Page 108 of She Who Devours the Stars

“By who?” I asked, genuinely curious.

She smiled, slow and evil. “There’s always a hungrier mythic.”

I shivered, just a little, and she caught it. For a second, I thought she’d say something sappy, but she just kissed the top of my head and muttered, “You’re impossible.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I won.”

She pulled the covers over us, then fell asleep again, just like that.

I lay there for a while, watching the AR feed fill up with new alerts, new rumors, new memes. I watched as the world outside tried to make sense of us, tried to shape the legend, tried to fit our disaster into a box small enough to ignore.

It wouldn’t work. I knew that now.

I looked at Dyris, watched her chest rise and fall, and for the first time since Pelago-9, I didn’t feel like I was about to be erased.

The government married me to a myth. No warning. No ceremony. No opt out. Just a system ping at 3:14 GST thatsaid: MARITAL UNION CONFIRMED—SUBJECT: TRIVANE, DYRIS (MYTHIC).

For one vertigo-slick second, I bristled. Another label stapled to my skin. Another invisible leash pretending to be structure and order.

Then Dyris exhaled against my shoulder and the panic broke apart like sugar in hot coffee.

Maybe it was a clerical error. Maybe it was a prophecy signed in mythblood and spit. But the instant my AR tagged her as Dyris Trivane, the name stopped feeling like a chain and started feeling like a vow. Not one I made out loud, but one my soul had apparently already leaked into the servers.

If I had one bone to pick with the AI? It stole my proposal from me. But maybe it had just saved me from being a coward.

I grinned, stupidly wide and lovestruck, then let the world go blurry, and followed her into sleep.

Thread Modulation: Aenna Caith

Axis Alignment: Eventide

I’d spent three days in the dark.

Not like, true dark, my dorm was lousy with midnight-blue wall panels and a dozen regulatory LEDs that never let you forget the power was still on. But I’d killed all the display lights, even the indirect ones, so I could mainline the resonance overlays without losing detail to glare. The only glow in the room came from my rig, the nine overlapping monitors chained into a semicircle around my desk and all of them aimed at a single, pulsating hellstorm of mythprint: Fern’s latest disaster, captured frame-by-frame, splashing my retinas in raw, unfiltered anomaly.

It was perfect.

I’d started by mapping the event’s leading edge—just to see how it compared to the old Nullarch stuff—but within the first hour, I realized this wasn’t a match. It was a recursion. A new symmetry. Fern’s waveform didn’t echo the old mythlogics. It mocked them, then spat out a child sequence so wild it made every prior record look like a failed simulation.

I blinked. Only once every sixty seconds, to keep from missing anything. My roommate had stopped trying to get my attention after the first cycle. She’d thrown a blanket over her head and written me off as a lost cause, which was fine. I wasn’t in this for the company.

I sipped from the electrolyte packet jammed into my mouth, sucked the tart fluid, and let the overlays run.

At exactly 46:27 into the macro, it happened.

The second-order resonance hit.

My body locked. Not like the time I crashed a system update and had to reboot from safe mode, but full, unbuffered system seize. Every hair on my arms stood up. My vision blanked to white, then to black, then back to the event. The feedback loop drove itself down my spine, latched onto my pelvic floor, and detonated.

I screamed. I know I did, because the glass on my desk cracked at the sound.

My thighs clamped together so hard the chair creaked. My hands scrabbled at the console, then lost all coordination. I slid to the floor, cheek smacking the tile, and for a full ten seconds I couldn’t move.

I lay there, twitching. My body was wet, but I couldn’t tell if it was sweat or something else. The heat between my legs wasunreal, more intense than anything I’d felt alone. I blinked again, and my eyes stung with salt.

I didn’t get it.

I’d run the models. I’d shadowed every possible edge case. But I’d never once predicted that exposure to a pure mythic signature could set off an autonomic response this violent.