Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Beyond the Mouth of Stone
Lyssena
Lyssena had expected stepping outside to feel like falling, like crossing some invisible edge where the world would drop away beneath her feet, but instead Erevos turned, and the world did not open; it narrowed.
He did not lead her immediately into vastness, but deeper into stone.
The doorway did not spill into the sky, but into a cavern so immense she could not see its ceiling, only the suggestion of curvature where shadow thickened and swallowed detail whole.
Her steps echoed very faintly against rock that seemed to drink sound rather than return it, and when she glanced back, the house was already smaller than it should have been, as though distance behaved differently here.
“You built this house inside a cave,” she said, her voice soft, and yet it seemed to travel farther than it should. Lyssena thought of what would happen if she screamed.
Erevos did not answer immediately. He simply walked.
And so she followed.
The stone beneath her feet was not rough like the quarry walls near her village; it was smoother, it looked polished in places, as though countless unseen hands had brushed against it over centuries, though she suspected nothing had touched it at all.
When she trailed her fingers along the cavern wall, the surface felt cool but not cold, solid but faintly yielding.
They turned once. Then again.
And again.
Lyssena began to lose her sense of direction, for the cavern did not twist in sharp angles but in slow, curving bends that made it impossible to measure distance.
The walls narrowed and widened unpredictably, at times pressing closer as though curious about her, at others opening into vast hollows where the darkness pooled thickly between stone pillars that rose like the trunks of ancient trees.
“Do you know where we’re going?” she asked, though she suspected the question was foolish.
Erevos glanced back at her, and even through the mask, she felt the weight of his amusement. Of course, he knew.
The cave floor shifted gradually beneath her covered feet, the stone giving way to a fine layer of dark sediment that gathered at the edges of her steps and then smoothed itself again. She slowed, crouching slightly, pressing her fingers into it.
It clung to her glove like ash.
But when she lifted her hand, it fell away without leaving residue. She straightened quickly, heart fluttering, both unsettled and delighted.
This cave was definitely not like the caves at her home.
The ceiling arched lower in one stretch, forcing Erevos to dip his head, though she suspected he did not need to, suspected he simply chose to.
They turned again.
Lyssena was certain now that if she tried to find her way back alone, she would wander endlessly until she forgot what she had been looking for.
“Are we close?” she asked, and only then did she notice that Erevos had stopped.
The cavern ahead brightened.
Not with light, but with absence of thickness, as though the darkness thinned into something translucent.
Erevos extended one hand behind him, not touching her, but close enough that she felt the suggestion of it. “Stay near me.”
Lyssena nodded, and the final bend opened.
This was where the cave ended.
Lyssena stepped out of stone and into something that felt both infinite and unfinished.
The first thing she noticed was what she did not feel.
There was no wind.
Her bodysuit did not stir. The air did not rustle the feathers on her mask or slip around her ankles. It simply held in stillness so complete that her own small movements felt almost loud. So she took another step.
The grass beneath her was similar to what she knew, though the blades were darker than anything she had ever seen. When she bent and brushed her fingers through it, the texture was cool and silky, each strand thin and perfectly formed, bending easily and then rising again without resistance.
It did not smell like grass.
It did not smell like anything.
It was unusual . . . not to smell a single thing, something that Lyssena could not imagine getting used to. What would it be like if she lived here for years?
Though she did smell the food Erevos cooked for her. Speaking of which . . . Lyssena turned to look at him. He was standing a few steps away from her, unmoving as usual.
He observed her, of that she was certain. He did so quite often, and she did not mind. Well, maybe she even enjoyed it a little more than a human should.
Lyssena decided it was not the time for lovey-dovey thoughts about her god, so she looked away, beyond the field stretched trees.
She walked toward the nearest one without asking permission.
Its trunk was the color of deep pomegranate, ridged and twisting upward into branches that spread wide but carried no fluttering leaves.
She pressed her palm against the bark, and that, too, felt like nothing.
“Are you alive?” she whispered, unsure whether she meant the tree or the realm itself.
It did not answer.
But she felt something faintly responsive beneath her touch, a subtle vibration that traveled from bark into bone. Lyssena stepped back, turning slowly.
There was no sky as she understood it.
Above her stretched an expanse of uninterrupted darkness, not clouded, not star-strewn, not lit by sun or moon, but vast and depthless, as though she stood inside the pupil of an eye. Her breath came quicker. The sheer scale of this place felt like she was trapped inside a dark dream.
To her left, she saw a current barely moving. A river, perhaps?
She had not noticed it at first, for it did not gleam or reflect in any familiar way. But as she moved farther from the cave’s mouth, she saw a ribbon of black cutting through the land, smooth and very silent.
Lyssena decided to approach it. The water—if it was water—ran without ripple, without splash, without sound. When she crouched at its edge, she expected to see her reflection distorted along its surface. Instead, she saw nothing. Just depth.
She leaned closer, heart pounding.
“Erevos,” she called, though she did not look away to meet her god’s eyes.
The river did not mirror her mask, nor her hands, nor the outline of her form. It swallowed light entirely, leaving only an impression of endless descent.
Carefully, she extended one finger and dipped it into the surface.
The sensation was not wet.
It was cool and fluid, but it did not cling to her, did not bead or drip. When she lifted her finger, no trace remained, though she could swear the river had thickened briefly around her touch.
She stood abruptly, a thrill running through her. “This is impossible,” she breathed.
The silence pressed around her ears until she became aware of her own heartbeat, steady and loud within her chest, the only rhythm in a place that did not seem to pulse at all. No insects hummed. No birds called. No leaves rustled. Even her footsteps felt swallowed the moment they landed.
She turned in a slow circle and thought to herself how this place felt like standing at the beginning of creation.
Or the end of it.
She looked back toward the cave mouth, where Erevos stood watching her, tall and unmoving near the threshold. For a fleeting moment, the enormity of the place made her feel small.
Lyssena lifted her chin, turning once more toward the endless stretch of dark grass and pomegranate-colored trees and silent rivers that refused to reflect her.
“I want to see all of it,” she said.
And she meant it from the bottom of her heart.
When Lyssena was finally done with exploring every single tree within reach, every patch of ashy grass, every slow current of ink-dark water that refused to reflect her face, no matter how long she stared into it, she made her way back to Erevos, who had not moved from the place where she had left him.
Not once.
The entire time—though she could not say how much time had truly passed, for there was no sun to climb or sink, no moon to wax or wane, no shifting light to measure the hours—Erevos had remained exactly as he was. A figure carved from shadow itself.
He had watched her.
She knew that without needing to look.
Even when she wandered farther into the grass, even when she circled the trees and crouched by the riverbanks and pressed her palm against bark, she had felt the weight of his gaze resting between her shoulder blades. Only sometimes would his head turn slowly, following her path.
At first, it had unsettled her.
The awareness of being watched so intently, so continuously, had made her movements feel exaggerated. She had nearly stumbled once beneath the sensation, suddenly conscious of how small she must look against the endless dark.
And after a while, Lyssena found herself growing accustomed to it. Somehow.
It was like the silence of The Void. Overwhelming at first, then gradually folding into the background of her awareness until it became part of the landscape itself.
When she finally reached him, she slowed her steps.
Up close, he looked exactly as he had before she left—posture straight, shoulders relaxed, hands at his sides, darkness curling faintly around his form as though it breathed with him even when he did not visibly breathe. Had he truly not moved once?
“Did you just . . . stand here?” she asked, tilting her head slightly as she studied him.
If she had not known better, she might have believed him to be a statue erected in the mouth of the cave like some guardian figure carved to oversee the realm beyond.
Lyssena hesitated, her fingers fidgeting lightly at her sides. She wanted to ask him whether he was bored. The question hovered on her tongue.
On one hand, he was a god—or a demon—or something that blurred the boundary between the two so completely that the distinction hardly mattered.
He shaped air and stone and shadow; he bent objects as though they were cloth.
The concept of boredom might be too small and too human to apply to him at all.
But on the other hand, she could not help herself.
Curiosity rose in her, and she had begun to understand something about Erevos . . . something quite certain.
He did not get angry easily. In fact, he did not seem to get angry at all.
She had questioned him repeatedly. She had touched him boldly. She had stepped into his realm and asked whether she was caged. And he had never punished her.
The absence of wrath had made her braver.
“I was gone for . . . a while, I think,” she said slowly, glancing back over the dark field as though it might offer some clue. “Were you bored?”
There it was. The word felt almost absurd in this place, where time did not pass the way it should.
She searched his face carefully for any flicker of offense, any tightening of shadow.
None came.
In truth, she had begun to suspect something that made warmth coil unexpectedly in her chest. She thought Erevos might enjoy her questions.
The way his purple eyes focused when she asked them. The way his voice shifted, subtle but noticeable, when he explained something to her.
Sometimes she wondered whether he found as much pleasure in answering as she did in asking.
And that thought—that a being as vast and ancient as he seemed might take enjoyment in her curiosity—made her feel both powerful and impossibly small at the same time.
Lyssena stepped closer, peering up at him through the shadowed eyes of her mask.
“You watched me the whole time,” she added, blinking her eyelashes at him, though through the mask he probably couldn’t see them.
“I will never be bored with you, Lyssena,” her god answered her, and she smiled widely at that. Lyssena felt her chest flutter, her cheeks warm, and the need to hug him as hard as she could.
She was not yet certain whether that realization should comfort her or unsettle her all over again.