nce closely affiliated with the Pardoners, the Mnemoi served the judiciary of Stygia as questioners and sleuths. Questions of truth and falsehood, responsibility and fault were easily answered as the Mnemoi could call up memories of incidents in question and simply know not only the whats, but also the wherefores. The honesty of their Guild was unquestioned, in part because of the rigorousness of the Mnemoi training was widely noised about and in part because were the Mnemoi corruptible, it would be too disturbing to contemplate. Needless to say, the Mnemoi were in fact corrupt.

Not all betrayed their trust, certainly, but the elders of the Guild sold their talents to the highest bidder. When their schemes were unmasked by Charon, the Guild was broken and its followers either crushed or scattered. Its members, despised and occasionally hunted, were exiled to the hinterlands, and it is there, in a thousand places far from the capital of the dead, that the ways of reading and shaping memories are still taught.

The Guild’s symbol before the exile was an evenly balanced scale weighing one eye in each pan, but since the breaking of the Mnemoi, those who most keenly feel the Guild’s disgrace have recast it so that the scales are no longer balanced. Mnemoi are notable for never, ever blinking (save by conscious effort), and it is by this and only this that they may be detected.

Mnemosynis