Silas Thorne knew the weight of every shadow in Vane Manor, but none felt as heavy as the silence Eliza had just handed him.
He stood in the hallway outside the library, his back against the cold wainscoting. His hand was still closed tight around the rowan-wood lark, the jagged edges digging into his palm until he felt the sharp, grounding sting of broken skin.
She doesn't know.
The thought was a physical blow to his gut.
He had spent ten years carrying that summer like a holy relic. In the mud of the Low Districts, when the hunger was clawing at his ribs and the Thorne name was a curse spat by drunkards, he had closed his eyes and seen a girl behind a rosebush. He had heard the sound of her sharing a peach—the only thing in his life that hadn't been stolen or bought with blood.
And now, she was looking at him with the polite, distant kindness of a stranger.
He looked at his own reflection in a passing hall mirror and felt a surge of pure, unadulterated terror. It wasn't the fear of a blade or a gallows; it was the fear of a man standing on a pier watching the last boat vanish into the fog.
"You're losing her, Silas," he hissed to his reflection. His gray eyes were bloodshot, the pupils blown wide with adrenaline. "She's standing right there, breathing and warm, and she's already a ghost."
He felt a sudden, sickening lurch in his mind. He tried to remember the way she looked when she was six—the day of the Great Equinox—but the image was blurry, as if someone had smeared charcoal over the canvas.
Maryan.
The realization was a cold bucket of ice water. Maryan wasn't just eating Eliza's past; she was eating the world's past. If Silas was the only one who remembered Eliza, then Silas was the primary target. Every second he stood here grieving was a second Maryan was chewing through his own mind, searching for the tethers that kept Eliza anchored to reality.
Silas didn't head for the front doors. He headed for the servant's stairs, the ones that led down into the belly of the estate where the stone turned damp and the air smelled of saltpeter.
He checked his gear with a mechanical, detached precision.
Thorne Blasting Powder? Two vials.
The Silver Whistle? No, he had left that with her. A mistake? No. She needed a physical anchor more than he did.
The Ledger? He pulled the Baron's stolen accounts from his coat. It was useless now as blackmail, but it was a paper trail of the truth.
As he reached the heavy oak door that led to the underground tunnels, he paused. He felt a phantom vibration in his wrist—a sympathetic echo of Eliza's Hourglass. It was slow. Sluggish.
"The sand is stopping," he realized.
If the sand stopped, it meant the math had reached zero. It meant there was no "Truth" left to balance the "Erasure."
He pushed the door open, the hinges screaming in protest. The darkness of the tunnels swallowed him, but Silas didn't need a lantern. He had lived in the dark his entire life.
"You want to eat her, Maryan?" Silas whispered into the blackness, his voice sounding like the cocking of a pistol. "You want to erase the sunlight? Fine. But you forgot one thing."
He felt the rowan-wood lark in his pocket. It was a small thing. A childhood toy. But it was a fact. And facts were the only things the Devourer couldn't digest without a fight.
"I am a Thorne," he growled, his footsteps echoing off the wet stone as he began to run toward the mausoleum. "We don't build things to last forever. We build things to explode. And if I have to blow up every memory I have just to blind that thing in your throat, I'll do it."
He wasn't just her protector anymore. He was the only man in the world who knew that Eliza Vane deserved to exist. And as he reached the iron gates of the graveyard, the silver moonlight catching the edge of his blade, Silas Thorne looked less like a noble and more like the Auditor himself.
"Keep the light on, Eliza," he breathed, the mist of his breath swirling in the cold air. "I'm coming home with the peaches."