When she walked inside, the air felt still and untouched, exactly as she had left it.
“I was raised in that room at home, from the very first day of my life . . . ” she murmured as she crossed the space and approached the small wooden chair that was a bat.
“And my parents kept it only for me,” she continued, “even though I have brothers who share one room that was actually smaller than mine . . . ”
She crouched and lifted the bat into her hands. It was cool on her palms, and for a moment, she simply stared at it.
Lyssena asked it to become a few small plates as tears pricked her eyes.
The plates clinked as her grip tightened.
“This could only mean . . . ” she breathed, “This could only mean that my sole existence was for them to sell me.”
A tear slid from her chin and struck the smooth surface of one plate.
“My whole purpose was to be sold.”
The room did not argue with her.
It did not soften the truth or wrap it in kinder interpretations.
It simply held her there, witnessing the moment a daughter understood that love that taught you how to be alone was not the kind that taught you how to be safe.
Well, that was easy, Lyssena thought to herself as she walked out of the mouth of the cave, the stone arch curving above her like the lip of some great slumbering beast that neither questioned nor stopped her departure.
Being alone in The Void started to feel a little wrong. Especially without Erevos.
The vastness stretched before her exactly as it always had. It was endless and dark, with a sky that did not look like a sky at all. Nothing appeared different since the last time she went outside; the shadows drifted as they pleased, the distant horizon blurred into obscurity, and the ground beneath her feet remained smooth and unmoving at all.
Perhaps it had not. Perhaps she was overthinking everything.
With the mask secured over her face, the suit sealed neatly along her body, and a small pile of tear bubbles made of shadow cradled carefully in her hands, Lyssena continued forward. She felt smart and resourceful.
Very proud of herself.
Creating those small tea plates and filling them with her tears had been a very clever idea. She had watched the droplets gather and tremble before sealing them inside the shadow-formed porcelain, had felt the slight tremor in her fingers as she asked the plates to close, and of course, they had obeyed, folding inward.
That was indeed very resourceful.
Erevos had explained that the currency in The Void was emotion; it was so matter-of-fact in his tone as though such a system were entirely ordinary. Lyssena had not understood, at first, how one could physically hold an emotion, how something so intangible and internal could be offered across a counter like bread or fabric, until she realized that some emotions burned behind the eyes or tightened the throat.
Some left proof.
She still had no clue why gods or demons needed those emotions, what use ancient beings had for something as fragile and fleeting as sorrow or joy, but she was also far too impatient to wait for answers.
For now, she had somewhere to be.
Lyssena wanted to go to the market, and she did exactly that.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Under the Sun
Erevos
The market was full of humans.
Erevos enjoyed feeding on emotions—the tang of envy, the warm bloom of joy, the metallic pulse of fear, and the sweetness of devotion—but noise was an entirely different matter.
