He had existed as other demons existed, vast and patient and hollow, harvesting emotions from mortals the way storms harvested leaves, not out of cruelty nor kindness, but becausethat was the nature of their being. He had drifted through centuries untouched by pain, untouched by longing, untouched by the ache that now lived beneath his ribs.
Lyssena had given him meaning.
She had given him devotion without realizing she had done so, had offered him her whispered prayers and her fairness and her stubborn hope, and those small, radiant things had become the sweetest gifts he had ever known.
He had waited twenty years for her to choose him.
Twenty years of watching, of restraining himself, of placing coins in drawers and blood upon the soil in offerings of protection.
And she had chosen him.
She had spoken his name into the dark when she believed herself abandoned, had prayed for him to come when he had already been there, waiting with infinite patience for the sound of her voice to claim him.
Her tear slipped free, then another, tracing the curve of her cheeks, and Erevos felt something disturbingly close to guilt. A tightening, a pressure that seemed to gather at the center of his chest. She wept because of his words.
And that pained him. Erevos physically felt pain.
His gaze dropped slowly to his chest, and he lifted one clawed hand to the place, dragging the tips of his fingers lightly over the shadowed surface of his form as if he might carve the discomfort out and examine it. He had never felt such a thing before.
Not in centuries of existence.
“I’m so sorry!” Lyssena cried, her voice breaking as the tears fell faster, and each drop that struck his shadows dissolved into him like warm rain, and he felt them, every single one, as though her sorrow were imprinting itself upon his very essence.
Erevos rose immediately from his seat. The movement was driven by something far more primal than thought.
He stepped toward her, and before he could reach her fully, she had already turned toward him, her body angling in his direction as though drawn by an invisible ribbon that bound them together.
When he lowered himself, preparing to gather her into his arms, she lifted hers first.
That, more than her tears, more than her words, filled him with something so vast it eclipsed the pain in his chest entirely.Joy.
It surged through him like a tide breaking against ancient stone, warm and consuming and unbearably bright, and for a moment, he could not distinguish where his shadows ended, and that feeling began.
She wanted him. She reached for him.
His songbird now stretched her arms toward him without hesitation. Erevos folded her against his chest, enclosing her within the vastness of his form, his claws curving protectively around her back as though shielding a flame from the wind.
He was glad.
Glad beyond reason. Glad that she sought his closeness again. Glad that her tears did not drive her away. Glad that, after twenty years of waiting, she still chose to step into his embrace.
Lyssena did not hesitate once she was within his arms; she moved closer.
Not merely resting against him, not merely accepting the shelter he offered, butseekinghim. Her fingers curling into the dark substance of his form as though testing whether he was solid enough to hold her, her forehead brushing against his jaw before she turned her face and nuzzled into him with a small, trembling sigh. The sound alone undid him.
Erevos had known hunger.
He had known satisfaction.
He had known the distant, muted pleasure of consuming emotions from afar.
But this warmth that unfurled slowly inside him as she burrowed against his neck was something entirely different. The warmth inside him expanded.
It spread through him slowly like ink dissolving into clear water, filling spaces he had not known were empty. The shadows composing his form stirred. He felt . . . full.
And warm.
The warmth was unfamiliar and yet not, because he had felt echoes of it before, always when Lyssena stood near him, always when her hand brushed against his shadows, always when she spoke to him in that quiet, earnest way that belonged only to her.
