Page 112 of The City Of Fractured Memory

I nod, words refusing to form on my lips. He looks awful. His eyes continuously glaze over then refocus, over and over. It’s a miracle he can even stand at this point.

“Why is this happening to you?” I start to sob, despair clawing at my skin.

“I don’t know.” He’s breathless now, his shoulders heaving. “We need to–”

He staggers back, his eyes glazing over completely once more, panting heavily as he steadies himself against the grimy wall.

“Riven–”

His eyes sharpen. “Run, now!”

I don’t need to be told twice.

He grabs my hand and we sprint, our boots slipping on the bones and snapping them. Mercifully, unlike the tunnels, there are no diversions, just one long, seemingly endless passage, dimly lit with intermittent lanterns. I keep glancing at him, fear consuming me as the anguish in his features becomes more pronounced. Our eyes lock for a second, and the devastation on his face makes my heart stall.

“We need to hurry,” he pants. “Her fate is being sealed.”

How he’s navigating in the dark at such speed while his eyes are continuously becoming blind from visions is beyond me, but I don’t have time to question it. Finally up ahead, a cooler sort of light appears, marking the end of the catacombs.

Or so I thought.

We burst out of the passage into an enormous cavern, and even in my panic-fuelled state, it is nothing short of staggering. A place so old and vast it feels like stepping into the lungs of the world itself.

The tunnel spits us out onto a stone stairway that descends into a cathedral-sized hollow, and for a moment I forget how to breathe. Pillars of rock—some carved by hands long dead, others shaped only by time and the slow drip of the underworld—rise like titans on either side. Their surfaces are etched in layered ridges, like the rings of ancient trees petrified into stone.

A cold, blue-grey haze coils through the chamber, drifting in lazy swirls that blur the distant arches overhead. The ceiling seems impossibly high, lost in shadow, and every sound is swallowed and warped—the soft echo of our footsteps, Riven’s uneven breathing. A faint crackle sounds from surrounding torches, the flames shuddering with every draft and painting the cavern with shifting gold that makes the shadows seem alive. Far below, the staircase vanishes into darkness, but ahead of us, at the edge of sight, there’s the faint ghost of an archway, framed by drifting mist like an apparition patiently waiting.

“The Mirror Cavern is through there,” Riven says, panting heavily as he follows my gaze.

My heartbeat thunders in my ears. Everything feels too large, too silent. But I force myself forward, gripping the rough stone wall to steady my trembling legs. Bones skitter down the steps, dislodged by our boots as we hurriedly make our way up the crumbling steps.

It feels like the grave of a lost civilization…and we are trespassing on its bones.

The archway at the end swallows us whole, its stone cold against my shoulders as I slip past Riven and into the next cavern, only to stumble to a halt.

The chamber beyond feels wrong.

It is vast, but not like the huge hollow we just crossed. This space hums unnervingly, as though something enormous is breathing beneath the floor. The air hangs heavy with a fog that isn’t quite mist and isn’t quite smoke, drifting in slow, deliberate curls that shiver when they move, as if reacting to our presence.

At the far end of the cavern stands a mirror.

My throat goes dry.

Just like Riven described, it’s at least fifty feet tall, framed in a stone veined with shifting silver that moves like liquid beneath its surface. The mirror itself is darker, an obsidian void broken only by vague ripples of light, like a reflection trapped under deep water. Every now and then, something glimmers within it, something not quite a shape, not quite a face. A wrongness. A pull.

It makes me feel sick.

I tear my eyes away and the nausea instantly lifts. A crumbling dais sits directly before it, fractured by age and pressure, what remains of its engravings almost clawed away by time. Riven inhales sharply beside me, clutching his temples, his visions seemingly brushing against whatever magic radiates from the structure.

But what freezes my breath is not the mirror.

It’s the figures surrounding it.

The Children of the Briar.

A circle of cloaked silhouettes stand tall and motionless, their hoods pulled low to conceal their faces. They stand like silent sentinels around the dais, none of them moving or speaking. Laying on the dais in the middle of them all are the bodies of the three dead seers. Only now, their eyes are wide and unseeing, their throats slit.

Something prickles down my spine.