the pallor and slight translucence of severe sleep deprivation. His face is long, with hollowed cheeks and eyes like blackened mirrors that reflect scenes others have lived. Threads of smoked silk hang from his shoulders; the fabric seems to be stitched from fragments of old clothing — collars, gloves, a slit of a child’s dress — each piece the remnant of a memory he consumed. His fingers are unnaturally long, tipped with flattened, brittle nails that look like the edges of pages. Where his hands move, thin filaments of shadow unspool into faint, flickering images: laughing faces, storms, the crunch of snow. Scattered around his belt are small glass vials filled with condensed motes of light (the collected memories), and a satchel of loose, curling photographs. Scale: stands about as tall as a human man (6'2"), the glass vials are about the size of a marble; when he summons a memory it swells to the size of a man and can fill a doorway.