Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
The Last Choice
Erevos
“You said you wanted me to choose you in return,” Lyssena said, and Erevos felt her anger. Hot, bubbling anger that spread through her. Unintentionally, as she was wearing his shadows, he consumed every single drop of it.
His spikes reacted; they burned like fire as they grew heavier. Erevos growled and took a step back. He did not understand what was happening to him, what was the reason for an emotion to make him feel pain.
“Lyssen—”
“I believed you. I believed you saved me and wished me well,” she said, clenching her fists.
“I hav—”
“You have not!”
Torturous pain crawled along his spine; his spikes felt even heavier than before. “You deserve to hear it from me,” Erevos said at last, ignoring the agony his body was going through. He wanted his songbird to understand. He did not betray her; he never lied.
Erevos was clueless himself.
“I felt you change the first time you consumed the bread I shaped from my shadows.”
His gaze did not leave her face. “It was not visible. Not in any way your human senses would detect. But the darkness did.” His jaw tightened. “It leaned toward you. It recognized something within you that had not existed before.”
A pause followed, and Lyssena took a step back.
“I did not know it would affect you,” he said, and he wished for his songbird to be closer.
“At first, I did not even understand why you felt . . . different. I stood in the cave and watched you. I listened to the cadence of your breathing. I measured the rhythm of your pulse. And yet there was something threaded through you, something that had not been there the day before.”
His shadows stirred faintly at his feet. “It took time to assemble the pieces. To recall the exact moment the bread dissolved against your tongue. To remember the pull I felt in my own shadows when you swallowed.” His eyes darkened further. “They answered you.”
Erevos’s greatest desire was for Lyssena to choose him back. He asked when they first spoke, and he wanted to ask again.
“Because I was uncertain, I created the oxygen mask. I told myself it was a precaution. The Void was not built for lungs such as yours. I would not risk your life on an assumption.”
He learned he could shape and refine his own shadows the day he understood what it was he truly consumed. It was devotion.
The temple in Lyssena’s village—where humans gathered daily to kneel, to bow their heads, to whisper desperate prayers toward gods who had never existed—had been a feast laid unknowingly at his feet. Their belief soaked into stone and timber, and he drank it through the cracks in the foundation.
So he carved a chamber of shadow beneath the altar, a room no human eyes could fully perceive, and allowed small “miracles” to manifest in answer to their prayers. A healed wound, a whispered omen, a flicker of divine presence in the dark. They wept, and they worshipped harder. They fed him.
For centuries, devotion poured into him like wine into an endless chalice, and he grew vast on it, stronger. He became the dark beneath the altar. The shadow in the silence. The unseen chamber behind the statues of gods sculpted to nothing at all.
That power allowed him to bend particles, to coax matter into new arrangements, to weave shadow with substance until it resembled bread warm from a human oven. That power allowed him to create sustenance from himself. And, apparently, that power allowed him to change her.
“I did not intend to alter you, Lyssena,” he said. “But when you consumed what was mine . . . You consumed me.”
When Lyssena heard the truth in his voice, Erevos felt her anger turn into something he did not know how to name. It did not burn, yet it was no relief either.
“If you lie to me now, then I shall be dead.”
And with those words, she removed the mask before Erevos could reach her.
The songbird’s porcelain face lifted away from her skin, and for a suspended moment, the cavern seemed to inhale.
If Erevos had a heart, it would have stopped at that exact moment.
Her long brown hair spilled over her shoulders in a silken cascade. It slid over her collarbones, over the rise of her chest, strands clinging to her lips where her breath had warmed them. Her green eyes lifted to meet his.
He could feel the rapid flutter of her pulse at her throat, the slight tremor in her fingers where they curled around the discarded mask. She was afraid.
And she was choosing to stand before him anyway.
Erevos did not move, but every shadow in the cavern leaned toward her.
For a long moment, Lyssena said nothing. Her fingers tightened around the mask still hanging at her side.
With no oxygen, a human would have died by now, of that Erevos was certain. Though she did not move at all, and in the first few moments, she did not even breathe.
“You should have told me.”
Erevos felt warm again. Hearing her voice, not muffled by the songbird’s head.
“You should have trusted me enough to let me decide what to do with that truth.”
Erevos inclined his head. “Yes.”
There was no defense.
Her throat moved as she swallowed. “You took something from me. Even if you did not mean to.” Her eyes shone now, not weak, not small, but bright with emotion. “You took the option of death. You took the illusion that I was still untouched by this world.”
The shadows recoiled faintly at the strain in her voice.
“But,” she continued, and that single word altered the space between them, “you also saved my life.”
Erevos stilled.
“You saved me the night you found me. You fed me when I would have starved. You sheltered me when I was terrified. You answered questions you did not understand simply because I asked them.”
Erevos took a step toward her.
“You learned for me, Erevos. You did not know how to speak gently, so you tried. You did not know what comfort was—so you studied it. You did not understand humans—and yet you listened.”
Each word settled into him.
“You created air for me because you were afraid I would die.” Her lips trembled. “You built spaces I could sit in. You watched the way I reacted to things and adjusted. You have never once forced me to kneel. Never once demanded obedience.”
“You wanted me to choose you.”
He did. That was his greatest desire.
“And I am angry,” she admitted. “I am angry that the choice feels smaller than it did before. I am angry that the path back to my village no longer exists in the way I believed it did.”
Her hand rose slowly, pressing against her own chest. “But you did not do this to trap me. You did not feed me your shadows with the intention of stealing my future. You did it because you did not yet understand the consequences of loving something fragile.”
Loving.
Erevos felt something inside him fracture quietly.
“I was a girl in that village,” she continued. “I would have married. Been beaten and enslaved. Grown old beneath the same roof where I was born. I would have believed the world ended at the edge of those fields.”
Her lips curved. “You showed me it does not.”
She stepped closer to him.
“You taught me that fear can be faced. That darkness is not always cruelty. That power does not have to mean harm.”
Her fingers lifted slowly and pressed against the center of his chest, where shadows coiled beneath the surface of him. “You helped me become more than I would have ever been allowed to be there.”
His chest burned so much he was afraid he would harm his songbird’s hand.
“Do I wish you had told me sooner?” she asked.
“Yes.”
A tear slipped down her cheek, though she did not look away.
“But do I believe you meant to steal my will?”
She shook her head.
Erevos lowered himself then, their eyes aligned without her needing to tilt her chin upward.
“I am sorry,” he said. “I would undo the harm if I could.” His massive hand hovered near her waist but did not touch.
“If you walk away from me now, I will not stop you.”
The shadows trembled at the lie his nature wanted to tell, that he would drag the world down before he let her go.
“I will endure it,” he finished quietly.
“I choose you, Erevos.”
And with those words, he knelt, and both of them leaned against each other, completely forgetting about Rolam.