When she settled properly onto the pot and finally relaxed enough to let go, a soft sound filled the quiet chamber, and almost immediately she winced.
Erevos straightened.
Pain flickered across her face, and his shadows sharpened instinctively along the floor.
“It burns,” she admitted through a small exhale, her brows drawing together.
His gaze darkened. “Why?”
“My mother told me it might,” Lyssena explained, her voice steadying as she focused on breathing through her discomfort. “The first time can make everything . . . tender.”
Erevos was very displeased with himself for knowing so little of mating and its consequences. He had never thought he would ever experience it; he never had any interest in it. At all.
Now he knew he had to understand every piece of the process. He was a curious demon, of course.
“It is swollen,” she added, gesturing vaguely between her thighs. “I will need to put medicine there. Something soothing.”
“What medicine?”
“An herbal salve,” she said. “There are women in my village who make it. It helps calm the skin.”
His mind moved quickly through possibilities—shadow synthesis, matter shaping, reconstruction of known substances—but he realized with a great amount of irritation that he did not possess sufficient knowledge of mortal herbal combinations to recreate it accurately. He could bend shadows or fracture realms. But he did not know how to craft a village woman’s soothing salve.
“I will acquire it,” he said.
Lyssena blinked at him. “Acquire it?”
“I will go to your realm and retrieve this medicine,” he clarified, as though stating the most obvious solution. “You require it.”
She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. She was too tired to argue with a demon-god who treated inter-realm travel like walking into another room.
By the time she finished relieving herself, the initial sting had dulled slightly, though she still looked swollen and flushed.
Mortal bodies expelled waste even after ecstasy. Fascinating.
With a small motion of his hand, he bent the matter within, dissolving the liquid and its remnants into fine, harmless particles that shimmered before dispersing into the air and vanishing entirely, absorbed back into the architecture of shadow itself.
Lyssena stared.
“That is convenient,” she murmured.
Erevos looked mildly pleased. “Yes.”
Then he crouched before her again, his hands returning gently to her waist.
“Now,” he said, his voice softer once more, “we will tend to you.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
A Banquet in The Void
Lyssena
Every passing day felt better than the one before it, softer and fuller in a way Lyssena had never known life could be. Not that she truly knew how many days had passed, but by the rhythm of her sleep, by the way her body drifted into rest and woke again in his shadow-warmed bed, she guessed it had been three . . . perhaps four days.
Lyssena loved this home Erevos had created for her.
She loved its vastness, the echo of her footsteps along corridors shaped from shadow. There were rooms filled with fabrics softer than any she had touched in her village, tables carved from darkness that shimmered when she brushed her fingertips across them, alcoves glowing with dim, atmospheric light that made the walls feel alive. And she especially adored the bathing chamber.
