spellbound | book #1 | completed

X X X I

[edited: 15/09/2017]

When Maksim awoke, his head was pounding and his body covered in rubble. He pushed it off as quickly as he could, groaning as his joints tingled with pain. People around him were running and screaming, some of them using their magic to help others so that the air was filled with a brilliant array of colours. It had stopped raining.

He stood up and felt an icy jolt of panic shoot through him. Remy. She had been stood beside him before the explosion, but now she could have been anywhere; Maksim had been thrown away from her before he had passed out.

He searched around himself desperately, ignoring the people passing by him with dirt on their faces and ripped clothes. "Remy!" he shouted, his voice hoarse but loud enough to overpower the other screams and sobs. "REMY!"

Tripping over wood and brick, he pushed through the crowd to get a better look. His stomach sank when she was nowhere to be seen, and he scrambled onto the cobblestones of Astracia, feeling a panic that flooded through his bones and tore away at his soul as he could not help but picture her lying alone somewhere, bruised and broken. It did not look as though anybody had been badly injured, though many were using magic for healing spells. And then there was that small part of him that reminded him of who she was: a mortal. If anyone was to be hurt in this attack, it would be her. The minor injuries around him meant nothing. 

"Maksim!" someone called from behind him, and he was so desperate to find Remy that he didn't realise it was a deep voice that could not belong to her. He whipped around and met the eyes of Tykon. His stomach sank. "What happened? We were called out from the Central—"

"Have you seen Remy?" he interrupted. "I cannot find her, Tykon ... I cannot ..."

There must have been something in his voice—desperation, perhaps— because Tykon's eyes widened in realisation, and he immediately began to examine his surroundings with an urgency that Maksim had never seen Tykon possess before. "Where were the two of you stood before it happened?"

"She was stood near the entrance. She told me that we had to leave." Guilt strained his voice and stung his eyes, or perhaps that might have been the awful smell of dark magic that remained. "She knew that this would happen, and I dismissed her worries. I did not listen."

"It is not your fault," Tykon responded, most likely out of obligation than because he was actually listening. He was pacing around the now destroyed building to where the entrance had been, debris crunching under his boots as he delved further into the wreckage. The air was filled with an abnormal amount of snowdust, as though the explosion had disturbed even that, and it clung to Tykon's hair and clothes like paint.

Maksim's gaze fell on something, then: a wall, the only wall that remained standing now. He frowned and inched closer to it, his heart racing as a halo of blonde hair pooled over charred remains just behind it.

"Remy!" he called again, but this time hope strengthened his voice. She didn't look back at him. Her eyes were closed and her body unmoving. Her pale skin was patchy with black dust, but he knew that it was her. He had known the moment he saw her. He ran to her and knelt beside her. "She is not conscious," he told Tykon, examining her as gently as he could. "She needs a healing spell."

"Is she breathing?" Tykon sounded as though he didn't want to know the answer, and Maskim did not blame him. He was afraid to find out himself. 

Before Maksim could check, Remy's eyes fluttered and he exhaled in relief. A moment later, they opened completely, and she frowned up at him as though he was the one who needed examining rather than her. "Hello," she greeted hoarsely, as though she had not been unconscious a moment ago.