Nathan didn't sleep.
He lay in the dark with his hands pressed flat against his chest, as if he could feel the thing inside him through his ribs. Every few minutes he closed his eyes and saw the wall disappear, smooth and silent, the edges clean as cut paper. Then he opened them again.
Sometime after midnight, a soft knock came at his door.
Orla stood in the hallway, wrapped in a gray shawl, a single candle in her hand. "Walk with me," she said.
She led him not to the west wing but up, through a narrow stair behind the library that Nathan had never noticed, to a small stone room beneath the roof. A window looked out over the valley. The mist lay below like a sleeping animal, silver under the moon.
"Sit," Orla said.
Nathan sat. She lowered herself into the chair across from him, and for a while she simply looked at him.
"What is the family's name?" she asked.
"Cladrake."
"And before that?"
He frowned. "Before that?"
"Our name was not always Cladrake, Nathan. Three hundred years ago, it was written another way." She drew a slow breath. "*Desteroy.*"
The word landed strangely in the quiet room. It was just a name, but Nathan felt something stir beneath his ribs, the same slow turn he had felt in the chamber, like an animal lifting its head at the sound of its own name.
"I've never heard that," he said.
"No. You wouldn't have. Every record was burned. Every portrait, every letter. We even carved the name out of the stone, and out of ourselves." Her fingers tightened on the candle. "The people of Eireteria don't whisper it anymore. They don't even remember why they fear it. But the fear survived, passed down like a bad dream."
"Why would they fear us?"
"Because they have a story." Orla's voice grew flat, as if reciting something she had learned the hard way. "Three centuries ago, the beasts came in a flood. Not scattered packs, but an army, a tide of them, rolling toward the capital. The strongest bloodlines stood against them and fell. Then, on the last night, one of ours walked out alone."
Nathan's mouth was dry. "What happened?"
"Half the beasts vanished. And half the city with them."
The candle flame trembled. Outside, the mist shifted.
"They call it the Night of the Hollow Sky," Orla said. "Eleven thousand people, gone. Houses, streets, the beasts, all of it erased, as if a hand had wiped a slate clean. The survivors named us *Destroyers*. They hunted every Desteroy they could find. Within a generation, we were nearly extinct."
"The ones who hid," Nathan said slowly. "Came here."
"The ones who hid became Cladrakes. We changed our name, abandoned our power, and taught every child that the blood had bred out of us. Most of them even believed it." She smiled sadly. "For three hundred years, it did sleep. Until you."
Nathan stared at his hands. They looked ordinary: thin fingers, bitten nails, a scar from a fall when he was nine. He tried to imagine them erasing a city and couldn't.
"Why did he do it?" His voice came out small. "The one who walked out. Was he a monster?"
Orla didn't answer at once. When she did, her voice was gentler.
"That is the question I have carried my whole life. The survivors say he was a madman, that he lost control. But our own family kept one record the world never saw, and I've read it more times than I can count. It says he knew exactly what he was doing. It says he chose the city's edge as his line, and that he stood in front of it before he began."
"Chose?"
"Everything the Destroyer takes, Nathan, comes from somewhere. Your power doesn't create the emptiness. It *spends* something to make it." She looked at him very steadily. "That is the part I have not told you, and the part that frightens me most."
"What does it spend?"
"The user."
The word hung in the air.
"The wall you erased," she said. "Do you feel the same as you did this morning? Truly the same?"
Nathan opened his mouth to say yes. Then he stopped.
There was a quiet place in his memory, as if something had been taken from a shelf and the dust still showed where it had been. A tune his mother used to hum. He could remember that she'd hummed it. He couldn't remember how it went.
"I forgot something," he whispered.
"Yes."
"A song."
"I'm sorry." Orla's eyes were wet again. "It will not always be so small."
The room felt very cold. Nathan pulled his knees up to his chest like a much younger child. "Then I shouldn't use it. I'll never use it again."
"If only that were possible." She reached across and took his hand. "The seal is breaking. You woke it, and now it wakes *with* you. What lives in that black stone is hungry, and it has been waiting three hundred years."
Below them, far away, a bell began to ring.
It wasn't the slow evening bell. It was fast and ragged, hammered by someone who didn't care whether the whole valley heard. Orla's hand tightened until it hurt.
"The boundary tower," she said. "The markers have gone dark."
Nathan rose and ran to the window. Out beyond the mist, where the cliffs closed in against the sky, a dozen shapes were moving in the darkness. Large ones. And they weren't moving like anything that belonged to the valley.