Through The Looking Glass Ruins Novels & Stories

she’d promised. And she hadn’t. But presence wasn’t the same as proximity. She turned onto her side, watching Elara sleep through the baby monitor. The soft rise and fall of her chest steadied her breathing. “I chose this,” Lola whispered. She had to remember that. Melvin pov Therapy was different now. Less about surviving grief, more about navigating loss in real time. “I feel like I’m watching my life through glass,” Melvin admitted during one session. “Like I can see them but I can’t touch.”

Stones groaned beneath the keep. And from the heart of the ruins, something waited to be found. ---

“I’m heading to bed. Don’t stay up too late watching trash TV, alright?” “No promises.” Crystal responds, shooing me away. “You know that’s my favorite type since you’re so boring.” Rolling my eyes, I don’t bother responding before I head to my room and collapse on my bed so that I can finally let the weight of reality slam into me. “Shit,” I hiss, realizing what I was running headfirst into. “There really are monsters living amongst us and pretending to be humans.”

Veyra had decided to sneak off to go find the mirror stone on her own. Unknown to her Lioren had seen her and followed through. The entrance to the ruins of Fenwyre loomed before them—massive, vine-draped pillars carved with glyphs older than any spoken tongue. Veyra felt the air shift as she stepped across the threshold. It was like walking into memory. The stone beneath her bare feet pulsed faintly with a magic not her own, yet not entirely foreign either.

The ruins of Echo’s heart spread around them like the skeletal remains of a dead cathedral. Walls of black glass jutted upward like the ribs of some long-buried beast, cracked and glittering in the broken light of storm clouds overhead. The air reeked of ozone and scorched metal, the silence beneath it broken only by the slow groan of fallen beams, the faint hiss of dying wires sparking in the dust.

And in that exact moment— A child's voice echoed from somewhere inside the ruins. Soft. Impossible. Terrifying. "Adrian..." Everyone froze. Every guard reached for their weapon. The voice came again. Closer this time. "Adrian..." Then a light appeared inside the burned mansion. One single light. Glowing from an upstairs window that should not even exist anymore. And slowly— Very slowly— A silhouette stepped into view behind the glass. Watching them. Waiting. The lightning flashed. And for one horrifying second—

And suddenly, it was like reality tore apart. I froze instantly. The entire city shimmered violently. Like glass breaking, the beautiful buildings distorted. The glowing lights vanished. And suddenly, everything changed. The city was gone. What stood beyond the glass now looked dead. Collapsed buildings, broken towers, smoke. Ruins stretching endlessly across the land. The glowing rivers were black. The silver streets were cracked apart. Even the sky looked darker now. My chest tightened immediately. “What the fuck…” Beside me, even Iris went silent. The kingdom we had been admiring moments ago…

[The Foundation of Blood] The return to the Palisades was not a homecoming; it was a descent into the maw of a beast that refused to die. The ruins of the mansion sat atop the jagged cliffs of the Atlantic like a blackened skull, its glass eyes shattered, its skeletal framework groaning under the weight of the salt spray. The storm from weeks ago had left the site a graveyard of memories, but as the black SUV rumbled up the winding driveway, the air grew thick with a preternatural heat.

MAYA The house was too quiet. It had been six months since the metal of the car crumpled like paper. Six months since the world I built out of lies fell apart in a spray of shattered glass and screaming tires. I was the one who survived. I was the one who woke up from the coma. But sometimes, when I look at the empty space in our bed or the way Liam looks at his phone, I think the wrong person died that night.

"Why? And more importantly, how do we get out?" "The distortion is likely a symptom of the ruin's decay," he explained, his eyes, lit by my magic, scanning our surroundings. "But I don't believe this is one of your 'activated' ruins. Those are sealed, usually marked by statues standing sentinel. This place feels open, broken... porous. The creatures weren't guardians; they simply wandered in." He paused, his gaze dropping to the floor ahead. "Watch your step." The ground was a treacherous mess of rubble and shattered stones. I tried to lift my leg over a large chunk of rock, but my whole body felt weighted with lead. I swayed, a wave of dizziness washing over me.