Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
A Mask to See the Truth
Erevos
His songbird’s scent still lingered in Erevos’s mind as he shaped his shadows into the delicate face of a bird. A songbird, to be exact.
He heard Lyssena’s footsteps as she left her old bedroom and made her way through the quiet hallway. When she stepped into what was now her new room—the one where Erevos stood—she tilted her head and asked, “How do I look?” swaying her hips from side to side.
The shadowy gown he had crafted for her hugged her form well, but Erevos believed that anything would suit her. Everything she wore in the human realm had looked good, had enhanced the curve of her body, the softness in her shape, the warmth of her skin.
“It suits you well,” he said, setting the half-formed mask on the table beside him. “Would you want shoes?”
At that, Lyssena nodded, and Erevos began walking toward her.
There was a strange feeling moving through him as he did, something unfamiliar and unnameable, something he could not quite grasp or pin down.
Lyssena’s expression had changed, too. She no longer looked at him with fear, not like before, and that in itself made him pause. If not fear . . . then what was it?
He didn’t know.
Lowering himself to his heels before her, Erevos extended one hand so she could place her foot in it. She hesitated and then gently set her foot into his palm.
Erevos looked at her toes. They were small, different from his. Well, he didn’t exactly have toes, not in the way humans did, but he also didn’t have hair, and that was another difference, one of many, all of which he had started to notice with increasing fascination.
Placing his other hand over her foot, he summoned his shadows and wrapped them around her heel, shaping them forward to curl over her toes. He created a shoe that was firm yet soft, crafted with a cushioning lace along the sole so that she would feel no bumps or sharp edges as she walked.
Then he repeated the same process for her other foot, and when he finished, Lyssena stood with a new pair of shoes and entirely her own.
“Thank you so much, greatest,” Lyssena said with a smile, and Erevos felt that heat again. The same strange warmth that had begun to coil in his chest refused to leave.
For some reason, he found himself wanting to embrace her, to feel her close again.
It confused him . . . this new sensation.
He had been fascinated by Lyssena for so many years. He watched her, studied her, knew her as one might know a rare and ancient song, but he had never felt this warmth before, this need to be near.
“Of course,” he replied, rubbing his chest with one clawed hand, as if the act might somehow still the sensation within.
Erevos turned back toward the table, where the unfinished mask waited for him, and behind him, Lyssena walked in her new shoes toward the chair, her steps light and curious. She sat down, leaned her elbows onto the shadowy table, and peered at the strange object he was crafting.
“What’s that?” she asked, watching as Erevos added a slender, curved beak to the forming face of what would soon become a songbird’s head.
“A mask with oxygen,” he answered, shaping the piece with both hands. “I want you to be able to walk outside.”
He continued his work, adding the eyes now, though this part was difficult, more complicated than it seemed.
He couldn’t leave the eyes hollow, for the air in The Void could harm Lyssena’s vision. But he couldn’t make them opaque either; if the mask were completely black, she would not see at all.
So Erevos created the thinnest surface of shadow, a film so fine it would tint the world in a darker shade but still allow her to see through it. He shaped it slowly, carefully, and Lyssena watched him all the while, then asked, “Where are we? What is this place?”
He had wanted to explain everything to her when they bathed, though he was too distracted with everything that was happening there, and he simply forgot.
Erevos had never forgotten anything, never felt this warmth in his chest, never been drawn like that to anyone and anything. And yet now, he was.
“In the world,” Erevos began, “there are many dimensions.” He wasn’t sure she would fully understand, as humans had not yet discovered the truth of such things, but he tried anyway.
“In one of them, your kind lives. And in others . . . imagine it as layers of a world stacked one atop another. In one of those layers, we exist.”
“Gods?” Lyssena asked, propping herself up on one elbow, her brows drawn with thought.
“Gods do not exist, Lyssena,” Erevos said calmly. “A god is a concept created by humans to ease their souls when the time is hard. And as it evolved, it became a tool of control.”
“How come? There are temples and prayers and—”
“What is a god?” he asked, and Lyssena went quiet.
After Lyssena ate her bowl of porridge sweetened with honey, she curled into her new bed.
It was a true princess bed, in every sense of the word, for Erevos had shaped it in the likeness of one he had once seen beneath a real princess in the human realm, with silken drapes that shimmered like moonlight, if the moon was black, and carvings that swirled like wind over frozen glass.
He pulled the thick, weighty blanket up to her shoulders, its texture soft as velvet and warm as breath, then stood silently beside her, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest before he turned, stepped back, and closed the door behind him with a soundless sweep of shadow.
It was time to kill a demon.
Without hesitation, Erevos dissolved into smoke and shadow, his form unwinding into inky ribbons that slithered into the thick walls of the home he had made, and when he emerged once more beyond their protective edge, he reformed in silence, inhaling deeply, trying to trace the lingering scent of the one who had dared approach what was his.
Demons did not have strong scents. They usually smelled like the places they haunted—funerals, fire, stone, or rot—and Erevos, too, once bore that blank, hollow smell of emptiness.
But now, he smelled of Lyssena, of her skin, of her warmth, of the honey she had eaten and the soft wet minerals of the hot spring where he had held her. For a reason he could not explain, that scent pleased him in a way that was both unfamiliar and deeply satisfying.
Just as it pleased him that Lyssena was beginning to put together the pieces of the human system, that she was starting to question the foundation of the world she had come from, and what she had been told to believe.
She still thought he was a god, but not entirely; she was finally hesitating.
He wanted her to understand, but not through fear or doctrine, not through the human ways of sermons and submission. He wanted her to discover the truth for herself, to unearth it slowly like one might uncover buried light beneath layers of dust and time, and he would be there to guide her.
As he moved, Erevos rounded the high, jagged walls carved from shadow, his gaze scanning the endless paths of the cave system he had claimed for his own, the air around him thick with the silence of undisturbed dark.
So far, there was nothing unusual.
But when he reached the mouth of the outer cave, something caught his eye—a thin streak of red slashed across the stone.
A trace of blood.
And demons, as he well knew, did not bleed.