???

  ***

  Lethe awoke. In front of her were the ruins of a kingdom, from what she could tell. She stood in a rose field, and chunks of earth and roots were falling off her body. Looking down, she confirmed that the earth around her was broken, like she rose from a grave. Maybe that’s exactly what happened – she couldn’t really tell, as she possessed no memories of who she used to be. She started to wander, away from the ruins and out of the rose field, and she stumbled upon what looked like a grave marker.

  A depiction of a bloody sword sat on top of a gravestone that read ‘Romy’.

  Someone placed a bouquet of flowers here. A mix of various flowers of remembrance, like poppies, roses, hyacinths and more.

  She kept walking towards the meadow beyond. The tall grass swayed in a gentle breeze, as if nature itself forgot what atrocities happened here mere years ago, just the same as her.

  There was a hill in the meadow, and Lethe ascended it. On the top stood a single, white lily with a rainbow sheen. She kneeled down to look at it and was surprised by another peculiar feature.

  It showed two women. Two women who loved each other, on a deeply emotional level and as the flower showed, on a physical level as well.

  Lethe admired the little thing, running her fingers gently over its petals. Only now she saw that her own fingers were green, and her skin was like a rose’s stalk.

  How peculiar.

  She withdrew her fingers from the petals, on which the two women continued to make love to each other.

  “This is a memory,” she realized.

  “I can… take memories. Simple ones, little moments. Or I can take… entire memories of people… with a blood sacrifice. They all become beautiful flowers like this one.”

  She vocalized what her instincts were telling her, looking over the sea of grass behind her.

  “This is my world… and I can travel to others.”

  The meadow looked so empty right now. She was going to fill it with love, hate, fear, anger, with all the emotions and memories that make humans human. She would have a garden of her own.

  ???

  ***

  She returned. While she was out, she experimented a little. Currently her garden was closest to a rather peculiar world – one with tall buildings of silver and glass, with people who wore even more silver on their skulls and light in their eyes. With metal for arms or not, it seemed to depend on the preference of the individual. Her appearance caught attention, so she stole clothes; black, baggy clothes with very bright stripes of color that reflected light beautifully. The jacket sported a hood, which helped her to disguise herself in that strange place. She carried three new flowers: one contained a lover’s given name. A simple memory, easily restored by asking again. She planted the flower regardless.

  The other one was something called a ‘passcode’. Supposedly the memory’s owner would suffer a long string of inconveniences for forgetting it, but the memory playing on the petals was dull. It was simply the person’s fingers dancing on a grid of numbers.

  The last memory was a more precious one. She couldn’t steal all memories of a person without a blood sacrifice or spending significant amounts of time plucking away at all related memory strings, but she could still get specific ones the usual way. This one was the exact moment someone fell in love with their significant other. She planted the flower in her garden and looked at it.

  A strange warmth filled her. She wanted more! More of these beautiful flowers and the fleeting moments they captured.

  She paused – she felt someone’s eyes on her.

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  A glance over her shoulder confirmed that someone was here with her. A woman with silver hair and red eyes looked at her, carrying a bouquet of flowers. After looking at Lethe for a while longer, the woman moved again, placing the bouquet in front of the grave and removing the old one.

  She checked the grave and removed any dirt or moss as best as she could, keeping it in pristine condition.

  Lethe would have jumped at the opportunity to consume more memories and create more beautiful flowers, but something about this woman stopped her from following her base instincts.

  ***

  Days, weeks, months and years passed. Every few days the silver haired woman returned, and Lethe ignored her presence, even if she was in the middle of erasing a victim’s memories. The woman in turn ignored her actions and continued to care for the grave.

  After a while the years turned into decades, then centuries and finally a millennium. The grave keeper kept appearing, even as the worlds Lethe visited to extract sweet memories shifted and changed.

  She could notice a change in the grave keeper’s disposition as she started to experiment with repeat guests after a thousand years. There were a black-haired and a blonde woman in love – and Lethe tried to erase their memories only to a certain point every time, to let them fall in love again only to be plucked out of each other’s arms when they were about to commit to it. The tragedy of it was beautiful. They both knew about her, so fear and uncertainty accompanied them every step of their way, yet they couldn’t help but fall in love every time, as long as Lethe made sure that they didn’t forget each other completely.

  She thought she recognized pity on the grave keeper’s face. Pity and a hint of recognition, like the pairing reminded her of someone.

  Maybe this was what led her to commit her foolish mistake…

  ???

  ***

  Lethe sat next to the grave keeper. The silver-haired woman’s breathing was heavy, and her pretty dress was stained with blood. She was wrapped in vines, though the smooth kind. Lethe didn’t want to give her an easy way out. Her fingers were cut off, turned into useless little stumps and yet she never once screamed, or begged, or pleaded. Lethe was utterly fascinated, and frustrated.

  She caught her trying to sneakily return seven lilies she had previously stolen. The ones Lethe so painstakingly harvested off Miori and Seika, the two fated lovers from Earth whose union she kept out of reach for the past eight years. To put things simple, Lethe was furious with her little grave keeper. Furious enough to overcome her mental barriers that protected the silver-haired woman so far. Furious enough to hurt her, to mutilate her. And to her annoyance, the grave keeper didn’t utter a single word during her torture.

  She took her time right now, carving through the grave keeper’s leg with a knife as the woman clenched her teeth and simply tried to endure it with a stifled groan.

  Lethe could see the finger stumps grow – bones sprouted, pulling muscle, blood vessels and skin with them.

  “Ah… there we have it. You’re immortal, just like me.” Lethe shook her head and abandoned her cutting of the grave keeper’s leg, pulling the knife out and watching the wound slowly close.

  “My wounds don’t do that, though. I have to kill myself to reappear if I get maimed. If I do it too often in a short time span, I start losing myself, however. Immortality can be quite tricky.”

  The grave keeper still gave her a defiant look, visibly disinterested in her tangent.

  “You’re still not going to talk about what you did with my lilies, hm? Then I’m going to check directly.”

  Lethe placed herself behind the silver haired woman and sunk her fingers into her skull. Her own eyes rolled back as she rummaged through the ancient woman’s memories. A thousand years’ worth of history unfolded in front of her. The building of a city, the annihilation of another, the quest to immortalize a woman she loved. Pity for the repeat victims of Lethe’s memory erasure - that was it!

  Lethe focused on that feeling of pity and memories associated with it.

  There was a defiance in this woman’s memories – she tried her best to keep the cursed woman out, but it was to no avail. Before long Lethe took a good, long look at whatever memory the grave keeper was trying to hide.

  There was Seika, one of her favorite victims, in her crimson Magical Girl disguise. The grave keeper had the lilies with her and showed them to the magical woman, one after the other.

  Lethe clicked her tongue. “Naughty.”

  She saw more. There were the annoying little singers who hung out with her victims a lot of the time. They talked to the grave keeper, apparently planning something – however, as Lethe tried to dig deeper, she got nothing. She knew that all these women conspired against her somehow, but when she attempted to read their exact intentions, she found nothing, like her grave keeper erased her own memories.

  She yanked her fingers out of the woman’s skull.

  “Now I know what’s happening, so you can go. But you can’t be allowed to remember a thing about our interaction.”

  ***

  Lethe watched the grave keeper leave after her wounds were fully healed and she yanked the memory of her most recent visit out of her.

  “Madame Bille. What a peculiar name. And so familiar.”

  Lethe pondered, then she shook her head.

  “No matter… Seika knows the truth, and I can’t have that. I’ll erase her memories for good this time… but first, I’ll torment her… I’ll torment her good.”

  Lethe’s face became a monstrous, grinning visage as she planned her next steps. She wanted nothing more than to jump through a portal right now and tear the memories out of the woman, but something inside her wanted her to wait for the most dramatic moment to make her entrance. She closed her eyes and went over the memories she just saw – of visions of Earth, seen through the grave keeper’s eyes and a scrying crystal both.

  There were posters in the city called ‘Tokyo’, showing the little singers, and as they told her, the girls would hold their largest concert yet in a month.

  Lethe couldn’t ask for a more dramatic stage than that.