Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
The Pink of Spring
Erevos
His songbird smelled sweet again.
Erevos knew what sweetness was; he had tasted the purest form of devotion from Lyssena, warm and radiant like golden nectar on his tongue, but this scent was different.
It was still sweet, but in another way. Perhaps a different flavor entirely.
He watched her in silence, waiting as she thought through his question, and he knew, without a doubt, that whatever she wished for, he would give her all of it.
If she wanted more dresses, he would shape them from shadow and silk, would craft her every design her imagination could conjure.
If she desired more spices, he would find a dozen more Rolams, scour the corners of the human realm, and bring back every box and jar, every powder and seed that could make her food sing.
He would go back to the human world, again and again, if it meant placing a smile on her lips.
But more than anything, Erevos wished that Lyssena would never want to leave him.
Because if she did, he would not be able to let her go. He simply couldn’t.
His little songbird was too precious, too lovely, too kind, too beautifully human to belong anywhere but here . . . wrapped in his arms, safe and kept, where he could protect her and hold her and never again let her be hurt.
And right now, with her lying so near, he felt that familiar desire to pull her close, to feel the weight of her body against his, to breathe in the sweet scent now radiating from her skin.
“What is it that you wish for?” he asked again as he lifted the arm he had been resting on and brought it above her, caging her beneath him.
“Tell me, Lyssena,” he whispered, his face close to hers, his breath a caress of warmth. “What is it that you want?”
Her sweet scent deepened, and Erevos lowered his head to hers, his mouth barely an inch from her temple, and inhaled deeply.
Lyssena’s lips twitched, as if she were about to say something but lost the thought at the very edge of her tongue.
Erevos knew she hadn’t truly forgotten, so perhaps she had changed her mind; perhaps she was shifting through all the possibilities, weighing want against need, sorting the tangled threads of want and caution like he often did himself.
“I wish for you to answer two of my questions,” she whispered at last, and Erevos went still.
He had been certain she would ask for an object—perhaps silk, or sugar, or another soft comfort—or ask him to do something for her, to build her something, or bring her something, or promise her something with his power.
But his songbird wanted answers.
And he would give her those, too.
“I promise not to joke this time,” he said, his mouth stretching into that impossibly wide grin.
At that, Lyssena giggled. A sound light and fluttering, like the brush of wings across a mirror’s surface, and it made his gaze drift over her face, tracing every shifting muscle, every twitch of her lips, the way her nose scrunched just slightly, the way her eyes shone with thought.
“Are you a man?”
A man meant a human male.
Erevos knew the term well enough. His body was shaped in a similar fashion, two arms, two legs, a head, a mouth, all the familiar signs of humanoid form, but that was where the similarity ended.
“I am not a human, Lyssena,” he answered.
“I know that!” she said with a soft smile, and Erevos noticed that her green eyes were slowly being swallowed by the black dots in their centers.
“Are there gods that are wome—female?” she asked next, tilting her head on the pillow.
“I am no god,” Erevos replied, “and there are no females of my kind.”
Demons did not reproduce; there was no cycle, no mating, no need for such things in The Void. Erevos had never cared to question it, had never felt the need to, until Lyssena’s soft, curious voice drew the thought from him.
He paused.
That demon he had erased . . .
He remembered it now. The grotesque mimicry, the blood, the stroking. He had seen human males rub themselves in the same manner, though only now did he understand the significance, the perversion of what had been done.
That demon had likely fed too deeply on lust, had drowned in it until it twisted him.
“So you’re a male!” Lyssena said, her voice hesitant, the words curling upward into a question. “Uh . . . right?”
Was he?
Erevos glanced down at his body, at the legs that mirrored a man’s well enough, the shape that had always simply been. He had legs, yes.
So . . . there was that.
As he turned his gaze back to Lyssena, he noticed that her face had changed color. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose now flushed a warm shade of pink, the exact hue of those soft-petaled flowers that bloomed in the human realm when spring began to stretch its fingers across the land.
The Void had no seasons.
It knew no cold or warmth, no change of light or wind, no changing of sky or soil.
And yet Erevos had always been curious about how the world moved through its cycles, how color faded and returned, how trees shed and regrew, how snow, which he had only seen in the human realm, fell like frozen ash from the clouds.
But spring . . .
Spring was when the human realm became its most colorful, its most alive, and he remembered it vividly. It was in the spring that he’d seen Lyssena in one of the most memorable moments in his life.
She had been sitting beneath the angled bend of a tree whose trunk curved like a question, her form framed by a halo of pink blossoms that trembled in the wind, and she had looked ethereal.
The same shade dusted her cheeks now.
Songbirds sang the loudest when the world was pink and full of bloom, when the air was warm, and the sky was blue, and Erevos thought it suited her. His songbird, so full of color and warmth.
And in that moment, he thought he wanted to devour her, to cage her inside himself, to hold her so close she would never again be beyond reach, to fold her into his being until no part of her could be taken or lost.
Everything about her was just . . .
Perfect.
“Then I am a male, Lyssena. I can call myself god if you wish me to.”