Fists struck his shadows, which had hardened to stone.
“Lyssena, answer me!”
“Please, gods—Lyss, please!”
“Open this door!”
The noise was loud, their pleading sincere. But they could not reach her anymore. Erevos has already decided that she was his. She, however, had not yet decided what to think of him, and Erevos did not rush her to answer.
He had all the time in the world, as he had been living for so long already. A creature so ancient as he was would not care for screams and fear of mortals he did not care about. He never cared for anyone, really, but this human named Lyssena had caught his hungry soul.
“Who . . . who are you?” she asked, her voice hoarse, small, barely more than a breath shaped into sound.
“I am Erevos,” he answered, as shadows spilled from him like ink, coating every surface of the room—the floor, the walls, the bed, and desk—until all that remained was void. “I am the one you called.”
Erevos did not know why she would ask such a question, as he had already told her his name and had come when she called. But he was patient with her. He gave her time to think and reflect.
Lyssena turned her gaze to the blackened room, eyes wide, whispering, “You’re not . . . like the others.”
“No,” he said. Those absent gods, those hollow idols humans created for themselves to hang onto something when they needed. “I am not made of harvests or light, nor of coin or prayer. I am the dark beneath the altar. I am the echo that never fades.”
“I didn’t mean to . . . I didn’t know if you were real.”
“And yet, you lit the flame,” he said, shadows flickering as he drew closer. “You begged for someone to listen. I did. You gave your devotion shape. You called, and I answered.”
She said nothing after that. Lyssena only sat there, draped in a white gown, one arm bracing her weight, the other resting on her thigh. Her hair—light brown and unbound—cascaded in soft waves down her back and across her shoulders, reaching her thighs like a veil spun from dusk. With those green eyes, wide and full of sorrow and fear, she looked like a herta, the kind once kept in homes back in his homeland. He knew it looked like the cats humans had in this world.
Lyssena’s mind screamed.
He could feel the spiral of it, tearing at itself from within. Guilt, grief, and confusion rose beneath her silence.
Beyond the walls of shadow, her family still cried out. Voices loud, feet thudding against wood. One of her brothers shouted her name again and again. And when she flinched, Erevos added more shadows of his to the walls and the shadow-maid door.
She turned toward the sound. “My family . . . ”
“They sold you, Lyssena,” he said. “They set a price on your blood and handed you to the slaughterhouse with smiles on their lips. They called it love so you would kneel more willingly.”
“But they . . . they fed me, they cared for me . . . ”
“You think a cage is not a cage because the bars were kissed before they closed?”
She turned her face away, and tears slipped silently down her cheeks.
Erevos was not sure why she suddenly started defending those who wronged her. But he didn’t always understand human ways. And so he decided to finally tell her.
“You have a choice,” he said. “To stay, or to leave.”
Her eyes widened. Slowly, she turned her gaze toward the shadowed wall where once there had been a window.
“How can I leave them?” she whispered, her heart thundering so loudly that he wished to come closer and feel it himself.
“The family that betrayed you?” he asked. “The ones who watched you tremble and said nothing while he reached for your throat?”
She shook her head, slowly, as if the motion pained her. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“Then believeme,” Erevos said. “Come with me, Lyssena. Leave this house of hollow love and poisoned mercy.”
He had watched her for a long time.
