Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
The Option That No Longer Existed
Lyssena
The pearls felt weightless.
“My human,” Rolam said, “never chose me back.”
She lowered the case slowly onto the table between them, the sound of velvet against shadow sounding louder than it should have in the cavern’s hush.
“You loved her?” she asked.
It felt like a fragile question, though she was not entirely sure why. Perhaps because love, when spoken by a demon, sounded less like warmth.
Rolam did not look offended by it. If anything, his expression softened.
“I did not know what it was at first,” he replied. “She was . . . curious. Unafraid in ways the others were not. She would ask me questions instead of running.”
Lyssena could picture a human woman standing before him, chin lifted, unaware of the vastness she was addressing.
“I returned the next season,” Rolam continued, though something quieter threaded beneath his voice. “And then the next. Eventually, I found that waiting an entire year between visits was . . . hard.”
“So I came every month. Then every week.”
His fingers idly traced the rim of one of the tall glass jars beside him, and Lyssena noticed another thing that was different from Erevos. Rolam acted more human.
“And then,” he finished, “every day.”
“You became attached,” she said.
“I became obsessed,” Rolam corrected without hesitation.
There was no shame in the admission.
“I learned her languages. Plural,” he added. “I took her across oceans. Showed her mountains that cut into the sky. Deserts that swallowed the horizon. Cities bright enough to rival stars.”
As he spoke, his voice carried more color than Lyssena had heard from anyone.
“I began to feel more,” he said, then paused as though he sank deep into thought. “Impatience when she did not smile. Satisfaction when she did. Irritation at other men who approached her. Pride when she chose my company.”
His gaze flicked toward Lyssena then, searching her expression.
“Demons do not experience such gradual escalation. We hunger. We take. We discard. It is efficient.”
“And yet,” Lyssena murmured.
“And yet,” he agreed.
Lyssena became acutely aware of the steady beat of her own pulse beneath her skin.
“What happened?” she asked.
Rolam was silent for a moment. “As years passed,” he said at last, “she changed.”
“She aged,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
The single syllable made Lyssena sad. Would that happen to her as well? Would Erevos stay alone after she was gone?
“I asked her to come with me,” he continued. “To leave the human world behind.”
Lyssena’s fingers curled slightly against the table.
“To The Void?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated only briefly before asking, “Why not remain there with her?”
Rolam’s expression changed as though the question itself revealed her limited understanding. “In the human realm, there is time. It moves and consumes. It reduces all things.”
“In The Void, there is no time. No decay, no aging. She would have remained exactly as she was the day she stepped across the threshold.”
Lyssena’s breath stilled. Eternity.
Eternity was not poetry; it was literal. No aging. No death. No end.
Her mind struggled to wrap around it, because the human part of her measured life in seasons and years and birthdays. But here . . . here those measures dissolved.
She looked back at Rolam.
“And she refused?” she asked.
“She told me,” he said, “that her life was meaningful because it ended.”
Lyssena swallowed. “And you?” she asked, her voice quieter now. “What did you want?”
“I wanted her,” Rolam said simply.
The honesty of it made the air feel tight, even through the mask of a songbird.
Lyssena opened her mouth to ask another question, but the cavern trembled.
The shadows along the walls shifted suddenly, pulling inward as though drawn by a force.
The glass jars behind Rolam rattled, liquid inside them quivering.
And then the entrance of the shop darkened.
Rolam’s gaze lifted toward the threshold before Lyssena even turned.
The shadows did not merely part. They recoiled.
And in the doorway stood Erevos.
His height seemed greater, where the ceiling dipped lower than their home cavern, his thorns nearly grazing the arch of carved stone, his body outlined in a darkness deeper than the shadows surrounding him.
For one suspended moment, everything was still.
His gaze found her first, and Lyssena had exactly one second of shame before it moved.
To Rolam.
Erevos growled loudly, the shelves shuddered as the vibration tore through the cavern, glass vessels rattling violently before several toppled from their perches and shattered against the floor in violent bursts of liquid and bone. The scent of brine and decay exploded into the air.
Before Lyssena could speak, Erevos’s shadows struck. They did not glide like they did before. They lunged.
Black tendrils shot across the space, coiling around Rolam’s torso and arms with brutal force, slamming him backward into the stone wall behind the long table. More glass crashed to the ground, velvet cases overturning, pearls scattering like pale drops of frozen light across the dark floor.
“Erevos!” Lyssena screamed.
The sound tore from her throat as she rushed forward. She nearly slipped on shattered glass, catching herself on the edge of the table as more of Rolam’s collected treasures splintered under the assault.
“Stop! Stop—please!” she cried, her hands reaching toward the writhing mass of shadow binding Rolam. “I am alright! He has done nothing!”
Erevos stepped fully into the shop, and his shadows tightened. Rolam did not cry out, but the stone behind him cracked under the pressure.
Erevos opened his mouth. Rows of jagged, shard-like teeth caught what little violet light remained in the cavern.
“Lyssena,” he said, his voice no longer restrained, but edged with something feral and ancient, “is mine.”
Lyssena’s heart slammed violently against her ribs. Rolam had been kind. He had spoken gently. He had shown her beauty. And now he was pinned against the stone because of her.
“Please,” she said again, forcing herself forward despite the violent thrashing of shadows, despite the sharp scent of broken glass and spilled preservation liquid burning in her lungs. “Erevos, look at me.”
He did not.
The shadows continued to constrict. Lyssena swallowed hard, and she turned her focus not to him, but to the darkness itself. The shadows were alive; they listened to her today and before. They had always listened.
“Leave him,” she said, her voice shaking but clear. “He is not a threat.”
For one suspended second, nothing happened. But then the shadows faltered. Not fully, but enough. They loosened slightly around Rolam, and Erevos stilled.
The cavern went unnaturally quiet, broken only by the slow drip of liquid from shattered glass and the faint clatter of a pearl rolling to a stop against stone.
Erevos turned his head slowly toward her. “Did you choose him?” he asked.
“No,” she answered immediately, stepping closer to him despite the lingering cold radiating from his body. “No, Erevos.”
She reached for him. Her fingers slid into his enormous hand, she laced her fingers between his claws and tugged gently, calming him with the only thing she had.
The shadows around Rolam dissolved completely. He slid down the cracked stone wall but remained upright, steady, though shards of glass surrounded him like fallen stars.
Slowly, heat began to return to Erevos’s skin, and he stepped closer to her.
His free hand lifted, and he traced his fingers over the smooth curve of her masked head, down along the line where her shoulder started.
Lyssena exhaled shakily. “He was telling me a story,” she murmured.
She turned her head toward Rolam. He had not moved to attack. He had not spoken in protest. Instead, he was staring at the broken remnants of his collection scattered across the floor. After a moment, he lifted his gaze to her.
“I have been collecting these,” Rolam said, though his voice had grown quieter, “for a very long time.”
His eyes drifted briefly to a cracked glass vessel leaking liquid across shadow. “My human liked to collect objects from every place we traveled. Small things. Meaningless to most.”
Lyssena felt something twist in her chest. He had recreated that ritual for centuries. “I am sorry,” she said, looking at the broken items. “I did not mean for—”
“Why did you decide to live forever?”
The question struck her off guard. Her fingers tightened unconsciously around Erevos’s hand. “I—” She faltered, her thoughts scrambling. “If I return to my human home, I will age.”
Was she saying those words to feel the comfort of choosing? She had chosen to go with Erevos the day they met. Though now, after everything that happened, she felt the need to state that she still had the choice. She knew Erevos wouldn’t kill her or harm her in any way.
“You speak as though that option still exists,” he said.
Lyssena blinked. “What do you mean?”
Lyssena turned slowly toward Erevos. He had gone still again, that distant, unreachable quiet he sometimes slipped into, where his gaze aligned with her yet did not seem to land upon. It was as though he were looking through her.
He did that sometimes, and she had never understood why.
“Erevos?” she asked. Her fingers tightened around his hand, seeking reassurance.
“I could not shape matter and shadow as Erevos can,” Rolam said from across the fractured shop.
Lyssena’s brows drew together immediately. The words felt disconnected from her question, and she was losing patience. “What do you mean?” she asked again.
Rolam’s gaze did not waver.
“You ate my shadows, Lyssena,” Erevos said before Rolam could say a word. His voice was no longer feral. “You are part of me.”
Lyssena felt her stomach drop, a hollow plunge beneath her ribs that left her lightheaded.
“You ate my shadows.”
The words replayed in her mind, rearranging themselves into a meaning she did not want to assemble. Everything she consumed in The Void had been crafted. All of it . . .
Her mouth went dry. Everything I ate was . . . Him.
She was surrounded by demons.
One of them was Erevos. The one she had trusted most.
“You lied to me.”