Erevos’s greatest desire was for Lyssena to choose him back. He asked when they first spoke, and he wanted to ask again.
“Because I was uncertain, I created the oxygen mask. I told myself it was a precaution. The Void was not built for lungs such as yours. I would not risk your life on an assumption.”
He learned he could shape and refine his own shadows the day he understood what it was he truly consumed. It wasdevotion.
The temple in Lyssena’s village—where humans gathered daily to kneel, to bow their heads, to whisper desperate prayerstoward gods who had never existed—had been a feast laid unknowingly at his feet. Their belief soaked into stone and timber, and he drank it through the cracks in the foundation.
So he carved a chamber of shadow beneath the altar, a room no human eyes could fully perceive, and allowed small “miracles” to manifest in answer to their prayers. A healed wound, a whispered omen, a flicker of divine presence in the dark. They wept, and they worshipped harder. They fed him.
For centuries, devotion poured into him like wine into an endless chalice, and he grew vast on it, stronger. He became the dark beneath the altar. The shadow in the silence. The unseen chamber behind the statues of gods sculpted to nothing at all.
That power allowed him to bend particles, to coax matter into new arrangements, to weave shadow with substance until it resembled bread warm from a human oven. That power allowed him to create sustenance from himself. And, apparently, that power allowed him to change her.
“I did not intend to alter you, Lyssena,” he said. “But when you consumed what was mine . . . You consumed me.”
When Lyssena heard the truth in his voice, Erevos felt her anger turn into something he did not know how to name. It did not burn, yet it was no relief either.
“If you lie to me now, then I shall be dead.”
And with those words, she removed the mask before Erevos could reach her.
The songbird’s porcelain face lifted away from her skin, and for a suspended moment, the cavern seemed to inhale.
If Erevos had a heart, it would have stopped at that exact moment.
Her long brown hair spilled over her shoulders in a silken cascade. It slid over her collarbones, over the rise of her chest, strands clinging to her lips where her breath had warmed them. Her green eyes lifted to meet his.
He could feel the rapid flutter of her pulse at her throat, the slight tremor in her fingers where they curled around the discarded mask. She was afraid.
And she was choosing to stand before him anyway.
Erevos did not move, but every shadow in the cavern leaned toward her.
For a long moment, Lyssena said nothing. Her fingers tightened around the mask still hanging at her side.
With no oxygen, a human would have died by now, of that Erevos was certain. Though she did not move at all, and in the first few moments, she did not even breathe.
“You should have told me.”
Erevos felt warm again. Hearing her voice, not muffled by the songbird’s head.
“You should have trusted me enough to let me decide what to do with that truth.”
Erevos inclined his head. “Yes.”
There was no defense.
Her throat moved as she swallowed. “You took something from me. Even if you did not mean to.” Her eyes shone now, not weak, not small, but bright with emotion. “You took the option of death. You took the illusion that I was still untouched by this world.”
The shadows recoiled faintly at the strain in her voice.
“But,” she continued, and that single word altered the space between them, “you also saved my life.”
Erevos stilled.
“You saved me the night you found me. You fed me when I would have starved. You sheltered me when I was terrified. You answered questions you did not understand simply because I asked them.”
Erevos took a step toward her.
