Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Whispers Between Walls
Lyssena
This was a whole house made of shadows.
So much so, it made Lyssena wonder whether gods lived like humans, whether they, too, needed kitchens and bedrooms and halls and quiet spaces to exist in.
Besides her two rooms, it had a kitchen that looked almost exactly like the one in her home and a hallway.
Even a living room, though it had no furniture at all.
Lyssena walked down the long corridor, which was far simpler than the detailed, ornate rooms she had explored so far. It had only smooth walls on either side and a flat floor beneath her feet: all of it, of course, made from shadow.
Every room she had seen so far was lit by the same soft gray orb that floated near the ceiling, but here, in the hallway, there was no light at all.
Lyssena felt a prickle of unease as she moved through the darkness, the silence existing all around her, but she was feeling brave today, and far too curious to sit quietly in her room doing nothing.
With one hand resting on the wall to guide her and the other gripping her gown, she kept walking.
She had been walking for several minutes and still hadn’t found the end of the hall.
Occasionally, her hand would brush over a raised section of the wall—like bricks stacked atop one another—but strangely, not the entire wall was made this way; just patches, here and there, as if something were half-formed, or still growing.
To calm herself, Lyssena began to hum a soft melody, one she remembered from the traveling minstrels who would visit her village to entertain the people during the harvest months.
She had never been allowed to join the adult dances, as she was unmarried, but sometimes the musicians would orchestrate little dances just for the younger girls, and then she was allowed to join.
“Huuuuuuman?”
Lyssena’s heart dropped straight into her stomach.
That same voice slithered through the air around her, and she looked frantically to both sides, eyes wide, hands beginning to tremble very hard.
“Oh, you are . . . I can feel your heart beating.”
With a cry that tore from her throat, Lyssena darted forward, eyes squeezed shut, screaming as she ran, breath leaving her lungs in ragged bursts until she had no air left at all.
“Lyssen—”
“Ah!” Lyssena cried out just as she slammed into something solid, and when she opened her eyes, she realized it was Erevos.
“I . . . I . . . ” she stammered, breathless and struggling to form even a single sentence as her chest rose and fell rapidly. Erevos moved his head in that inhuman way of his and placed his massive hand gently atop Lyssena’s head.
She instinctively lowered her gaze, but then caught herself, remembering that she was allowed to look at him now—that he had told her so—and suddenly she needed the reassurance of his presence more than ever. She needed to meet his eyes and know that everything was alright.
Erevos moved his hand over her head slowly, as if petting a cat, then reached down to take her hand in his and turned around without a word.
Lyssena hadn’t even noticed there was an entrance behind him, hadn’t seen the space open there like a waiting mouth, so she simply followed, still trembling, still trying to slow her breathing and pull herself back together.
This room was unlike the others she had seen so far.
Every breath she took echoed against the walls, and the walls themselves didn’t look like the rest of the house. They were jagged and uneven, textured like natural stone.
It looked like a cave. A massive, black cave.
“What made you scream?” Erevos asked, his voice echoed around the cave as he stopped just before a dark pool. It looked like water, but moved and shimmered like ink.
With one hand pressed against her chest, Lyssena lifted her eyes to him and swallowed the saliva that had gathered under her tongue.
“I heard . . . a voice,” she said at last.
Lyssena did not want her god to leave her alone. Not to chase down the voice, not to investigate the unknown. And yet, just as much, she did not want him to think she was useless, or worse . . . that she had brought trouble with her.
“Did the voice say anything?” Erevos asked, lowering himself down to sit on his heels.
In that position, Lyssena was, for once, slightly taller than him. And that made her . . .
What did that make her?
A god had lowered himself before her, while she stood tall and looked him in the eyes.
Lyssena decided, then and there, that perhaps everything she had known before meeting Erevos no longer mattered. In this place, with this god, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the rules she had lived by simply did not apply.
“Will I ever go home?” she asked. It slipped from her lips before she could stop it, and Erevos arched his back slightly in reaction, as though he, too, did not expect that to come out of her mouth.
“Is that what the voice asked you?”
Lyssena felt foolish. A silly, overwhelmed girl, full of questions she still didn’t know how to ask, so consumed by thoughts and curiosity that she had entirely lost the thread of their conversation. She didn’t want her god to think she was scattered or weak, and certainly not foolish.
All she truly wanted, right now, was to sit him down and ask him everything from what he meant by calling her songbird, to what her purpose was here, and why he had chosen her.
She shook her head and murmured, “The voice said it knew I’m a human.”
At that, Erevos nodded once, slowly, and then stood again, stretching to his full, towering height. Lyssena assumed that he would deal with the matter now—that he would leave her behind to take care of whatever danger lurked—but instead, he turned toward the inky black pool.
“Would you like to bathe?” he asked.
Would she like to bathe? In an unfamiliar place, in water as black as a raven’s wing, with a god standing nearby? Would he simply stay and watch her?
No, he would probably leave her to it, she reasoned, likely going off to investigate the strange voice while she cleaned herself.
So Lyssena nodded.
Both the god and Lyssena stood in silence, eyes locked, saying nothing.
Lyssena couldn’t understand why he wasn’t leaving. Wasn’t he going to investigate the voice, or give her some privacy? And Erevos, for his part, seemed to be . . . waiting?
But waiting for what?
“I’m sorry—” she began, just as—
“Why aren’t y—” he started to say at the same time.
What a tragedy it was that neither of them finished their sentence. Their words crashing into each other mid-air and falling to the ground between them.
Lyssena cleared her throat, flustered, and gestured for Erevos to continue, but instead of speaking, he simply crossed the space between them in two long strides and lifted her effortlessly into his arms.
A small, startled whimper escaped her lips as she clutched at his shoulders, her breath catching, her heart thundering so loudly in her chest that she was certain he could hear it echoing against the walls of this dark cave.