To what? What, exactly, was he eager for?
“May I ask two questions?” Lyssena’s voice broke through his thoughts, and at last, her words reached him. He understood them.
Perhaps I am eager to understand.
“Was that the first question?” he asked, and Lyssena let out a small huff of laughter, barely more than a breath, but there. And Erevos felt something warm bloom within him, something that spread quietly through his chest.
Was that . . . joy?
“You may,” he said, and turned toward the bed and remembered it wasn’t one anymore. He couldn’t sit with her there as he had hoped. But he wanted to try. He remembered watching her, many times before, curling into her blankets and folding herself into softness, and he had longed to feel what that was like. He had tried once, by himself, mimicking the shape of her rest, but it hadn’t felt as it looked.
“This isn’t . . . a goodbye hug, right?” Her voice came smaller again, threaded with shame.
And Erevos did not like that.
He did not want her voice to sound uncertain or brittle. He wanted to hear that tiny sound she made when she found him amusing, that small flicker of laughter when he tried to mimic the human custom of joking. He had learned about humor from watching mortals, seen how they twisted words and meaningsinto something clever, something that could bring warmth even to the coldest moments. And he found that he enjoyed it.
He wanted her to feel that again.
But Lyssena was afraid. He could feel it, so he would fix it.
He glanced at the bed and the chair, both reshaped by her will, both no longer serving to be seated on. He could have returned them to their original forms with a thought, but he didn’t. Not without asking Lyssena first. She had commanded his shadows, shaped them for her own liking, and he would not take that from her without her permission.
He did not want to undo her choices.
And he did not want to shift the conversation away from what mattered, so he didn’t ask. What mattered now was telling her the truth.
That with him, she was safe.
That with him, she would never die.
By the time Erevos finished wrestling with his own demons and was finally ready to answer his little songbird, he found that Lyssena had fallen asleep.
She had been so exhausted that her body had done what it must: surrendered to rest.
Once again, he had lost his chance to speak with her. The first time he had tried, there had been a man in the way—a man whose blood still was being scrubbed in her room. Then, Lyssena had needed food, and so Erevos had gone to find it for her. And now, when he had finally returned, when he was eager with thoughts to share and things to say and the warmth of emotion burning in his chest, she had fallen asleep in his arms.
He looked down at her gently curled form, her breath warm against his throat, and thought that she needed more space.
And the thought excited him.
This house he had made, this quiet home of shadow nestled deep within a forgotten cave in The Void, would grow. He would expand it for her, carve new spaces from darkness.
There were already a few rooms, empty ones, half-shaped, waiting for meaning. And in one of them Erevos now stood, while Lyssena slept within his arms.
He needed one arm to use, and so he adjusted her gently, shifting her weight until he held her in his left arm alone, her head nestled into the curve between his neck and shoulder.
He was aware of what he was—his body all shadow-bound muscle as if made from obsidian stone. He did not know if she was comfortable there, pressed against hardness and heat, but he hoped she was.
And he began to work.
Chapter Eleven
The Day of Too Many Teeth
Lyssena
Awarm cup of tea in cold weather, a warm blanket after a long day, even the warm, fuzzy toe beans of the neighbor’s cat, were the little wonders that made Lyssena feel at peace. Her eyes were still closed, and she snuggled deeper into her bed, letting the comfort stretch for a bit longer.
