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Author's Notes:
Just a couple of these Sydney-centric chapters left and then Math will be back
With Sydney's luck it had fallen into the Thames. She prays it hadn't. The damn comb fell out of her hair on Tower Bridge, and she better not have lost it or she'll have lost her best chance at getting a grip on this whole mystery once and for all.
She can feel it take over in her desperation as she searches the bridge for the second time, and the third, pacing the bridge back and forth like a madwoman as she seeks out that flash of red that means she's found her comb.
It's as if her mounting panic has brought the same result as going into battle. The bear leans over her shoulder, its breath in her ear, whispering, let me in. Let me embrace you.
Sydney closes her eyes, tilts her chin up, breathes in the cold air whistling through the bridge's cables. And lets the bear in. Just as it slips its way into her ribs she reaches for her cloak of illusions and draws it down over herself like a hood.
< & >
It's as if someone has taken a knife and scraped a thick layer of paint from the world. When operating under the illusions, Sydney always saw the world clearer, sharper somehow, catching small details she never would've seen in her ordinary state, somehow able to focus on things that ought to have been a blur, catching these tiny flashes of almost-precognition but in a timeframe so short you could brush it off as a bad startle reflex.
This – this is that, but more. The red-white fog of the bear's wrath clears away and leaves in its wake was a world as hard and bright and sharp as the edge of a new-polished knife. The smog over London vanishes like dust swept away, leaving the Milky Way bright as witchlight overhead, glimmering against the pitch-black of the Thames.
And the colors, oh, the colors are different. Some are muted, almost black and white, and others stick out brighter and more vibrant than before. She sees the bridge in the brilliance of day and there it is, to her left, wedged into the space between the pillar she'd fallen against and the edge of a giant bolt: a flash of brilliant scarlet red. The comb.
Sydney bends down and picks it up. The smooth, carved-bone tines glint silver-white in Sydney's strange new vision as she reaches for the knife in her belt. With a heavy, almost protesting heart, she sets it to the red thread wrapping the spine of the comb and slices it away.
She nearly drops the comb off the bridge in shock. It's covered in runes, ugly twisted ones carved into the spine. Worse, embedded here and there in the bone are bits of dull metal wire.
Slowly, with shaking hands, Sydney tucks the comb into the pockets of her skirt. She puts the knife away. And she releases whatever strange power stills the whistle of the wind in her ears and puts that strange, sharp edge of her vision.
It's time to go home. She has work to do.
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mirror shards // matthew fairchild {1}
Fanfiction{snap, shatter, and howl, pt. i } When Sydney Herondale returns from a year of tour in Romania, she's a very, very different woman from the girl Matthew left behind at the Shadowhunter academy years ago: a new version of Sydney that he finds himself...
