The air in the abandoned Thorne Mausoleum was thick with a rot that didn't belong to the dead. It was the smell of a void—a cold, ozone-heavy vacuum that sucked the heat from the flickering black candles Maryan had arranged in a jagged circle.
Maryan sat in the center, her emerald silks stained with soot and old blood. Before her knelt Lord Varick, an elderly count who had once been Eliza's most vocal supporter in the High Council. In the previous life, he was the one who had held Eliza's hand at her debutante ball and told her she reminded him of the morning sun.
Now, his eyes were rolled back, showing only the whites, as a violet, ethereal smoke snaked from his nostrils and into Maryan's waiting, parted lips.
Maryan gasped as the memory flooded into her.
It wasn't hers, but she felt it. She felt the warmth of a summer garden ten years ago.
She felt a young Eliza, heart racing, hiding behind a rosebush as a stable boy. It was a small, golden fragment of joy. A piece of the "Perfect Heiress" that made her human.
"Delicious," Maryan hissed, her voice distorted by a double-tonal vibration. "I can taste the sunlight in it. I can taste the hope."
"Consume it," the Devourer whispered from the back of her skull, its hunger a physical ache in her stomach. "Eat the girl until the woman is a ghost."
Maryan closed her eyes and swallowed. In the mental landscape of the city, a tether snapped.
Lord Varick blinked, his eyes clearing. He looked at Maryan, then at the empty space where Eliza's portrait usually hung in his mind.
"My Lady Maryan?" Varick stammered, his voice hollow. "Why are we here? And... why am I thinking of a stable boy? I feel as though I've lost a ring, but I cannot remember which finger it belonged to."
"You haven't lost a ring, My Lord," Maryan said, rising to her feet. Her skin was glowing with a sickly, translucent violet light. "You've simply cleared the clutter. You were speaking of the Vane inheritance. You were saying it all belongs to me."
"Yes," Varick murmured, his will dissolving like sugar in water. "Yes, of course. There is no one else. There has never been anyone else."
Maryan turned away from the broken old man and looked at the obsidian shard in her hand. It was no longer black; it was pulsing with the gold she had just ripped from Eliza's timeline.
"She thinks her Hourglass is a shield," Maryan laughed, a jagged, cruel sound that echoed off the stone tombs. "She thinks as long as she tells the truth, she stays alive. But what is the 'truth' when no one remembers the girl who spoke it?"
She reached out and touched the stone wall of the mausoleum. The moss beneath her fingers withered and turned to gray ash instantly.
"I am not just taking her crown, Devourer," Maryan whispered, her face contorting into a mask of pure, ecstatic evil. "I am taking her childhood. I am taking her first kiss. I am taking the way her father looked at her when she was born. By the time I am done, Eliza Vane will be a name written in water. And I... I will be the only sun left in the sky."
Far across the estate, in the library, Eliza collapsed as the memory of that summer garden vanished from her mind forever.
Maryan felt the vibration of Eliza's pain through the shared tether of their blood. She smiled, her teeth looking too sharp, too many.
"Cry for me, sister," Maryan crooned. "Every tear you shed is a drop of ink I use to rewrite your ending. And I promise you... it ends in silence."