The cavern was wrong.
Erevos knew it the moment he emerged from shadow into the familiar vastness of their home, the shadow walls arching high above him, the slow river of darkness winding its silent path along the far edge of the chamber. Everything was exactly as it had been when he left. And yet . . . It was wrong.
“Lyssena.”
He did not raise his voice because he did not need to; his voice carried regardless, threading through the cavern like a low current. No answer came.
He stepped forward, his gaze sweeping across the seating area she had begun to arrange. Her presence lingered in the air, a trace of warmth woven into the otherwise cool stillness of The Void.
But she was not there.
Erevos moved deeper into the cavern, his stride lengthening as he passed into adjoining chambers, each space carved from shadowed stone. It was all empty.
“Lyssena.”
This time her name carried more weight, and with that, the shadows responded. They stirred along the walls at once, rising toward him, stretching outward in thin, searching tendrils that slipped into crevices and along ceilings, beneath stone ledges and into narrow passages where even she could not easily tread.
Find her.
The shadows dispersed, racing outward through the vast network of tunnels that laced the hill, slipping across thresholds, pouring through unseen seams in reality itself.
Erevos stood very still in the center of their home and waited. He had never needed to wait for his shadows before. But now they returned with nothing.
So he expanded his reach. The shadows thickened, flooding outward in greater volume, spreading like a tide beyond the boundaries of their cavern and into the wider expanse of TheVoid, brushing against distant structures, skimming across the market’s outer edges, tracing the contours of familiar territories.
He could feel them straining, and yet he could not feel her.
Erevos attempted to narrow his focus, to refine the search, to isolate the distinct pattern of her presence among the countless currents of darkness.
He could sense other demons; he could sense the slow churn of traded grief and sealed emotion within shadowed containers at the market.
He could sense the hum of ancient energies shifting beneath the surface of The Void.
But Lyssena . . . He could not find her. Something unfamiliar began to unfurl within him, not irritation, nor anger. It was sharper and colder.
It felt as though a fissure had opened somewhere deep within his vast, ancient core, and from it poured something raw and destabilizing.
He had existed through centuries. He had endured the slow erosion of time that claimed even demons less careful than himself.
He had never feared.
Now the cavern felt enormous and suffocating, the silence no longer thick and intentional but oppressive, echoing back at him with unbearable emptiness.
She had been here.
She had walked these stones.
She had spoken his name in this space.
And now there was only stillness.
Erevos’s form shifted, edges sharpening, shadows clinging more tightly to him as though reacting to the tremor beneath his composure. Where was she?
The question tore through him.
For the first time in his long existence, Erevos felt true fear.
If harm had come to her??—
