Page 104 of She Who Devours the Stars

We did our best.

And if the rest of the world woke up aching and confused, so much the better.

They would never be able to forget us.

We’d made sure of that.

Chapter 14: Echo of the Seal

Thread Modulation: HoloNet

Axis Alignment: HoloNet

—[HOLO-NET]—

breaking news / LIVE / Eventide Satellite Uplink / mythic tier 1 clearance

The news anchor’s face split in two. Literally—not a metaphor, not a scandal, but a failure of the backbone server as it tried to render every emotion at once and gave her two mouths: one screaming, the other trying to carry on with the teleprompter.

“—never before witnessed, not in Accord era, not in the archives—”

Cut to raw feed: the Eventide skyline, South Tower burning with a blue-white corona. Then the feed jittered, pixels trying to find purchase on a story they weren’t coded for. The disaster drone hovering near the epicenter spiraled, caught in the updraft, then snapped a perfect 8K closeup of the Tower detaching from its roots, floating for a full minute before thunking back into place.

On every channel, the banner ran in a thousand languages—

EMERGENCY: ASTRAL SIGNATURE OVERRIDE / EVENTIDE SYSTEM

A split screen:

—Academics at the Athenaeum, faces slack, some with tears.

—The House of Antellan, live from their panic room, head-of-house sobbing into a comm, then hitting the mute and running both hands through their hair.

—A data-witch on the Lower Reach, arms thrown wide, cackling, “It’s real! It’s so real!” as followers collapsed in fits of joy and/or epilepsy.

The Accord’s official HoloNet feed tried to restore order. The system avatar—a gently-glowing androgyne with the voice of a bored god—materialized, only to glitch so hard it spawned three avatars at once. All of them spoke:

“SGR 0418+5729. Primary Event. Twin Convergent. Repeat: twin convergent, Class SGR.”

Cut to a religious channel. The priest tried to finish a prayer, but the walls behind her melted, the stained mythglass pouring down in rivulets of glowing code. Her lips formed the word “Lioren,” but the broadcast censors blanked it with a sound like someone biting down on a live wire.

Data scrolls at the bottom of every display.

“NEW CONVERGENT IDENTIFIED: DYRIS TRIVANE (AGE 27)”

“INCIDENT WITNESSES REPORT: FERN TRIVANE / NULLARCH PRESENT”

“EFFECTS: UNKNOWN. DURATION: UNKNOWN. OUTCOME: ———”

Somewhere in the Vellari system, a flotilla of mythic cultists threw themselves out of an airlock in what the ticker described as a “Symbolic Gesture.” Half survived; the rest trended for an hour before being replaced by a meme of Fern and Dyris photoshopped onto a pre-Accord honeymoon beach.

—[ON THE GROUND / street cam footage / Eventide Core]—

A crowd gathered around the South Tower, heads craned. All of them blinked tears from eyes that couldn’t process the afterimage left by the event. A teen in the front row, snot down her face, screamed, “IT HURT SO GOOD!” and the crowd echoed her, every voice harmonized by a glitch in the mythic grid.

—[IN THE ASTRUM]—

Black: the void, pulsing with hunger.