August's back was to Elias, a pale rampart of slender shoulders beneath the tremulous candlelight, his posture both regal and ruinous. The air between them was dense, not merely with silence, but with a silence that had weight — a silence that pressed upon the ribs and throttled the breath, a silence in which the faintest sound might shatter something irreplaceable.
Elias stood just within the threshold, his jaw taut as though each muscle was bound by iron wire. He did not move, for he knew not whether to advance or retreat; every instinct warred against the other. The boy before him — no, the man, though fragile as a winter blossom — seemed at once untouchable and unbearably alone.
August's hand, pale as moonlight upon snow, rose to his own cheek with slow, deliberate grace. He brushed away the solitary tear that had trespassed there, and yet that gesture was no mere act of cleansing — it was as though he erased a confession, burying it beneath the cold armour of composure. The movement was unhurried, almost ceremonial, and with it came the low, brittle command that cut through the air like the sudden snap of a frost-laden branch.
"Leave me."
The words, though softly uttered, carried a gravity that neither volume nor threat could match. They did not beg nor plead; they dismissed, as a sovereign might dismiss a court.
Lirael, who had been standing nearer the window, felt the command in the marrow of his bones. He looked at the boy's back — the back that had borne too many invisible burdens — and though his lips parted as if to speak, no words dared cross them. With a bow of the head, he withdrew, his steps making no more sound than the falling of ash. The chamber door closed behind him with the faintest click, leaving the two of them alone.
Elias did not move. He could still see the faint tremor in August's shoulders, the delicate sway of platinum strands that caught the candle's firelight and scattered it like molten silver. His presence was a defiance, a refusal to abandon the other to the company of his own shadows.
Yet August felt him there — felt the tall figure rooted behind him as though Elias's very presence had cast a heat upon the air. The sensation was intolerable, for August's pride was a fortress built upon ruin; he could not, would not, allow the citadel to be viewed in its collapse.
His voice came again, lower, harsher, the syllables edged like glass.
"I said Leave… me alone."
The words struck the air with the cold finality of a closing tomb. They were not born of anger, but of a desperate will to conceal the fracture within.
Still Elias lingered, silent yet immovable, his shadow stretching across the chamber floor to touch the hem of August's Ivory gown— a wordless tether between them that neither command nor pride could wholly sever.
August lay upon the bed, his form half-sunken into the pale embrace of the mattress, as though the linen itself conspired to hold him prisoner in thought. Elias stood not far, his presence a shadow carved in flesh — the same height, the same breath, the same frame — yet no longer the man August had known. His mind, once a library of shared moments, had been swept bare by some cruel tide, leaving only the architecture of a body bereft of memory.
There was hesitation in Elias's stance, a silent faltering that August could feel without turning his head. It was not the kind of hesitation born of guilt, but of absence — as though Elias were a painting whose colours had been washed away, leaving only the outline.
August turned then, slow as though the motion might fracture him. His gaze met Elias's, and the ghost of a thousand recollections stirred like dust in the golden air. How often had he scolded this man — no, this soul — for hovering over him with unrelenting concern? When memory had still clothed Elias in its warmth, he had refused to be sent away, had stayed even when August ordered him to go.
And oh, August remembered — painfully, tenderly — the way Elias's hand had once rested upon his stomach. A thoughtless gesture of care, perhaps, but to August it had burned with a peculiar heat. Embarrassment had rushed to his face before Elias could settle his palm there, and in a flare of defensiveness, August had struck Elias face so hard that it left a handprint on his cheek. Not because the touch was unwelcome — but because it was too welcome, too charged, as though Elias had looked upon him and seen something else, something August feared to name.
Now, that Elias was gone. Or rather, the man before him was an empty shell — the vessel remained, but the captain had vanished.
The chamber was still, its air drenched in the languor of a slow afternoon. Morning light clung stubbornly to the corners of the room, a pale reminder that time was indeed moving, even if August felt suspended between breaths. His thoughts slipped again to the dream — the most vivid of them all — in which Elias had touched him as though he were something of worth, as though his existence were not merely endured, but cherished.
He could not meet Elias's eyes now. The weight of it — the collision of pain, fevered dreams, and the tangled, unspoken history of his family — pressed upon him like the sea upon a drowning man. It was too much. Too bright. Too near.
And yet, he remained.
August lay against the pillows, his body a frail silhouette against the dim light chamber, yet his gaze—those smoke-grey eyes—still burned with a quiet devotion that was his alone to give. Even in pain, even in the shadow of fever, these eyes were meant only for Elias.
But Elias… Elias's heart trembled beneath his ribs, aching with a grief he could not name. His mind, however, stood as a stranger in his own skin—blank, hollow, stripped of the threads that had once bound him to the man before him. How does one offer tenderness to a memory he no longer possesses? How does one drive away a pain he does not understand?
When August's gaze found his, Elias faltered. He turned his head away—not for lack of care, but because he cared too fiercely, and that care became a torment when shackled to ignorance. To look was to be reminded of the vast chasm carved between them, a rift of forgotten days and vanished warmth.
And August saw it. He saw that Elias was not the same—that the man who once knew the architecture of his silence now stood at its threshold, uncomprehending. So August too turned his head away, a quiet surrender. For he knew, with the sting of bitter truth, that part of the fault was his own. He had kept Elias at arm's length once, guarding his heart as though it were a citadel; now Elias was beyond his reach entirely, and the distance between them cut deeper than the poison threading its way through his veins.
The room was still, yet heavy, as though grief itself hung in the air like dust—silent, inevitable, and impossible to breathe.
August lay upon the bed as though the very weight of the air pressed him into its silken depths. The faint gleam of lamplight traced the pallor of his face, gilding the curve of his cheek, catching in the fine tremor of lashes that refused to close. He said nothing; not a syllable dared trespass past his lips. Yet his eyes—those smoke-grey orbs—began to glisten, not with the heat of fever, but with a quieter affliction: the unspoken admission that for so long, he had blamed Elias for keeping a distance, when it was he, in his own silent cruelty, who had built the walls.
Now those same walls felt like a prison collapsing inward.
Elias stood near the bed, his posture straight as any sentinel's, and yet there was something in his stillness that betrayed the storm within. His orders were plain—Lady Katherine had tasked him with watching August, nothing more. He was to be the guardian, the shadow in the corner, the man who acted without question. And yet… the ache in his chest lingered, a hollow pain that neither duty nor distance could smother.
August did not look at him, for the sight of Elias's face—so close, yet emptied of all the shared histories—was a torment sharper than any blade. Instead, he fixed his gaze upon the dim recesses of the room, where shadow bled into shadow, as if seeking refuge in their indifference.
Elias's eyes, trained for vigilance, wandered instead to the faint rise and fall of August's breathing, to the subtle quiver of his fingers where they clutched at the coverlet. He had been taught to measure threats, to read enemies, but this… this sorrow was a script written in a tongue he could no longer remember. And still it hurt.
Between them, the silence thickened, heavy with all the words they could not speak, and heavier still with the ones they no longer knew how to.
The afternoon lay upon the land like a sheet of molten gold, spilling its languid light over rooftops and hedgerows, as if the sun itself sought to lull the world into drowsy complacence. Within the grand walls of the Valemont estate, silence moved with the measured grace of a butler—composed, unquestioning, and polite enough not to pry.
Yet Everin himself was neither composed nor unquestioning. Beneath the polite mask he wore for his household, there simmered an unrest—a restlessness that pressed against his ribs like a trapped bird. His mother's eyes, as sharp as jeweled daggers, searched him that afternoon when he announced, with the ease of a rehearsed line, that he intended to visit the city. The lie slipped from his lips like fine wine poured into a crystal glass, smooth and unspilled, yet with the faintest tremor in the pour.
The truth was a far more unruly thing. The truth was August.
August, pale as frost at dawn, standing forever behind the glass wall of his own silence. August, whose rejections cut deeper than any blade, and yet whose absence gnawed at the marrow. August, who had pushed him away with words that were never sharp enough to kill affection, only to wound it into longing.
Everin could not say to his mother—who adored etiquette more than she adored mercy—that he was slipping from the safety of their gilded cage to see a cousin who would likely refuse him at the threshold. And so he dressed himself in the armour of civility, donned his coat like a knight's mantle, and stepped into the waiting afternoon.
Outside, the air smelled faintly of distant rain and the dusty perfume of sun-baked stone. The gates of the manor opened with a sigh, as though resigned to his deception. Everin's boots struck the gravel with deliberate rhythm, yet his pulse stumbled ahead of him, hurrying toward the vision he carried: August, frail and far away, waiting—though perhaps not for him.
For all he knew, the door might never open, the eyes he sought might turn cold as slate, and yet… even rejection from August was a thing he could not keep himself from seeking. Better a closed door than the suffocating ache of wondering. Better a wound than an emptiness that made no sound at all.
A carriage waited for him at the gravelled sweep of the drive, its lacquered frame gleaming like a raven's wing in the sun. The horses, two creatures the colour of winter cream, pawed restlessly at the stones, their harnesses whispering in silver accents. The coachman, stooped with years and clad in black, regarded Everin with the kind of silence that belongs to men who have long stopped questioning the errands of the young.
Everin mounted the small iron step, his gloved hand resting for a breath upon the carved doorframe. The interior was a hush of shadow and velvet, the air within faintly scented with cedar and travel. As he settled onto the cushioned seat, the leather creaked like the exhale of an old confidant. A faint tremor of anticipation wound through him, threading his resolve tighter.
With a curt nod to the driver, the reins drew taut, and the horses surged forward into motion. The wheels rolled over gravel with a sound like grinding pearls, carrying him away from the safe, suffocating corridors of his birthright. The trees on either side blurred into a shifting tapestry of green and gold, their branches bending as though whispering secrets into the wind—a wind that seemed to carry his unspoken prayer: that August might, if only for a moment, allow him near.