"...I don't know this to be therapeutically relevant but I'm having trouble forming a picture of the - tortured slave army thing, which also involves that being possible."

"Well, Detlev wasn't being tortured at that point. He 'broke' early on and pretended to become their willing servant."

"And accounted for you?"

"Yes."

"Can you tell me what you've done to reconcile with these experiences so far?"

He smiles. "I do what I can to better the human project—translations, histories—knowing that it erases neither what I have done nor what was done to me, but that it is important work nonetheless. I find myself especially drawn to help suffering children, when I can."

"You were - deployed - do you have any more specific interaction or lack thereof with people you affected?"

"The victims of my worst acts have been dead for centuries or more. Today I am known the world over as the villainous Norsundrian who enchanted humanity into a waking sleep for a year. In this way I've 'personally affected' everyone over the age of thirty-three, several of whom I interact with in my daily life. One of whom I've married."

"A... waking sleep?"

"They went through the motions of their lives, staying fed and healthy, but without emotion or awareness. Many experienced the end of the spell as waking up from a strange dream."

"Okay. Does that reputation affect you a lot day to day?"

"No. I'm surrounded by people who trust me, and not many strangers know my face."

"Okay. It seems like the work you've done so far is serving you really well. That understood, for demonstration and practice purposes, what do you want me to add to that today?"

"I understand that you can dull the affect of certain memories. I've selected an especially vicious encounter from my past, one I won't miss."

"Okay. The way I do that according to my textbook is that I cause you to rehearse the structure of the memory, but with all of the details artificially reduced in salience - amounts of time replaced with 'a while', people with 'nobody in particular', places with 'somewhere', all the emotions muted to almost nothing. Repeated enough times, this is supposed to make your mind bored of the memory and less interested in bringing it up when it's not wanted; it will not actually prevent you from remembering it if you try. Does that sounds okay?"

Smile. "I'm ready when you are."

"Okay, can you think about it so I can find it without running into anything extraneous?"

He nods immediately, recalling the memory in perfect detail. Grotesque statues and carvings surround him: art that celebrates violence in all its forms. A hard-faced man in a leather jacket rapes him, not quite for the first time and very far from the last. The sound of Detlev's voice catches his attention—"Is this display intended to move me?"—and Siamis struggles to turn, sees his uncle regarding him from across the wide room. Detlev looks, and sounds, bored. A woman stands next to him, rapacious, but Siamis' attention is drawn completely to his uncle, reaching out in the mental realm—help me, save me, don't look at me—only to bounce off Detlev's perfect mind-shield without eliciting any outward reaction. The emotions of the past (betrayal, shame, anger) exist alongside the knowledge only gleaned with hindsight (that Detlev was saving him; that if he'd revealed any affection or concern in front of the twins, they'd have escalated the torture tenfold).

Yuuuuup that is the sort of thing you are gonna see if you're a therapist. She takes a deep breath, and then -

There's like, some stuff, in the room, on some sort of theme. No one in particular is doing some sort of thing. There's some person over there, who says something in some sort of tone of voice, and somebody else alongside with some sort of facial expression, and Siamis (Siamis himself gets to not be "no one in particular", here) sends some kind of message for some reason and if this has any result it's not included in this memory, and it's all pretty boring but the things happen in an order and with a relationship to each other, just one that is not the sort of thing you can imagine dwelling on any more than you'd perseverate on whether you buttered your toast from east to west or west to east and with this or that side of the knife and with exactly how many crumbs shedding onto the plate.

Oh wow. That is—not dangerous but weird. He already knew that the subtle arts work directly on the mind without touching the soul (having witnessed secondhand that Sartoran cobbler being put to sleep), but wow this is bizarre. He'll hold his tongue until it's finished.

Dena Yeresbeth–induced perfect recall means that Bella may need to work a little harder and/or longer than normal, but it doesn't block the treatment entirely.

She'll keep doing it till the emotions from the unaltered memory are clearly not pulling hard on it any more than ones about toast, or until he interrupts her.