Page 10 of The City Of Fractured Memory

The wardens outside whisper loudly of ghosts and curses, of things that pass through wood and stone. I roll my eyes. Their fear lingers in the air thicker than the scent of blood, but fear clouds their vision, and I see only what the room is willing to give me.

It is a small chamber, almost ascetic in its arrangement. A narrow bed pressed against the far wall, its blanket folded with military precision; a writing desk by the shuttered window, neat, but for a single overturned inkwell; shelves sparsely lined with ledgers and tomes, spines cracked from use. A life of order and discipline, and yet order has ended in this chaos.

I let my gaze sweep across the room, hoping to spot any sort of clue that could point me in any direction. Blood radiates outward in concentric stains, seeping into the rug beneath. And yet no obvious wound. No puncture. No gash. Not a single tear in the skin that I can see. A vessel poured out without being broken.

The ink spilled on the desk draws my eye, its dark, midnight blue pool dried into a spidering stain across various papers. A colour of ink I’m not familiar with, but it’s not exactly anything to go on. Did the victim reach for the quill? Try to write something before their end? I stand and sift through the parchment. Numbers, accounts, nothing out of the ordinary. No frantic scrawl of a dying woman. The inkwell may not be relevant to her collapse then.

I step around the corpse, slow and deliberate.

This room insists upon impossibility. Barricaded from within, a victim drowned in her own blood without blade or poison. An execution without an executioner. But impossibility is only the artifice of clever hands. There are always tiny fractures where reality gives itself away, and I need to find the first one. The wardens outside continue to mutter about murderous phantoms, but I know better. Phantoms are sloppy. Creatures––mortals and Echofae alike––are infinitely crueler, and infinitely more ingenious.

And the mind that designed this…

It wants to be found.

Xavier slowly approaches me, his brow furrowed in concern. “You see anything amiss?” he mutters, looking about the room.

“Other than the dead woman, you mean?” I reply, but the warning in his stern look discourages me from making any more quips. Instead, I squat down next to the victim again, the pain in my knees now notably lessened with my ring recharged. I scan the length of her body and my gaze snags on a darkened patch of skin peeking out from her wrist. Carefully, I lift up her hand and rotate it, discovering a tattoo inked into the skin there.

“Xavier,” I hiss. “Look at this.”

He kneels down next to me, trying to avoid the pool of blood. “A tattoo?”

I try to hide my eye roll and I tap my fingers together three times. For such a good detective, he really isn’t the most observant sometimes. “It’s the same tattoo as the first victim, and they are both seers. It’s too specific to simply be chance. They have to be connected.”

“What do you think it means?” He takes a closer look at the illustration of a magpie surrounded by thorns, numbers written beneath that hold no obvious pattern at first glance. I frown, wracking my brain for any recognition, but I find none. Unless it’s a memory I’ve lost, this tattoo holds no meaning to me. I grab a piece of parchment and quill from the desk and return to a crouch beside the victim, making a quick sketch of the tattoo before folding it and tucking it into my cloak.

I lean back on my heels with a sigh of frustration while Xavier edges round me to inspect the woman’s head.

“There’s also the same mark on her temple that the other victim had,” he observes, tilting her head slightly with gloved hands so I can get a better look. I lean in and the light catches against the silvery brand imprinted into her skin. It’s barely noticeable, but it’s definitely there.

The same tattoo and the same memory siphoning mark on the temple?

It can’t be a coincidence.

“Out,” I demand, a little too forcefully it seems as Xavier flinches. I don’t have time to offer an apology as he gets up to leave, muttering to himself as he always does, but otherwise doing as he’s told. I’ll make sure to apologise for my tone later.

My hand closes around one of the phials I always keep handy in my cloak. I fish my hand into the other pocket and curse when I find it empty. Of course. Usually, the circlet steadies me, channels the pull of the spell and anchors me so I don’t lose too much of myself. But Xavier caught me by surprise, and I ran here with none of my usual tools, fuelled by his desperation. No circlet means no anchor. Just me and my raw magic.

I swallow hard.

As if my anxiety acts as a trigger, my Shadow looms even larger in my periphery as soon as I’m alone. I tap my fingers three times again, trying to ignore his intense scrutiny as I steady my nerves and reach for my talisman. But as I pull it from my cloak and turn it in my fingers, I find no relief from my racing mind. I frown down at it and find it cold and empty, the magic drained from overuse. I inwardly admonish myself for allowing that to happen. First the ring and now this? I’m never usually this sloppy, I don’t know what’s come over me these last few days.

I guess I have no choice, but to do this without any buffer.

Gods help me, this is going to suck.

I pull in a deep breath and whisper the spell the circlet usually provides under my breath, syllables hissing against my teeth and the familiar pressure building behind my eyes. The magic answers greedily. A thread unravels inside my skull, tugging loose my thoughts and my memories as the spell reaches outward, sinking its hooks into any remnants clinging to the victim and this case.

There––flickers, shards. Suddenly a voice, an image, something precious snatched from me I can’t quite identify. I try to hold onto it, to coax only the memories of the crime scene into the phial, but the magic doesn’t care about my limits. It drinks, and drinks. The memories rush through me too fast, the pain sharp, burning like hot glass scouring across my mind. Faces I know, laughter I don’t want to lose. My mother’s hand on my shoulder. Stryx’s grin when I gave her that mushroom. The first time I held a note from Corvus, the ink staining my fingertips…no. I need that, I can’t lose that memory, it’s too important. But they’re slipping, siphoned from me, strands of my soul tugged loose as I’m powerless to stop it without the circlet.

No, no…it’s too much. I can’t–

I grit my teeth, trying to pull back, to clamp down, but without the circlet, there’s no anchor. Only the flood of magic pushing against the walls of my mind. The phial in my hand grows warm as it fills, glowing faintly with what it’s stolen. My vision blurs and I fall forwards onto my hands, dropping the phial less than a second after I manage to seal it.

The room tilts as the small bottle rolls across the floor, and I’m vaguely aware of Xavier shouting and gripping my shoulders, my Shadow watching me until the dark closes in and the room collapses into nothing.

My last thought before the dark takes me is the familiar terror that one day I won’t wake up, and even if I do, there’ll be nothing left of me to recognise.