The Erasure

Roughly eight hundred years ago, at the sealed barrier of Ether, Strahd took the memory of his marriage out of Taara and bound it into a book, Kept Memories.

What happened

Taara had left him before dawn and gone home to move Ether's Flame beyond his reach. Her casting overshot, and the Great Freeze closed Ether with her locked outside. Strahd found her at the barrier, too late to stop it.

He erased the marriage: part mercy, part cover, part keeping a guard away from the prize he was hunting. He could not bring himself to destroy what he took, so he bound the years into Kept Memories, and altered the book so that even a full reading would lie about the order of events. The erasure is a refined casting of the same Zephyrian craft as the Gift.

The full order of events, before and after, is kept on Ether's Flame.

How it held

The marriage years were cut out cleanly. Her wandering centuries felt continuous to her, one stretch of solitary vigilance among many, and nothing in her mind marked the gap. What remained was an unnamed grief: her heart mourned something it could not name, and filed it under the nearest familiar shape, the death of a bonding. Her Zephyrian history, the Tree, the sigils and her search all stayed intact, because none of it was his to take.

The spell cannot be lifted by its caster. Strahd tried for eight hundred years. Only someone else reading the book returns what it holds, line by line, to Taara wherever she is.

Taken again

The book was not the last time Strahd took from her memory:

• Session 24. When Myra tried to show her the party's history, Strahd told her not to trust it, and her memory of the party being trustworthy was gone.
• Between sessions 24 and 26. Her memory of banishing Logi went missing (Logi's Banishment). Myra told her the fact in session 26, without saying the memory had been taken.
• Session 26. At the closing breakfast Strahd wrote the night into a book, and it partly took on her, pushing her toward his version of Vess's death.

Undone

• Session 24. Logi read Chapters 1 and 2 aloud in the gallery. She got back the friendship with the old count, the courtship and the happy years of the marriage. Chapters 3 and 4 were never read.
• Session 31. On Ether, everything that had been taken came back to her at once, and stayed after she came home: the leaving, the freeze she cast, the erasure itself, and every later taking (Ether's Reignition).