Mindwiping

“You think I’m asking you to kill this man,” he continued, his voice suddenly far more calm. “But I’m not. I’m asking you to save him, Beleren. I cannot trust him to live with what he knows. I’m asking you to give me another, more merciful option.” Jace stared at him, his jaw working.

“Now,” he continued, breathing deeply, “take the sword or not, as you choose. But either his memories must go or he must. And if you’re to have any place in the Consortium, it will be at your hand.”

Jace clenched his fists until his fingers turned white, and then slowly released a breath, uttered the first words of an incantation …

“No.” Tezzeret reached out and tapped him on the head, just barely hard enough to hurt. “No summoning. What you do, you do.”

Choking back vomit, Jace spun back toward the table. Mustering everything he had, throwing his all into the spells so he wouldn’t have to think of what he was doing, he once more wrapped his awareness around the record-keeper’s mind. Again he stared at the fellow’s thoughts, his memories, his dreams. And as the better part of him wept, Jace carelessly peeled those thoughts away.

***

It wasn’t until days later that Jace learned that his powers weren’t nearly so precise as he’d believed them to be; that he hadn’t erased merely the man’s memories of the Consortium, but the memories of his life. That he’d left the man an empty husk, an infant in an adult’s body.

***

Agents of Artifice, Chapter 12