She pressed her palm against the bark, and that, too, felt like nothing.
“Are you alive?” she whispered, unsure whether she meant the tree or the realm itself.
It did not answer.
But she felt something faintly responsive beneath her touch, a subtle vibration that traveled from bark into bone. Lyssena stepped back, turning slowly.
There was no sky as she understood it.
Above her stretched an expanse of uninterrupted darkness, not clouded, not star-strewn, not lit by sun or moon, but vast and depthless, as though she stood inside the pupil of an eye. Her breath came quicker. The sheer scale of this place felt like she was trapped inside a dark dream.
To her left, she saw a current barely moving. A river, perhaps?
She had not noticed it at first, for it did not gleam or reflect in any familiar way. But as she moved farther from the cave’smouth, she saw a ribbon of black cutting through the land, smooth and very silent.
Lyssena decided to approach it. The water—if it was water—ran without ripple, without splash, without sound. When she crouched at its edge, she expected to see her reflection distorted along its surface. Instead, she saw nothing. Just depth.
She leaned closer, heart pounding.
“Erevos,” she called, though she did not look away to meet her god’s eyes.
The river did not mirror her mask, nor her hands, nor the outline of her form. It swallowed light entirely, leaving only an impression of endless descent.
Carefully, she extended one finger and dipped it into the surface.
The sensation was not wet.
It was cool and fluid, but it did not cling to her, did not bead or drip. When she lifted her finger, no trace remained, though she could swear the river had thickened briefly around her touch.
She stood abruptly, a thrill running through her. “This is impossible,” she breathed.
The silence pressed around her ears until she became aware of her own heartbeat, steady and loud within her chest, the only rhythm in a place that did not seem to pulse at all. No insects hummed. No birds called. No leaves rustled. Even her footsteps felt swallowed the moment they landed.
She turned in a slow circle and thought to herself how this place felt like standing at the beginning of creation.
Or the end of it.
She looked back toward the cave mouth, where Erevos stood watching her, tall and unmoving near the threshold. For a fleeting moment, the enormity of the place made her feel small.
Lyssena lifted her chin, turning once more toward the endless stretch of dark grass and pomegranate-colored trees and silent rivers that refused to reflect her.
“I want to see all of it,” she said.
And she meant it from the bottom of her heart.
When Lyssena was finally done with exploring every single tree within reach, every patch of ashy grass, every slow current of ink-dark water that refused to reflect her face, no matter how long she stared into it, she made her way back to Erevos, who had not moved from the place where she had left him.
Not once.
The entire time—though she could not say how much time had truly passed, for there was no sun to climb or sink, no moon to wax or wane, no shifting light to measure the hours—Erevos had remained exactly as he was. A figure carved from shadow itself.
He had watched her.
She knew that without needing to look.
Even when she wandered farther into the grass, even when she circled the trees and crouched by the riverbanks and pressed her palm against bark, she had felt the weight of his gaze resting between her shoulder blades. Only sometimes would his head turn slowly, following her path.
At first, it had unsettled her.
