Page 58 of The City Of Fractured Memory

“What?” I demand, my heart starting to race.

“There’s something…” She shakes her head with a frown. “Put it under the microscope.”

I quickly unstopper the phial and pour a small amount of the blood onto a tiny tray under my microscope, my heart in my throat as I lean forward to examine it. But within seconds, my hopes of finding anything are dashed, my shoulders sagging as I heavily fall back into my chair.

“It’s just blood, Stryx. Like I said, there’s nothing unusual about it.”

She frowns again, setting down her tea and walking round to my side so she can look for herself. She hums as she looks through the scope, then jerks back, almost knocking it to the floor. I instinctively fling my arms out to steady her, my elbow pinching painfully as I momentarily take her weight before she rights herself.

“It’s the same magic, Octavia. There’s a resonance to her blood, the same I felt when we were chased in the Archives. It’s…I don’t understand.”

“Riven warned me there was much I needed to learn about magic when he healed you,” I whisper, thinking back to that awful moment. “He used magic in a way I’m not familiar with. Not mortal magic, of that I’m certain, but it was similar to yours in a way. Raw. Powerful. It didn’t have any negative effect on him. Not that I could see, anyway.”

Stryx hesitates, swallowing hard as she lowers herself back into her chair. “It could be The Veyne.”

It’s not a term I’ve heard before, but the sight of her face turning pale when she whispers the name turns my blood cold all the same. I grab her arm gently, snapping her out of her panicked stupor and encouraging her gaze to mine. “Tell me.”

She swallows again, but nods slowly. “I don’t know if that’s what Riven used, but whoever chased us in the Archives used awful, dark magic. The only thing I can think of is the Veyne, though the Echofae often refer to it as The Forbidden Current. It’s an ancient magic, banned for good reason. I don’t know much, but I was taught that it was ritualistic, often requiring sacrifices or certain spells and ingredients…”

She trails off, biting her lip anxiously.

“Why are you so afraid of it?” I ask, though I’m nervous for her to answer.

She looks at me with wide, glassy eyes. “It pulls power directly from the Voyd, Octavia.”

“The Voyd?” I repeat, trying my best to disguise my skepticism. “The apparent hell beneath our feet where our souls cling in death when found unworthy of the Veil?”

It’s a myth, a tale told to warn people against misdeeds, disguised as religion. I may curse the Voyd or swear to the Veil as much as any mortal, but not once have I ever thought of it as anything other than mere superstition. I worked a case last year where a man convinced himself he had managed to enter the Voyd and return—he ended up locked up in Aethermere prison, sentenced for murder under grounds of insanity when he killed a man he claimed was a God who had followed him back.

Stryx frowns at me in confusion. “Octavia, it’s not some religious fanaticism. The Voyd is a realm, a very real one beneath the lake. Governed by the Gods.”

I pull back from her, shaking my head. “This is insane.”

She raises her eyebrows at me in silent challenge, but a religious debate is not something I want to get into, especially as it still gives us no answers to our case. My gaze settles again on the blood of my friend, sitting innocently under the microscope like it hasn’t thrown my world upside down.

“Even if that were true,” I think aloud. “And people could somehow draw this unlimited power from The Voyd, how would it tie in with these murders?”

“I don’t know. But if the murderer is practicing The Veyne, they will be very powerful. We need to tread carefully.”

I slump in my chair, thoughtful, but sit bolt upright again when something occurs to me. “You can detect magical signatures, right? So can you tell what the purpose was? The intent?”

She furrows her brow as she thinks, her silence eating away at my hope, but her eyes widen as realisation dawns on her, and my pulse quickens. She leaps from her seat and skips over to the bookshelf, her bare feet almost silent against the tired carpet. She runs a long finger along the spines of my books and plucks out one of the largest tomes, needing two hands to hold it as she carries it over to me and thuds it down on the table. I recognise the cover: The Key To Higher Magic. Just owning this would gift me a stint in the cells at the Division.

I lean back from it warily, the burden of this last week feeling heavy on my shoulders. “I can’t risk using magic, Stryx, not for a while. I’ve only just started feeling myself again.”

She shakes her head earnestly. “You don’t need to, but it has a passage about recognising other magics. It could help us identify any spell that may have been used on her blood.”

It seems like Stryx has taken to reading my books whilst stuck in here if she knows that. Given its nature, it’s not a book I’ve taken to reading often, let alone front to back.

The script inside is cramped and precise, ink faded to the colour of old tea. Marginal notes—many in a different, sharper hand—thread between the paragraphs like roots. Stryx bends over the page, her ears twitching, and I read over her shoulder.

The book describes patterns to watch for rather than incantations. The felt-signs of someone mapping intent into matter—a cold that does not come from temperature, but from absence, or a crystalline filigree that forms along a liquid’s surface under certain spells.

Stryx’s eyes darken as she reads the next page. “There’s a way to draw the intent out,” she breathes. “Not by repeating words, but by listening with the kind of stillness the book describes. It can show you the intent it was bound to.”

Right…okay then.

It’s not often I come across something I don’t understand, but none of this makes any sense to me at all. Though given that Stryx has a different type of magic to me, and a better understanding of magic in general, I take her word as gospel and hand her the phial, letting her take over from me.