She tilted her head back and found a single orb suspended high above, casting a dim, gray light that barely dared to exist. It was the first hint of color she had seen since waking, and even that seemed shy.
She sat up slowly, fingers running across the surface of the blanket. It was soft, thicker than linen, gentler than wool, not fur, not anything she could easily name, and the strangeness of its texture made her hum without meaning to, just a quiet sound of thought as her eyes moved toward the far side of the room.
Another wall. Black again.
She lifted her hand, reached toward it, and pressed her fingers against the surface, feeling something cold and solid. The question echoed again in her mind:Where am I?
“Do you breathe well?” a voice asked, echoing through the walls. “Tell me where it feels wrong. I will adjust it.”
Erevos.
She froze, hand still against the wall, and lowered her head instinctively. Lyssena wasn’t sure what he meant by adjusting. The air? Well, he was a god. Perhaps he could really do anything. And still she was confused.
“I breathe well. Thank you,” she said, her voice quiet, her thumb rubbing against the other.
“You may walk,” Erevos said. “Touch what you wish. See if this place suits you.”
She hesitated, then rose.
Her steps were almost silent. She was hesitant about everything around her. Lyssena’s fingertips brushed against the back of a high-backed chair, which was shaped exactly like the one that had stood by her window at home. It even had the same faint curve at the top, the one she used to drape her shawl across in the early evening.
She blinked, frowning, her gaze drifting toward the dresser beside it.
She knew that shape.
The edge was slightly worn on the left side, just as it had been at home, where she had once spilled oil and tried to scrub it clean, only to fade the color instead. Her fingers moved to the second drawer, and sure enough, the handle pulled out a little too far, the screw loose in the same, familiar way.
The way the bed was placed, tucked beneath a low curve in the ceiling, looked like her room.
Not exactly, but close enough that her heart began to beat faster. She turned in place. There had been a pillow she loved, one she always held when she couldn’t stop her thoughts from circling, but it wasn’t here.
And then it was.
It appeared so quickly, without sound or movement, nestled in the corner of the bed, as dark as everything else in this place, but unmistakably shaped like the one she used to cling to beneath the covers when the night stretched too long, and the world felt too sad.
She gasped and stepped back.
I didn’t say that out loud.
The pillow looked wrong at first—slightly off, not square—and she moved closer. She reached out, fingers trembling as they brushed its surface. And then she saw five edges. Not four.
She had torn it as a child, by accident, playing too roughly, too carelessly, and tried to sew it back together herself. She had been too small, her stitches uneven, and the whole corner had collapsed in her hands. So she had added a new one. A fifth edge. It wasn’t perfect, but it had made the pillow feel whole again. No one else had known. No one else had ever noticed.
And now it sat before her.
Then came the vibrating sound that filled the room, like an animal’s growl, and she clapped her hands over her ears out of fear, heart slamming into her ribs. But it didn’t help; she could still hear it, not through her ears, but somewhere deeper.
Inside her head.
Chapter Six
Little Songbird
Erevos
This little mortal amused Erevos, and he was pleased.
He had thought her bones too soft, her mind too delicate, her prayers too beautiful when they reached the deep where he dwelled. And yet she had reached him. She had called, and when she did, she offered something most mortals no longer knew how to give—devotion. So raw, it was so beautiful to him. And now, she stood within the space he had created, gasping when the walls remembered her shape, when the air curved itself to feel like home.
