Chapter Five: Shattered Reflections
Selina's nan stayed for three days.
Three days of quiet care, of herbal teas that tasted like earth and healing, of gentle touches and knowing silences. Her nan didn't ask questions. Didn't demand explanations. She simply existed in Selina's space like a calm anchor in a storm, letting her granddaughter grieve without judgment.
On the third evening, as they sat together in the fading light, Selina finally spoke.
"I can't stop thinking about him," she whispered. "Every time I close my eyes, I see his face.
Every color reminds me of his magic. Even now, knowing what his family did, knowing he didn't come for me... I can't let him go."
Her nan was quiet for a long moment, her weathered hands wrapped around a cup of tea. "Do you want to?" she asked finally.
"I don't know," Selina admitted. "Part of me wants to hate him. Wants to believe he knew, that he was complicit. It would be easier that way."
"But you don't believe that."
"No." Selina's voice cracked. "I think they did something to him. Trapped him somehow, or threatened him, or... I don't know. But the Lyon I knew, the one who painted me and loved me and was so excited about our baby... he wouldn't have abandoned me. Not like this."
"Then you carry two griefs," her nan said softly. "The loss of your child, and the loss of knowing what truly happened to the man you love."
Selina nodded, tears sliding down her cheeks. "I can't live like this, Nan. I can't function when every moment is consumed by what I've lost. I have to work, have to maintain my cover, have to keep going. But I don't know how."
Her nan set down her tea and reached for Selina's hands. "There is a way," she said carefully.
"An old magic, rarely used. It won't erase the memories—that would damage you in ways that can't be healed. But it can... contain them. Lock them away where they won't overwhelm you, but preserve them so they're not lost."
"How?"
"A mirror ritual," her nan explained. "We would trap your memories of Lyon in an enchanted mirror using your blood as the binding agent. The memories would be pulled from your active mind and stored in the glass. You would still know, logically, what happened. But the emotional weight, the constant remembering... that would be sealed away."
Selina pulled her hands back. "That sounds like running away."
"It sounds like survival," her nan corrected gently. "Child, you've been through a trauma that would break most people. Your body has healed from the miscarriage, but your heart hasn't.
May never fully heal. This ritual would give you space to breathe, to live, without forgetting what mattered.""What happens to the mirror after?"
"You shatter it," her nan said. "Take the pieces and create something beautiful from them. The ritual requires transformation—the memories must be broken apart and reformed. Many choose to make wind chimes or mobiles, something that catches light and moves with air. The fragments retain faint impressions, colors and feelings that surface in certain lights."
Selina closed her eyes, imagining it. A life where she could function without this constant ache.
Where she could take roles and attend parties and maintain her cover without every moment being colored by loss.
But also a life where her memories of Lyon—his laugh, his touch, the way he looked at her while painting—would be locked away, inaccessible except as distant echoes.
"If I do this," she said slowly, "can I ever get them back? The full memories?"
"Yes," her nan said. "But you would need to perform a counter-ritual, and it would be... difficult.
The memories would return all at once, with all their weight. Most who use this magic choose to leave the memories sealed."
"Most," Selina repeated. "But not all."
"Not all," her nan agreed.
Selina sat with that for a long time. Outside, Sharn's towers lit up against the darkening sky, a million lives going on while hers felt suspended in grief.
Finally, she nodded. "Teach me the ritual."
They prepared over the next two days.
Her nan procured a mirror—not a simple glass, but an antique piece with a silver frame covered in intricate knotwork. "The older the mirror, the better," she explained. "Old glass has seen more, held more reflections. It's stronger."
Selina gathered the other components under her nan's guidance. Candles in specific colors—white for clarity, black for binding, red for blood magic. Herbs that smelled of memory and loss: rosemary, forget-me-not, dried lavender. Salt for purification. And a small silver knife, ceremonial and ancient.
The ritual had to be performed at midnight, in a space cleared of all other magic. Selina chose her studio—the room where Lyon had first painted her felt appropriate, somehow. A place where their love had begun could be the place where she finally let it go.
Her nan drew the circle on the floor in salt, creating intricate patterns that hurt to look at directly. The mirror was placed at the center, propped on an easel where a canvas might normally sit. Candles ringed the space, their flames steady in the still air.
"Once we begin," her nan warned, "you cannot stop until the ritual is complete. If you break the circle or disrupt the magic partway through, the consequences could be severe. Fractured mind, lost memories beyond just those of Lyon. Do you understand?"
"I understand," Selina said, though her hands were shaking."Then let's begin."
Selina stepped into the circle, the mirror before her reflecting her pale, grief-worn face. Her nan began to chant in a language older than Khorvaire, words that resonated with power and ancient sorrow.
"Take the knife," her nan instructed. "Cut your palm. Let the blood fall onto the mirror's surface."
Selina did as she was told, gasping at the sharp pain as the knife bit into her flesh. Blood welled up, red and bright, and she held her hand over the mirror. Drops fell onto the glass, spreading in patterns that looked almost intentional.
"Now," her nan said, "look into the mirror. Think of Lyon. Remember everything. Let the memories rise up."
Selina stared into the glass, and the memories came flooding back.
Lyon in the alley, his dichromatic eyes wide with alarm and wonder. Lyon at her doorstep, holding her ragamuffin familiar. Their first kiss, desperate and real. The way he'd painted her, each brushstroke a caress. Making love on the floor of her studio, surrounded by color and magic.
Sky-bridge picnics. Murals in the Cogs. Rain against windows while he painted her transformed.
The joy in his eyes when she'd told him about the baby. The plans they'd made, the future they'd dreamed of.
All of it rose up, sharp and clear and agonizing.
The blood on the mirror began to glow. Selina could feel the magic pulling at her, drawing the memories out like water from a well. It hurt. Gods, it hurt worse than the miscarriage, worse than any physical pain she'd ever known.
"Don't fight it," her nan said. "Let them go. Let the mirror take them."
Selina sobbed as the memories lifted away, one by one. She could feel them leaving, could feel the weight easing even as her heart broke at the loss. Lyon's laugh. The taste of his kiss. The color gold and how it had felt warm as sunlight on her skin.
All of it flowing into the mirror, trapped in glass and blood and ancient magic.
When it was done, Selina swayed on her feet, exhausted and hollowed out. The mirror's surface shimmered with rainbow colors, like oil on water, and she could see faint images moving in its depths. Ghosts of what she'd just surrendered.
"The final step," her nan said softly. "You must shatter it."
Selina picked up a small hammer her nan had prepared. She raised it, hesitated.
"It's not destroying the memories," her nan reminded her gently. "Just transforming them.
They'll still exist, just in a different form."
Selina brought the hammer down.
The mirror exploded into countless fragments, each piece catching the candlelight and throwing rainbow refractions across the walls. Some pieces were as large as her palm, others no bigger than glitter. All of them shimmered with that same oily, chromatic sheen."Gather them carefully," her nan instructed. "Every piece matters."
They worked together in silence, collecting fragments into a velvet bag. When they were done, Selina felt strange—lighter, somehow, but also incomplete. She remembered, intellectually, that she had been in love with Lyon D'Lyrandar. Remembered that they'd had a relationship, that she'd been pregnant, that his family had killed her child.
But the visceral pain of it was muted now. Distant. As if it had happened to someone else, and she was just hearing the story secondhand.
"How do you feel?" her nan asked.
"Empty," Selina admitted. "But I can breathe. Is that wrong?"
"No, child. That's the point."
They built the mobile together over the next week.
Her nan was skilled in such crafts, and she guided Selina through the process. A frame of copper wire, bent into spirals and curves. The mirror fragments suspended from thin threads, arranged so they would catch light and move with even the slightest air current.
When it was finished, it was beautiful. Haunting. The fragments spun slowly, throwing rainbow patterns across any surface they touched—walls, floor, ceiling. Sometimes, if the light hit just right, Selina could almost see shapes in those rainbow refractions. A hand. A pair of mismatched eyes. Two figures intertwined.
Memories, preserved in broken glass.
Selina hung the mobile in her bedroom window, where the morning sun would catch it. Her nan had returned to the countryside by then, satisfied that her granddaughter would survive this grief, even if she would never fully heal from it.
Alone again, Selina tried to rebuild her life.
She took a new role in a play—something light and comedic, the opposite of the tragedy she was living. She attended social functions and smiled at the right moments and gathered secrets for her mother. She wore her glamours and played her parts and pretended that everything was fine.
Sometimes she saw Lyon across ballrooms. He looked thinner than she remembered, shadows under his eyes that makeup couldn't quite hide. He never approached her. Never even looked at her directly.
Selina wondered what his family had told him. If he believed she'd betrayed him somehow, or if he knew the truth and was simply powerless to act.
She wondered, but distantly. The wondering didn't consume her anymore.
One evening, a month after the ritual, Selina sat in her apartment with a new script in her lap. A period piece about star-crossed lovers torn apart by family obligation. The irony wasn't lost on her.
The mobile spun slowly in the window, catching the last rays of sunset. Rainbow light dancedacross the walls—purple-passion, red-desire, gold-gold-gold. Colors that meant something once, though Selina couldn't quite remember what.
She watched the patterns shift and swirl, feeling the faintest echo of something. Not quite memory. Not quite loss. Just a sense that once, those colors had mattered in a way that went beyond aesthetics.
Her ragamuffin familiar chirped from its perch on the desk, drawing her attention back to the script. Right. Work. She had lines to learn, a character to inhabit, a performance to give.
Selina picked up the script and began to read, her voice steady and professional.
The mobile continued to spin behind her, throwing its prismatic shadows. And if sometimes those shadows formed the shape of a man with mismatched eyes, reaching for a woman he'd lost, Selina didn't notice.
She was too focused on the next scene, the next line, the next role to play.
The memories were safe in their shattered prison, and Selina was free to live whatever half-life she could cobble together from the pieces that remained.
In the city of Sharn, where a million souls lived stacked upon each other and secrets were currency, it was the best anyone could hope for.
And if her dreams sometimes filled with colors she couldn't name and a touch she couldn't quite remember, well.
Dreams faded with the morning light.
The mobile remained.