The iron gates of the Vane cemetery didn't just creak; they shrieked, protesting the presence of a man who still had a pulse.
Silas Thorne didn't slow down. He hit the gravel running, his heavy duster snapping behind him like a crow's wings.
The air here was wrong—thick, oily, and tasting of copper.
The moonlight didn't reflect off the tombstones; it was absorbed by them, trapped in a violet haze that crawled across the ground like hungry vines.
"Maryan!" Silas roared, his voice tearing through the unnatural stillness. "I'm here for the debt!"
The Shadow-EchoesFrom behind the weeping willows and the weathered statues of weeping angels, they emerged.
They weren't ghosts. They were Shadow-Echoes—the hollowed-out remains of the people Maryan had already erased. There was the blacksmith who had once shod Eliza's horses, his face a featureless blur of gray smoke. There was the flower girl from the market, her basket filled with black ash. They moved with a jerky, stop-motion rhythm, their joints popping like dry kindling.
"Out of my way," Silas growled, drawing the Thorne heavy-caliber flintlock in his left hand and a serrated trench knife in his right.
The blacksmith lunged, his smoke-formed hammer whistling through the air. Silas dived to the left, the hammer shattering a marble headstone where his skull had been a second before. He didn't waste a bullet on a phantom. He kicked the blacksmith's knee, feeling the resistance of cold mist, and slammed the butt of his pistol into the entity's "face."
The Echo dissipated into a cloud of soot, but three more took its place.
Silas was surrounded. The flower girl lunged, her fingers turning into jagged obsidian claws. Silas spun, his coat flaring out. He reached into a hidden inner pocket and withdrew a small, glass sphere filled with a swirling, pressurized liquid—Thorne's Liquid Sunlight.
"Cover your eyes, you hollow bastards!"
He smashed the sphere at his feet.
A blinding, incandescent flash erupted, a localized sun tearing through the violet gloom. The Echoes shrieked—a sound like metal scraping on metal—as the alchemical light scorched their smoke-flesh into nothingness.
Silas didn't wait for the spots to clear from his vision. He sprinted toward the mausoleum doors—two massive slabs of granite etched with the Vane crest.
As he reached the stairs, the ground bucked. A massive, violet tentacle of pure shadow erupted from the earth, slamming Silas back against a stone sarcophagus. The air was punched out of his lungs. He tasted blood.
High above, on the roof of the mausoleum, a figure stood. It looked like Maryan, but her skin was the color of a bruise, and her hair floated around her head as if she were underwater. Her eyes were two bottomless pits of violet fire.
"You're late, Bastard Thorne," Maryan's voice echoed, layered with the guttural growl of the Devourer. "I've already eaten the memory of her first steps. I've swallowed the sound of her mother's lullaby. There is nothing left for you to save but a breathing doll."
"I only need one memory to kill you, Maryan!" Silas spat, wiping blood from his lip.
He fired the flintlock. The lead ball, etched with Thorne alchemical runes, streaked through the air. Maryan didn't flinch. She simply raised a hand, and the bullet slowed, stopped, and crumbled into dust before it could touch her.
"You fight with lead and powder," Maryan mocked, leaping down from the roof with impossible lightness. She landed ten feet away, the ground cracking beneath her. "I fight with the end of all things. Forget your name, Silas. Forget why you're angry."
She lunged. Her movement was a blur of violet static.
Silas threw his last vial of blasting powder at her feet and fired his second pistol into the air to ignite the trail.
BOOM!!
The explosion rocked the cemetery, sending a shockwave that shattered the remaining windows of the mausoleum. For a heartbeat, the violet smoke cleared. Silas charged through the flames, his duster smoking, his eyes locked on Maryan's throat.
He tackled her, the momentum carrying them both through the granite doors of the mausoleum and into the darkness of the tomb. They hit the stone floor, rolling past the coffins of Eliza's ancestors.
Maryan pinned him down, her hands—now cold enough to burn—clamping around his neck. "Give me the boy at the fence, Silas," she hissed, her face inches from his. "Give me the peaches and the whistle, and I'll let you die with a smile."
Silas gasped for air, his vision blurring. He reached into his pocket and felt the rowan-wood lark. It was hot. Glowing.
"You want... the memory?" Silas choked out, a feral, bloody grin stretching across his face. "Take it. Take the whole damn thing. It's a Thorne memory, Maryan. It doesn't just sit there. It burns."
He jammed the wooden lark into the center of the violet fire in her chest.
A shockwave of gold and purple light erupted from the point of contact. Silas felt the memory of the summer garden being ripped out of him—the smell of the peaches, the sound of the laugh—but he didn't pull back. He pushed. He poured ten years of longing, rage, and truth into the void of her hunger.
The Devourer inside Maryan shrieked. It couldn't digest the sheer, concentrated mass of the truth Silas was forcing into it.
"Too much?" Silas roared over the sound of the cosmic screaming. "Eat it all! Eat every second I've ever loved her!"
With a final, blinding flash, the mausoleum was plunged into total darkness.
Silas lay on the cold stone, gasping, his mind a hollow, echoing chamber. He didn't know why he was in a tomb. He didn't know whose name was engraved on the coffin next to him.
But as he heard a faint, distant whistle blowing from the direction of the manor, his hand instinctively closed around the emptiness in his heart.
"I... I remember... nothing," he whispered into the dark. "But I'm still... angry."