Page 117 of The City Of Fractured Memory

“Please don’t go,” I whisper, my eyes blurring through my tears. “Don’t go where I can’t follow you.”

A hand closes over mine, steadying, grounding. Riven is kneeling beside me, his face pale. My voice cuts through the chaos, bordering on hysteria. “Riven, use your magic. Save her, please.”

“I can’t,” he whispers, his face ashen.

“No, no you healed me before, my shoulder–”

“I just put it back in the socket, that’s it.”

No, that’s not right, it can’t be. “But I felt so good after, it felt like magic–”

“You just assumed it was magic. You’ve asked me more than once why I won’t heal myself. It’s because I can’t.” His words are a frenzied rush, his hands joining mine as we try to stop the bleeding.

“But Stryx, you healed her before, when she was attacked in the Archives, you can do it again.”

“She wasn’t physically injured, she was attacked with magic, I just countered it. It’s not the same.”

Stryx makes a gargling noise as her throat continues to bleed, Riven’s words sinking into me like a leaden weight. Everything starts to unfold around us with a kind of terrible, surreal slowness, every detail sharp in my senses, every heartbeat a countdown. Xavier remains standing before the towering mirror, his silhouette swallowed by the ghostly vapour now siphoning from its surface into him. The substance streams like pale, liquid light, coiling around his arms, sinking into his skin, making his veins beneath it glow an eerie, unnatural white.

With every pulse of that drifting essence, the mirror changes. Its surface—once shifting like dark water—stiffens and solidifies, becoming something akin to blackened glass. Fine cracks start to lace across it, spiderwebbing outward in slow, delicate lines that glitter with trapped light. The sound is faint at first, soft pops and brittle ticks, like ice thawing under strain.

Riven and I work frantically over Stryx’s limp body, hands stained with blood, trying to stabilise her, trying to keep her tethered to life. But her pulse is terrifyingly weak, and the cavern itself is shaking now, responding to the force Xavier is drawing into himself.

“I can’t save her, but maybe you can,” Riven says, his voice strained.

I shake my head. “How? I don’t understand.”

“You just have to try,” he grits out, “it’s all about intent. Try to picture what you want your magic to do in your mind.”

I look at him incredulously. “If it’s that simple, then why can’t you do it?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been able to. But you—you have to try–”

He gasps, lunging forward onto his hands a second before I feel it too. A sudden wave runs through my chest, like something’s being ripped violently from my body. Then, like an elastic band snapping, it stops, and I’m left feeling this horrendous emptiness in my mind, like a part of my soul has been removed. One glance at Riven’s pallid face tells me he experienced the same thing.

The world shudders as Xavier screams, and a single, deafening fissure rips through the mirror’s centre. For one suspended heartbeat, everything stops. Then, without warning, the mirror shatters. A violent, concussive eruption explodes through the cavern as it bursts into a million pieces, a colossal boom slamming into the cavern walls, detonating the glass outward in a storm of razor-bright fragments. Deadly debris sharp as knives cascade through the space at speed, and the air becomes dust and thunder.

Glass pieces scythe through the thick smoke, slicing into stone pillars, embedding into the earth. The explosion wipes out all sound save for a ringing, metallic shriek. The world becomes white haze, choking dust, and the sharp, burning rain of the broken mirror.

Riven’s reflexes snap into place with a burst of magic that flares around us like a curved, shimmering barrier. Vesper and Amari also manage to throw up a shield around themselves and Xavier just in time, but the others are not so lucky. The impact of the blast slams into Riven’s shield hard enough to rattle my bones, the force shuddering through it as glass and stone shriek across its surface.

The explosion hits the unshielded cultists full-force.

The shrapnel viciously cuts its way through the cloaked crowd in a storm of glittering death. Shards punch through bodies, slicing cleanly, brutally; the explosive wave hurling them backward like rag dolls. Cloaks tear, limbs buckle, silhouettes collapse in sprays of dark, misting blood that vanish quickly into the settling dust.

All of them fall instantly.

When the dust clears, the cult members lie scattered around the dais in broken shapes. Not one of them survived the mirror’s death. Xavier still stands unmoving, shielded by his sister, drinking in the last of the power as the mirror collapses in front of him.

Another gurgling sound snaps my attention back to Stryx, her face ghostly pale, her blood loss too significant. Bile claws up my throat, and my heart feels like it’s going to explode like the mirror. My world narrows to her trembling pulse beneath my fingers, getting weaker every second. I press harder and close my eyes, trying to summon my magic like Riven said, whispering nonsense half-spells, half-prayers under my breath as I focus on Stryx’s skin stitching back together.

Blue light flashes behind my eyelids and Riven’s sharp intake of breath has me snapping my eyes open again.

Holy Gods, it’s working.

Stryx’s eyes focus slightly, using the small remaining energy she has left to lift her shaking hand to cup my face. Blood streaks in its wake, but I don’t care. I grip her hand with mine, sobbing uncontrollably as I continue to stitch her skin together with the other.

“Come on, come on, please–”