Chapter 41
Chapter Forty-One
Unbearable Silence
Erevos
“Does it look correct?” Erevos asked, holding the small clay vessel between his fingers.
He was seated at the woman’s rough wooden kitchen table, and the contrast between him and the modest human dwelling was almost grotesque. The ceiling beams seemed too low above him, the hearth too small, the very air too thin to contain the vastness of what he was.
Across from him, the woman stood rigid, her hands clasped so tightly before her apron that her knuckles had blanched white, her gaze fixed somewhere near his elbow rather than upon his face.
She did not dare meet his eyes.
She avoided his gaze just as Lyssena once had when they first stood before one another.
“It . . . it is perfect, Greatest,” she whispered, her voice thin and strained, her entire body shaking in small tremors that made the fabric of her skirts rustle with each unsteady breath.
“Look at it,” Erevos said, tilting the jar toward her. Instead of lifting her gaze, she shook harder.
“I—I trust it is as it should be,” she stammered, her eyes squeezing shut altogether now, as though blindness were safer than sight.
Erevos regarded her for a long moment, observing the rigid line of her shoulders, the rapid flutter of her pulse at the base of her throat, the thick bloom of fear scenting the air around her.
He had told her several times that she might look at him.
He had clarified that he would not harm her.
He had even softened his tone—marginally.
None of it had altered the outcome.
After a pause, he decided the effort was unnecessary.
“It will suffice,” he concluded.
The woman exhaled, and Erevos rose from the table, his height forcing the kitchen into deeper shadow as his presence expanded, the corners of the room darkening in response to him like obedient hounds moving closer to their master.
“You have been efficient,” he said. “Thank you.”
Gratitude was a human custom.
Without further explanation, Erevos allowed his shadows to unfurl.
They slipped from beneath his feet and along the walls like living ink, pooling at the threshold before vanishing entirely into the seams of the house, into the cracks between timber and stone, into the narrow spaces where light never lingered.
The woman made a strangled sound in her throat but did not move.
Moments passed.
Then the shadows returned.
They re-entered the kitchen, coiling upward before solidifying at Erevos’s side, depositing at his feet a heavy leather sack that struck the wooden floor with a heavy weight. The sound alone caused the woman to flinch violently.
Erevos bent to retrieve it and placed the bag upon the table between them. Coins shifted inside with a thick metallic clink.
The woman stared at it.
At first, she did not move. Then, slowly, cautiously, her gaze dropped to the mouth of the sack, where the drawstring had loosened just enough to reveal the gleam of gold and silver within.
Her breath left her in a broken whisper.
It was more coin than most households would see in several lifetimes.
“For the ingredients,” Erevos said evenly. “And for your time.”
Her knees buckled, and she caught herself against the edge of the table, eyes wide. Erevos observed her reaction with mild curiosity. Humans valued metal greatly.
It seemed appropriate compensation for the preservation of his songbird’s comfort.
“You taught me how to take care of my songbird. For that I am grateful.”
Without further ceremony, Erevos dissolved into shadow, leaving behind the scent of cold night and the overwhelming weight of fortune upon her kitchen table.
The cavern was wrong.
Erevos knew it the moment he emerged from shadow into the familiar vastness of their home, the shadow walls arching high above him, the slow river of darkness winding its silent path along the far edge of the chamber. Everything was exactly as it had been when he left. And yet . . . It was wrong.
“Lyssena.”
He did not raise his voice because he did not need to; his voice carried regardless, threading through the cavern like a low current. No answer came.
He stepped forward, his gaze sweeping across the seating area she had begun to arrange. Her presence lingered in the air, a trace of warmth woven into the otherwise cool stillness of The Void.
But she was not there.
Erevos moved deeper into the cavern, his stride lengthening as he passed into adjoining chambers, each space carved from shadowed stone. It was all empty.
“Lyssena.”
This time her name carried more weight, and with that, the shadows responded.
They stirred along the walls at once, rising toward him, stretching outward in thin, searching tendrils that slipped into crevices and along ceilings, beneath stone ledges and into narrow passages where even she could not easily tread.
Find her.
The shadows dispersed, racing outward through the vast network of tunnels that laced the hill, slipping across thresholds, pouring through unseen seams in reality itself.
Erevos stood very still in the center of their home and waited. He had never needed to wait for his shadows before. But now they returned with nothing.
So he expanded his reach. The shadows thickened, flooding outward in greater volume, spreading like a tide beyond the boundaries of their cavern and into the wider expanse of The Void, brushing against distant structures, skimming across the market’s outer edges, tracing the contours of familiar territories.
He could feel them straining, and yet he could not feel her.
Erevos attempted to narrow his focus, to refine the search, to isolate the distinct pattern of her presence among the countless currents of darkness.
He could sense other demons; he could sense the slow churn of traded grief and sealed emotion within shadowed containers at the market.
He could sense the hum of ancient energies shifting beneath the surface of The Void.
But Lyssena . . . He could not find her. Something unfamiliar began to unfurl within him, not irritation, nor anger. It was sharper and colder.
It felt as though a fissure had opened somewhere deep within his vast, ancient core, and from it poured something raw and destabilizing.
He had existed through centuries. He had endured the slow erosion of time that claimed even demons less careful than himself.
He had never feared.
Now the cavern felt enormous and suffocating, the silence no longer thick and intentional but oppressive, echoing back at him with unbearable emptiness.
She had been here.
She had walked these stones.
She had spoken his name in this space.
And now there was only stillness.
Erevos’s form shifted, edges sharpening, shadows clinging more tightly to him as though reacting to the tremor beneath his composure. Where was she?
The question tore through him.
For the first time in his long existence, Erevos felt true fear.
If harm had come to her—
The thought did not finish.
The shadows around him began to writhe, responding to the surge of emotion he no longer bothered to suppress, the cavern darkening as his control thinned.
“Lyssena,” he said again, but this time her name was not a call.
It was a plea.
And the silence that answered him was unbearable.