The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

It was an ordinary day.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. It was an ‘ordinary day’ two days ago. Except instead of actually being ordinary, it was this weird, conjured up kind of ordinary. The kind that made everything seem ordinary, even when it definitely wasn’t. The kind that made me ignore things, or gloss over events, or have the little voice in my head act all strange.

This wasn’t that kind of ordinary. This just felt normal. Actually normal. I woke up at the right time, got my clothes on properly, grabbed the books I needed (not from the pile on our room’s small desk, those must’ve been someone else’s extra study material), I made it to breakfast, I had some shockingly mundane biscuits for a school full of mages. Maybe the kitchen’s gastronomancer was having a rougher morning than I was. Everybody had off-days.

Even me. Because it was an actually normal day, it kind of felt like an off-day. There was the capability for it to feel that way. I had a little headache while I went to my first class, and it only got worse the longer Professor Irsine lectured on the fundamental principles of magic. I liked her, I really did, more than any of the other teachers I had that year. The rest were boring, like Professor Hernst, or so high-up that they seemed unreachable, like Magus Vrenwiche. Seriously, what was a military spellcaster even doing teaching first-year civilians?

But Irsine was nice. Normal, mostly. She had her quirks, but every sorcerer I’d ever met did, too. But she also had hair that got a bit frizzy, a lanky appearance and somewhat-awkward gait, and she actually seemed to care about what we were doing and learning. And not in that ‘care about what we’re doing and learning so that we can apply to become good Damean magi one day’ way of caring. Maybe it was just because it was a survey course, walking through the basics of all branches of magic, but she wanted us to have the ability to chase after anything we wanted. I liked that. It almost made me feel welcome.

But I wasn’t welcome. I was reminded of it constantly: I laughed when the other students didn’t, I asked too many questions at too many wrong times, I didn’t know what half the answers were to the questions I was asked, and I couldn’t keep myself from grimacing every time she called me ‘Miss Arrageste.’ I felt paranoid, uneasy, and anxious, even while I was enjoying every moment of the class I was in.

In short, a pretty regular day for me. And things were still happening that were out of the ordinary—like walking in on two third-years totally making out on the way to my second class. That didn’t happen every day. Nor did finding out I got a passing grade on my writing test. No, not rune-writing or stone-wrighting, just plain writing. Literacy. Calligraphy. The sorts of things you need to know to be a mage. Can’t cast a spell if you can’t read how to do it. Unless you’re a hedge-mage, then you learn the old-fashioned way.

I was lucky that both my parents were literate; a girl who couldn’t read a sentence would’ve stood out like a sore thumb in that class. So I made it out of there alive, and headed to my lunch.

Now, you might’ve expected me to be suspecting something. That makes sense, given what you know about how my last few days had gone. But I didn’t. I still can’t exactly explain how that felt, how my head was processing it all. Because you’d think, and I’d even think, that as soon as I got to thinking about yesterday, and the day before, and the day before the day before, I’d have stopped right there and had a long hard think about the very, very weird things that were happening to me.

But I didn’t. And why?

Because I wasn’t thinking about those days. And yes, you can ask, because I have hundreds of times already: ‘How can you not think about yesterday?’ I mean it’s yesterday, after all. The day before today. A set of events that lead directly into whatever events you might take on this day, influencing your actions and, yes, your thoughts too.

It’s like, to make a bigger example, never thinking about last year. What things happened to you last year? What actions did you take? What events were you a part of? Too many to count out loud, I’m sure, but also too many to remember. And that’s fine—we don’t all remember everything. We can’t remember everything, far as I know, but sorcery could yet prove me wrong.

But while we don’t remember everything, we do remember some things. Big things. Events that shape us, that teach us, that we learn from or look fondly on. It’s the same thing with yesterday. There’s little things that we don’t have to remember, that we most-often forget, and there’s the big things that we take with us into tomorrow. Or today, I guess.

But I didn’t have any of those. Wait, no, it’s less like that. Because if you didn’t have any of those memories, you’d know they were missing, right? We’re used to having them there, to call up whenever we need to or whenever they just pop into our heads. We’re not always thinking about them, but we know we can think about them, even if we don’t think about the fact that they’re there.

That’s kind of a mouthful. But I think you get the distinction: you’d notice if those memories were just gone, vanished. They’d leave a hole behind, and where there’s a hole, you know something is missing.

But there wasn’t a hole in my memory. That’s what I’m trying to get across, and that’s what was so weird. But it wasn’t so weird at the time, it was… well, you know. I didn’t even know anything was wrong until she came up to me.

Okay, and even then I didn’t think anything was wrong. I thought it was weird, sure, for a second-year I’d never met to come up to my end of the table. For two reasons: nobody came up to me during meals, ever, and definitely not a second-year. She had black bangs (they looked recently cut, I wondered if she’d done it herself), darker-than-normal skin for a Damean (at least I thought she was Damean?), and purple eyes (who in the hells has purple eyes?!). It definitely didn’t feel outright wrong. And she looked at me expectantly.

And I had no idea who she was. “Am I in your seat?” I asked her, already prepared to high-tail it away with my half-finished plate.

“No,” she said, still looking at me with that ‘don’t you have any idea who I am’ sort of look.

Now I know I should have known who she was. I’m ungodsly embarrassed that I didn’t. But I swear I had a good reason not to at the time. Which is why I shook my head, shrugging helplessly. “Are you… looking for someone else?” I offered.

“No,” she said again, growing more confused by the second. “I’m looking for you.”

“Me?” I snickered, turning my attention back to my plate even while I felt a blush on my cheeks. Being accosted like this was strange, especially by someone like her, and I didn’t like the attention it was sure to bring. “I don’t know why you would,” I said more quietly.

She sat down. At my table. A second-year at my table, sitting down, and looking at me like that time everyone looked at me for swallowing a bug. Oh, this was just great. “I’d hoped you might at least thank me,” she said standoffishly.

I still had no idea what she was on about. “For deining to grace my lunch table with your presence, O Mighty Second-Year?” I grinned, mocking her with a long dip of my head.

And I wasn’t paying attention then, my blood was pumping loud and hot in my ears from embarrassment and that sixth-sense that tells you when someone is probably trying to bully you, but remembering it now, I can see just how confused and even hurt she looked. “For yesterday,” she corrected me.

I blinked. And I started to think about it. And before I could go even two steps, my thoughts swerved back to self-defending sarcasm. I shrugged in her direction. “I’m a very busy woman, lots of things happened yesterday. It’s easy to get them all mixed up.”

“Then let me help jog your memory,” she insisted, her teeth gritted together and her voice coming out as a low growl. “Girls’ quarters. First section, first room.”

My brows knitted together. “How did you—”

“Because I already told you that yesterday,” she hissed, “after I saw your initials written on your sleeves. Don’t play dumb.”

I grabbed at both my sleeves, then, turning them over and left and right to demonstrate how un-initialed they were. “I’m not dumb. I just have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She rolled her eyes. “Your other sleeves.”

“What other sleeves?”

“Your night robes!” She laughed, incredulous. “Everyone’s night robes have stitching on the sleeves. This isn’t your first day, how can you not—I mean, okay, you saw it yesterday when I pointed it out, how can you not get this?”

I shook my head once, and then I did again. I wasn’t remembering any of it. To me, it all sounded like a big prank, a joke by the upper class on my expense. Somebody’d put her up to this, maybe Mollian, because she hated my guts. But I only thought that because I wasn’t thinking. I thought that I was thinking though. That’s why I felt so confused.

Because when, for your entire life, you have the unchallenged assumption that your memories of yesterday will be exactly as you left them when you think about them today, you don’t notice anything wrong when you simply don’t remember something. It’s not that I couldn’t remember it. It’s that I didn’t. Whatever reflex there was between my thoughts today, and the events from yesterday, was just being… stifled. And I didn’t notice a thing, because nothing was telling me that the memories I was looking for, the ones I thought I didn’t have at all, weren’t accessible. It’s like sending a letter in the post. You address it to your friend and mail it off, then a month goes by and you’ve heard nothing back. You send another, just to be safe, and another month rolls past without any word. So you assume the friend hates you, or they’ve died, or you had the address wrong, or your friend never really existed. The last thing a reasonable person assumes is that someone’s been intercepting and blocking their missives. Who’s paranoid enough to think that? Who’s crazed enough to just know that their thoughts have been tampered with?

Well, it wasn’t me, I’ll tell you that much. But if I’d been that crazy, I could’ve at least spared the look of disappointment on her face when I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“So you don’t remember the library.”

“No,” I said. A reflex. I’d already decided it didn’t, couldn’t have happened.

“You don’t remember how I brought food to your room.”

“I don’t—” I paused. I looked at her with a critically assessing gaze… and then a less critical one. And I thought long and hard about why in the hells a very pretty second-year would be saying she came to my bedroom… I decided to humor her. Just a little. “Why would you have done that?” I questioned. “I could’ve gotten my own meal.”

She shook her head, speaking with a calm that seemed unnatural. “No, you couldn’t have.”

“Well why not?” I demanded.

“Because you were in your night robes. And you don’t wear your night robes to the dining hall.”

I looked around the grand hall that we were all seated in. Not one person wearing the fuzzy sleeping robes. I looked back to my violet-eyed guest, “Then explain why I wouldn’t just wear my normal robes.”

She smiled, like this was some little logic game we were playing, and to be fair it felt like that to me, too. “Because they’d gotten torn in two.”

“How did that happen?” I snorted.

“Hells if I know,” she shrugged, “you just told me that you were going to fix it with magic, since somebody did it with magic.”

“But I don’t know anything about mending spells,” I replied. “Just the reversal paradigms can take weeks of practice to execute.”

“What’d you just say?” she said quickly.

“I said I don’t know sh—”

“No, you fool, about the reversal whatevers? Where’d you hear about those?”

I shrugged. “A book somewhere, probably. Or one of Irsine’s lectures.”

“‘To Make and To Unmake, the Body of the Arcane?’”

I stared at her… and then shook my head. “Never heard of it in my life.”

“That’s just what was on top of the stack you were carrying in the library. You had like seven of the things, so maybe you didn’t actually read that one, but I could swear…”

I was tuned out, totally, until she mentioned the stack. Then I was zoned out. Because I remembered a stack of books, eight of them, sitting on the desk in my dormitory this morning. I was the last one out, and no one else took even one with them, so either they weren’t important, or they were…

No, maybe they just forgot them. But the library has a return policy, so if it had been long enough, they’d’ve had to bring them back. But how long had they been there? I couldn’t…

It didn’t matter. They were just books. But there were eight, clearly there was an important task if someone rented eight books at once. They would’ve taken at least one with them, if it was that big a deal, unless they’d already learned what they needed to know the night before…

But then they would’ve taken them back. So why did no one take them back? The only reasonable explanation would be that…

“... they forgot,” I whispered, while the second-year still went on and on.

Someone had to have forgotten the books. But how could you forget such an important project? It would’ve had to have been finished already. And…

My robes were already mended. But to forget that, and the books, I’d have to have forgotten more. The library when I got them. The meal I shouldn’t have been able to eat. The robe, the embroidery, the ripping, the waking up, when the fuck did I wake up yesterday? What did I do yesterday?

I stood up abruptly, jamming my leg into the hard wood tabletop with a grunt. The dark-haired girl paused her rambling, her face concerned. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I muttered, looking around, “I’m just…”

… looking for someone. Someone whose face always seemed to appear when nothing made sense. Someone whose name rolled off my lips with a quiet hiss that belied my rising bile. “Carlisle.”

Dark skin. Dark hair. Glinting lenses and frames. Eyes wide and bright with recognition and terror, even from across the hall. He stood up, his bench groaning, the students around him glaring at the interruption and their spilled food, but he was already walking away and uttering a stammered string of apologies.

And I was walking after him. “Hey—hey! Where are you going?” the second-year called from behind me.

I took just enough time to look over my shoulder, still moving with speed and purpose. “I… sorry, yesterday was weird, just forget about me, okay?”

I didn’t hear anything she might’ve said in reply, because I’d already crossed half the room in my pursuit. Carlisle kept looking over his shoulder, panicky, bumping into edges of tables and students’ sides with “so sorry”s and “excuse me”s and “really in a rush”es. I just followed the empty path he left in his wake, slowly gaining on him, picking up speed—until he ducked into an old door on the hall’s far wall. I cursed under my breath and ran to the door, slipping inside before it could fully close.

The thin corridor was dark, no lights running down its sets of stairs, but I could hear Carlisle’s frantic footsteps and yelps echoing from below. Must have been an old servant’s stairway. I followed after him as quietly and quickly as I could, the rage only growing in my throat. Eventually I reached the bottom, a long hallway where a few torches were flickering: illuminating a cobble floor and walls and little doorways branching off. One of these, Carlisle was frantically trying to grapple open.

I was terrified, frankly. I had no idea what he could do, what he would do. But I could remember enough of my forgetting, enough of seeing this boy and it all going blank, to know that if I didn’t do something now I would live to regret it.

“Stop right there, asshole,” I barked into the cold, echoing hall. He froze on the spot, and I had to force my voice not to tremble. “Don’t move. Don’t turn around. Don’t even breathe.”

“Apophenia,” he began, “I—”

“No,” I growled, stalking closer, “you do not speak to me and you do not even think of speaking to me. O-or else. I know what you can do, what you’ve done to me.”

“If you really did,” he said softly, ignoring my threats, “you wouldn’t have come after me. You’d know I have the upper hand, and you’d know that this is a mistake for you.”

“The only mistake here was your choice to fuck with me,” I spat. “Did you think I wouldn’t figure this shit out? Did you think you’d get away with it?”

“I think you’re very intelligent, Apophenia.”

“Don’t fucking talk back to me.”

“I think it was only a matter of time before you’d realize.” I could see the corner of a smirk on his lip, his body still facing towards the doorway. “I’m impressed that it only took half a day. Usually you need a full one.”

“Would you shut the fuck up?” He shook his head, and began to turn toward me. “Don’t,” I cautioned, halfway to him now with a wand already in my hand.

“I’m not doing anything,” he said calmly, continuing to turn and raising his hands above his head. “See? No wand. No danger.”

From the light of the torches, I could see the calm demeanor he’d put on was a sham. His lip was trembling, his eyes were still wide, even his fingers were shaking. No, they weren’t shaking—they were moving together on his right hand.

Something primal took me. I shrieked the word of a spell and threw my wand-arm out at him blindly. The spell shot from my body, shaking through my arm and out through the focusing conduit of my wand like a bolt of lightning, jolting through my whole being and screeching through the air to meet its mark. The blinding tendril of white light snatched his wrist, made him yelp, twisted its way up his hand and spread all five fingers wide apart. Keeping him from snapping or doing whatever the fuck he was planning to do to me.

The arcane knot pulsed with each of my panting, labored breaths. He opened his mouth to speak and I cut him off, “Save it, you piece of shit. No more words.”

“That’s fine,” Carlisle muttered, “I only need the one.”

He uttered it, something arcane, something old, something deeply and uncomfortably familiar. Then I saw the flash of light from his left hand, the tip of his wand, illuminating the grin on his face before

I yelled, my hands finding the motions and positions I’d practiced a thousand times for Applied Spellcraft. Dmitri’s Voltaic Retort came exploding out from me, colliding with Carlisle’s spell and blasting it away with a crack of thunder, dispersing it into a million arcs of electricity that sent the boy hurtling through the air to slam against the wall with a groan as he slumped, legs sprawling out beneath him.

I stomped forward, walking through fading, flickering crackles of blue-white energy, hurling another binding spell at him before he could get his wits. His left hand’s fingers were stretched apart, then the same mystic band wrapped through the air to tie around his head, gagging his mouth shut while he marveled at me through dazed, dilated, half-lidded eyes. Forcemagic brought him up to eye-level, pushed him flat against the wall with his feet dangling below, made him look me in the eyes while I spoke low and rough, “You are going to tell me what you did. How you did it. Why you did it. And then you are going to undo every single thing. Because I beat you, Carlisle. I fucking won.” My foot stepped over his wand on the floor, I could crush it in an instant if I wanted to for even half a second. And with a word, I released the spell that bound his head, held his mouth shut. “So start talking.”

His head hung low on his neck, and as it turned up, a weakened, wheezing chuckle left his lips. “Why should I ever do that?” he asked with the beginnings of a grin. “You’re not going to kill me, Apophenia. I didn’t think you could even get this violent, but I know you won’t go any further.

“And I know that you can’t report me to anyone either,” he continued, letting his words come slow and lilting. “Then they’d know you’ve been walking around after dark, causing trouble, casting spells where you shouldn’t. And even if you did: only I can put your mind back in order.”

“Any spell can be reversed.” I pushed my wand against his stomach, forcing him harder against the wall, making his breath come in loud gasps. “I don’t need you,” I whispered.

“If you don’t want to be expelled,” he grunted through the strain, “then yes, you do need me.”

I didn’t want him to see me hesitate. I didn’t want him to see that I could be weak when I’d just beaten him. When I’d won. But I chewed my lip, and I thought about it, and my magic shoved him even harder into the wall so that he couldn’t interrupt me with more than a few anguished groans. I needed my head fixed. And I needed to stay here.

If I let him free he could tell anyone about me, bring me to suspicion, get me kicked out for worse reasons than sneaking around at night. Or worse than that, if I let him free, he could do all this to me again. And I didn’t want to think about what else he could do, given that chance.

Maybe he was lying. Maybe if I turned him in and begged for help from the faculty, someone like Professor Irsine, maybe I could be fixed. But then they’d still ask questions. They’d still find out. And I’d still be expelled. Either way I chose, I risked disaster, but at least this way… I had something of a chance.

I exhaled. With it, my spells dissolved, and Carlisle collapsed to the ground in a heap. I bent down, not to speak to him, but to stow his wand in my bag instead. “I’ll need that if I’m going to help you,” he grumbled, lying on his side and not yet bothering to try and push himself up.

“You’ll have it,” I said, and my voice only quavered a little. “Tonight. On the balcony.”

“I also need it for my classes?”

I rolled my eyes, leaving him in the grime and dust. “That’s your problem, not mine.”

Before I could reach the stairs though, he called out after me. “I’m a man of my word, Apophenia. You’ve bested me, and I’ll fix this.”

I stood there for two seconds, then I climbed the steps alone. My only words were the ones in my head, unsure if in making the only choice, I’d doomed myself entirely.