He would feed her. Bathe her. Clothe her. Build worlds beneath her feet if she desired them.
He would do everything. Anything.
As long as she chose to remain at his side.
Erevos stepped aside, the shadows parting with him, allowing Lyssena to take her first step beyond the threshold of their home.
“You can breathe, Lyssena,” he said when he realized he could not hear the soft rhythm of her inhaling; her chest did not rise, did not fall. “Open your eyes.”
He wanted to see the muted green of them through the thin sockets of the mask, wanted proof that she was truly looking, truly standing in a place no human had ever been meant to stand.
“I’m scared,” she murmured, her voice small beneath the beak.
Then she gasped. “I can breathe!”
Of course, she could.
Erevos’s mouth stretched wide in satisfaction, revealing rows of sharp, immaculate teeth. He was a clever demon, a demon who could bend matter, fold time, steal oxygen from another realm, and make it obey.
As his songbird took another step, and then another, moving farther from the doorway, turning in place as though testing whether the world would remain stable beneath her feet, gasping again and again simply because she could, Erevos did not follow.
He stood where he was and watched.
He found himself wondering whether the absence of color would disturb her eventually. Whether a human eye, raised in brightness and bloom, might find his realm lacking. To him,it was complete. It was vast and endless in ways that did not require decoration.
But humans were fragile things. They often mistook simplicity for emptiness.
Still, she had not complained. Not about the shadows or the darkness. Not about the way his home had been carved from a palette that belonged only to him.
And that pleased him.
Lyssena turned back toward him then, her movements quick, her eyes wide behind the mask. “I can’t believe this place is even real.”
Erevos tilted his head slightly at that, the shadows at his shoulders shifting with the motion.
“It is real. It is The Void,” he said, and the only thing he could look upon was his shadow-songbird with wide, green eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Beyond the Mouth of Stone
Lyssena
Lyssena had expected stepping outside to feel like falling, like crossing some invisible edge where the world would drop away beneath her feet, but instead Erevos turned, and the world did not open; it narrowed.
He did not lead her immediately into vastness, but deeper into stone.
The doorway did not spill into the sky, but into a cavern so immense she could not see its ceiling, only the suggestion of curvature where shadow thickened and swallowed detail whole. Her steps echoed very faintly against rock that seemed to drink sound rather than return it, and when she glanced back, the house was already smaller than it should have been, as though distance behaved differently here.
“You built this house inside a cave,” she said, her voice soft, and yet it seemed to travel farther than it should. Lyssena thought of what would happen if she screamed.
Erevos did not answer immediately. He simply walked.
And so she followed.
The stone beneath her feet was not rough like the quarry walls near her village; it was smoother, it looked polished in places, as though countless unseen hands had brushed against it over centuries, though she suspected nothing had touched it at all. When she trailed her fingers along the cavern wall, the surface felt cool but not cold, solid but faintly yielding.
They turned once. Then again.
