Lyssena became acutely aware of the steady beat of her own pulse beneath her skin.
“What happened?” she asked.
Rolam was silent for a moment. “As years passed,” he said at last, “she changed.”
“She aged,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
The single syllable made Lyssena sad. Would that happen to her as well? Would Erevos stay alone after she was gone?
“I asked her to come with me,” he continued. “To leave the human world behind.”
Lyssena’s fingers curled slightly against the table.
“To The Void?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated only briefly before asking, “Why not remain there with her?”
Rolam’s expression changed as though the question itself revealed her limited understanding. “In the human realm, there is time. It moves and consumes. It reduces all things.”
“In The Void, there is no time. No decay, no aging. She would have remained exactly as she was the day she stepped across the threshold.”
Lyssena’s breath stilled.Eternity.
Eternity was not poetry; it was literal. No aging. No death. No end.
Her mind struggled to wrap around it, because the human part of her measured life in seasons and years and birthdays. But here . . . here those measures dissolved.
She looked back at Rolam.
“And she refused?” she asked.
“She told me,” he said, “that her life was meaningful because it ended.”
Lyssena swallowed. “And you?” she asked, her voice quieter now. “What did you want?”
“I wanted her,” Rolam said simply.
The honesty of it made the air feel tight, even through the mask of a songbird.
Lyssena opened her mouth to ask another question, but the cavern trembled. The shadows along the walls shifted suddenly,pulling inward as though drawn by a force. The glass jars behind Rolam rattled, liquid inside them quivering. And then the entrance of the shop darkened. Rolam’s gaze lifted toward the threshold before Lyssena even turned.
The shadows did not merely part. They recoiled.
And in the doorway stood Erevos.
His height seemed greater, where the ceiling dipped lower than their home cavern, his thorns nearly grazing the arch of carved stone, his body outlined in a darkness deeper than the shadows surrounding him. For one suspended moment, everything was still. His gaze found her first, and Lyssena had exactly one second of shame before it moved.
To Rolam.
Erevos growled loudly, the shelves shuddered as the vibration tore through the cavern, glass vessels rattling violently before several toppled from their perches and shattered against the floor in violent bursts of liquid and bone. The scent of brine and decay exploded into the air.
Before Lyssena could speak, Erevos’s shadows struck. They did not glide like they did before. They lunged.
Black tendrils shot across the space, coiling around Rolam’s torso and arms with brutal force, slamming him backward into the stone wall behind the long table. More glass crashed to the ground, velvet cases overturning, pearls scattering like pale drops of frozen light across the dark floor.
