The first report came from a family of mice near the northern boundary of Jukrit's sanctuary. Their eldest daughter had forgotten her wedding day. Not misplaced or confused—the memory was simply gone, leaving a strange gap where joy once lived.
"She knows she has a mate," the mother mouse explained, wringing her paws. "She sees the nest they built together. But the happiness of that day, the celebration..." Her voice trailed off.
Jukrit might have attributed it to illness or age, but the daughter was young and healthy. Then came more reports. A flying squirrel who couldn't recall his first glide between the great oaks. An old beaver who'd lost the memory of teaching her kits to build. Always happy memories. Always completely gone.
By the time Jukrit set out to investigate, half the forest was whispering about the Memory Thief.
He started where the first losses had been reported, in a grove of ancient pines where shadows fell thick even at midday. The place felt heavy, weighted with more than just darkness. Following his instincts, Jukrit discovered traces—tiny claw marks in the soft bark, a few dark brown fur strands caught on thorns.
A young bat, from the size of the marks.
The trail led deeper into the grove, to a hollow tree that reeked of sorrow. Inside, Jukrit found not a thief's hoard of stolen goods, but something far more unsettling: hundreds of small glass vials, each glowing softly with captured light. The bat hung from the ceiling among them, her dark fur matted and unkempt.
"Please don't take them," she said without turning. Her voice was hollow, aged beyond her years. "I need them."
Jukrit entered slowly, noting how the vials pulsed with warm light—condensed joy made tangible. "These belong to others."
"They don't miss them. Not really." The bat finally faced him, and Jukrit saw the deep scars that marked her wing membranes, tears that had healed poorly. "They know something's gone but not what. It's... cleaner that way."
"What happened to you?"
The bat laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "Would you like the memory? I could give it to you, shaman. Every detail. The pine marten that found our roost. The sound my mother made when—" She stopped, shuddering. "My siblings trying to fly before they could even properly spread their wings. The silence after."
Jukrit's heart ached. "I'm sorry."
"Sorry." She picked up a vial, rolling it between her wing-claws. "Everyone's sorry. But sorry doesn't make the memories stop. Sorry doesn't help when every happy thought leads back to them. When every good memory is just a reminder of what's gone."
"So you take others' joys?"
"I don't take them to have them," the bat said. "I take them to study them. To understand how happiness works when it isn't tangled up with loss. This one—" She held up a particularly bright vial. "—a squirrel's memory of finding the perfect acorn. Simple. Pure. No shadow waiting behind it."
"And what have you learned?"
"That I'm broken," she said simply. "Other creatures, their happiness exists separate from their pain. Mine doesn't. Everything joyful I remember leads to that morning. First flight? They were teaching me. Favorite songs? We'd sing them together during night hunts. Every happy memory is a door that opens onto the worst day of my life."
Jukrit sat among the vials, their stolen light playing across his fur. "What's your name?"
"Vespra. Not that it matters."
"Everything matters, Vespra. Even pain. Especially pain."
"Easy for you to say," Vespra snapped. "You shamans with your wisdom and your balance. Have you ever wanted to claw your own mind out just to make it stop remembering?"
"No," Jukrit admitted. "But I've known others who have. And I've learned something from them—pain that's locked away doesn't heal. It festers."
"So what am I supposed to do? Return all these memories and just... endure?"
Jukrit picked up one of the vials—it felt warm, almost alive. "What if we tried something different? What if instead of stealing joy to study it, you helped create new ones?"
"New memories won't erase the old ones."
"They're not supposed to. They're supposed to exist alongside them. To prove that joy is still possible, even after loss."
Vespra was quiet for a long moment. "They were so small. My siblings. They didn't even have their adult fur yet."
"Tell me about them."
And she did. For the first time since that terrible morning, Vespra spoke about her family not as victims but as they'd lived—her mother's elaborate echolocation games, her father's patient flying lessons, the way her smallest brother would hang upside down from her tail just to make everyone laugh. Tears fell onto the glass vials, but she kept talking.
When she finally fell silent, Jukrit asked, "Did remembering them hurt?"
"Yes," Vespra whispered. "But... differently. Like cleaning a wound instead of letting it fester."
Over the following days, they worked together to return the stolen memories. It wasn't simple—Jukrit had to develop a ritual to restore what had been taken, and some creatures were angry, rightfully so. But Vespra faced each one, explaining not excusing, offering not just apologies but understanding.
The mouse daughter regained her wedding day but also gained something else—the knowledge that joy could be so precious that others would steal it. She surprised everyone by insisting Vespra attend her anniversary celebration.
"I want to share this happiness," she said. "Properly this time."
Some creatures refused forgiveness. A bitter old badger proclaimed that anyone who could steal happiness was fundamentally broken. Vespra didn't argue, just nodded and moved on to the next return.
But slowly, something shifted. The flying squirrel whose first glide she'd stolen began teaching her proper membrane control—"You've been compensating for those scars all wrong." The beaver family invited her to help with their dam, creating new memories of building together.
The empty vials, once containers of stolen joy, became something else. Creatures began filling them with small offerings—a perfect berry, a shiny stone, a soft piece of moss. Not payment or penance, but gifts freely given to someone learning how to hold happiness alongside sorrow.
Seasons passed. Vespra never fully healed—some wounds don't mend that way. But she learned to live with her scars, to build new memories that didn't erase the old ones but existed beside them. She became known not as the Memory Thief but as the Memory Keeper, helping others who struggled with trauma to sort through their pain without losing their joy.
"Do you still think about them every day?" Jukrit asked during one of his visits.
"Every day," Vespra confirmed. "But now I also think about the mouse's new litter I helped name. The dam I helped build. The young fruit bat I taught to fly properly after an owl injured his wing." She smiled, a small but real thing. "The memories hurt. But they don't hurt alone anymore."
In his sanctuary, Jukrit would often share Vespra's story with those who came seeking help with grief. How she'd tried to understand joy by stealing it, only to learn that happiness couldn't be extracted and studied like a herb's essence. It had to be lived, had to be woven into the fabric of loss and survival, shadow and light together.
"Some pain," he would say, "is too great to bear alone. But it's also too important to forget. The answer isn't to steal joy from others or ourselves, but to create new moments worth remembering, even when remembering hurts."
And in the grove of ancient pines, where shadows still fell thick, a bat tended a collection of glass vials filled not with stolen memories but with freely given moments of light—proof that even the deepest sorrow could learn to make room for joy.
