Chapter 5
Chapter Five
The Meaning of Devotion
Lyssena
She sat on nothing.
There was no floor beneath her, only the suggestion of one.
A flat impression drawn in shadow, as if the world had been dipped in ink and left to dry wrong.
Her palm rested against that void, sinking slightly, but there was no texture, no grain, only the eerie sensation of pressing against a thought, something that wasn’t truly there and yet insisted on being felt.
Everything was wrong.
The walls, the bed, the very air had been dipped in shadow. Shapes remained: the outline of the dresser, the sharp angle of the door frame, the familiar rise of her bed, but they were now hollow sketches and painted in pitch. And at the center of it all: him.
A living mass of black, shifting and pulsing, the suggestion of form where no form should exist. He had no true edges, only movement like smoke that understood how to hold itself together.
Then, his eyes opened.
Two perfect purple orbs that stretched backward, and her mind, despite everything, longed toward prayer. But she did not move.
Because something was changing again.
The darkness that was Erevos began to draw inward, folding and condensing, and time seemed to slow to match the rhythm of his becoming.
His height—too vast to belong within the narrow confines of her room—compressed until it could fit.
Shoulders took shape, broad and thick, as if chiseled from the dark before light had ever been born.
His chest followed, muscles like slabs of stone wrapped in something that pretended to be skin.
Lyssena wasn’t sure whether to be scared or fascinated.
Erevos was massive.
Every muscle looked like it had been forged before softness had entered the world, each tendon flexing with restrained violence.
His thighs stretched wide, thick and solid and entirely without mercy, carved from the kind of strength men could only dream of.
This was not a man. This was the thing men imagined when they wished to be feared.
And last came his face. The head of a man, but featureless. No mouth, no nose, only those eyes, those endless, watching purple eyes.
Her family’s voices, still clawing from the other side of the shadow-walls, began to fade, swallowed slowly as the room darkened further—if such a thing were even possible.
He watched her, and she watched him.
He waited, and Lyssena could not comprehend what was happening before her. She has already forgotten the horrid knight named Kaan. She didn’t notice the screams outside the new door. She only thought of what had just happened.
She had prayed. She had called for a god, and now he had come, asking her to go with him. But what did that mean? What did it mean to go with a god like this?
Was she going to die?
“I don’t want to die,” she whispered, and she finally realized she was speaking to a real god.
She should kneel. Her body knew that, even if her heart did not. Had she forgotten how to show respect so quickly?
She moved slowly, folding her legs beneath her, pressing her weight onto her arms as she righted herself into a posture of obedience. She placed her palms gently on her thighs and lowered her gaze.
Besides being a god, he was a male, and she could not meet his eyes now, not now that she had seen that he had them. He was a god, and she must show respect.
Lyssena was afraid, and yet she was not.
She did not know what to do.
“Why would you die?” Erevos asked, and she felt the shift of his presence as he moved away from her, soundless but felt, a displacement in the air that made her want to look up, to follow him with her eyes, to know what he was doing, but she didn’t.
She mustn’t.
“You said you want to take me with you . . . ” she murmured, voice trembling.
“Does that mean you would die?”
How could she have asked that? How dare she question him? Foolish, foolish Lyssena. She had never spoken to a god before—at least she had never heard back—had never even dreamed of being in the presence of one. He could do as he pleased with her.
So she kept her eyes down, head bowed, because it felt right, because her body had unraveled into the shape of a prayer, and for once—just once—it wasn’t for someone who had never listened.
They hadn’t listened.
Not when she was a child, sick with fear, praying with tiny hands clenched over her heart that her mother’s cough would go away.
Not when she asked for the goats to stop dying so they might have milk to sell.
Not when she whispered into her pillow, night after night, asking for safety, or love, or a gentle husband. They were silent.
They had always been silent.
They gave nothing.
But he came.
And that truth was clear to her.
She could not understand it the way she would want to.
But he had heard her. She had lit the flame and screamed inside, and he had torn through the veil between worlds to stand between her and the man who would have broken her.
And he had not waited for gratitude, had not asked for ritual, before erasing the threat.
That was strength. That was a god.
She exhaled slowly and lowered herself further, pressing her forehead to the ground—though there was no true ground here, only shadow—but it felt like him, as if every surface now bore his name.
The air, the floor, the weight in her chest—it was all Erevos.
She folded forward, smaller and smaller, arms at her sides, palms open, spine bowed so low she felt the pull at the base of her skull, and still she did not raise her head.
She had never felt this small and never this safe.
Erevos. Erevos. Erevos.
There was no holy room. No elder’s voice telling her what she owed and how to say it. There were no temple rules, no rituals she needed to memorize. There was only this: her truth.
This god came when the others didn’t.
And for that alone, he deserved everything she had been taught to give and more. If devotion had weight, she would give all of hers to him. If faith had shape, she would mold it in his image.
Around her, the shadows pulsed. It was soft, like breath taken slowly. It felt warmer, with something deeper that wrapped itself around her gently, curling into the hollows behind her knees, the arch of her spine, like night falling softly over a weary world.
How could she ever express her gratitude?
So she offered more.
She whispered, “You’re the only one who ever came. Please, greatest Erevos . . . take me with you.”
And it was the holiest thing she had ever said.
Lyssena opened her eyes and felt well-rested. Though she could not remember the moment she had fallen asleep, and as she glanced down, she discovered herself wrapped in a thick black blanket, lying on a bed just as dark. Everything about it was unfamiliar and yet . . . gentle.
Is this my room?
Lyssena turned her head slowly, letting her gaze sweep across the space, and saw that everything around her existed in shades of black. One flat color, but within it layers, depths, textures that felt as though the dark had moods and temperatures and names she had never learned.
It felt like a cave, but nothing like the ones from the forest near her house. The walls here were strange, curling into fluid shapes that had no corners. There was no light except for something above her that glowed faintly.
She tilted her head back and found a single orb suspended high above, casting a dim, gray light that barely dared to exist. It was the first hint of color she had seen since waking, and even that seemed shy.
She sat up slowly, fingers running across the surface of the blanket.
It was soft, thicker than linen, gentler than wool, not fur, not anything she could easily name, and the strangeness of its texture made her hum without meaning to, just a quiet sound of thought as her eyes moved toward the far side of the room.
Another wall. Black again.
She lifted her hand, reached toward it, and pressed her fingers against the surface, feeling something cold and solid. The question echoed again in her mind: Where am I?
“Do you breathe well?” a voice asked, echoing through the walls. “Tell me where it feels wrong. I will adjust it.”
Erevos.
She froze, hand still against the wall, and lowered her head instinctively. Lyssena wasn’t sure what he meant by adjusting. The air? Well, he was a god. Perhaps he could really do anything. And still she was confused.
“I breathe well. Thank you,” she said, her voice quiet, her thumb rubbing against the other.
“You may walk,” Erevos said. “Touch what you wish. See if this place suits you.”
She hesitated, then rose.
Her steps were almost silent. She was hesitant about everything around her.
Lyssena’s fingertips brushed against the back of a high-backed chair, which was shaped exactly like the one that had stood by her window at home.
It even had the same faint curve at the top, the one she used to drape her shawl across in the early evening.
She blinked, frowning, her gaze drifting toward the dresser beside it.
She knew that shape.
The edge was slightly worn on the left side, just as it had been at home, where she had once spilled oil and tried to scrub it clean, only to fade the color instead.
Her fingers moved to the second drawer, and sure enough, the handle pulled out a little too far, the screw loose in the same, familiar way.
The way the bed was placed, tucked beneath a low curve in the ceiling, looked like her room.
Not exactly, but close enough that her heart began to beat faster. She turned in place. There had been a pillow she loved, one she always held when she couldn’t stop her thoughts from circling, but it wasn’t here.
And then it was.
It appeared so quickly, without sound or movement, nestled in the corner of the bed, as dark as everything else in this place, but unmistakably shaped like the one she used to cling to beneath the covers when the night stretched too long, and the world felt too sad.
She gasped and stepped back.
I didn’t say that out loud.
The pillow looked wrong at first—slightly off, not square—and she moved closer. She reached out, fingers trembling as they brushed its surface. And then she saw five edges. Not four.
She had torn it as a child, by accident, playing too roughly, too carelessly, and tried to sew it back together herself.
She had been too small, her stitches uneven, and the whole corner had collapsed in her hands.
So she had added a new one. A fifth edge.
It wasn’t perfect, but it had made the pillow feel whole again.
No one else had known. No one else had ever noticed.
And now it sat before her.
Then came the vibrating sound that filled the room, like an animal’s growl, and she clapped her hands over her ears out of fear, heart slamming into her ribs. But it didn’t help; she could still hear it, not through her ears, but somewhere deeper.
Inside her head.