Page 130 of She Who Devours the Stars

Dyris moved first. She pushed up on her elbow, grimaced at the line of drool on her bicep, then looked down at me with the same face she’d used to sign the ceasefire at Vireleth: regal, tired, a little bit smug, but mostly just satisfied she’d won. Again.

“That,” she panted, voice cracked and beautiful, “is why I’m top of the food chain.”

Alyx, face buried sideways in my stomach, made a sound halfway between a giggle and a scream. She peeled her cheek off my skin, blinked once, then let her gaze focus on the ceiling and nowhere else. “You’re not even top of the towel,” she muttered. “I can’t feel my legs. Is that normal?”

“Only if you did it right,” I said, and Dyris gave me a look so loaded I actually felt it hit my teeth.

We were all going to be sore tomorrow. Maybe forever. But the moment had its own gravity, and none of us was in a hurry to break orbit.

Alyx wiggled her toes. “Is this what mythic stasis feels like?”

Dyris snorted. “No, stasis is more boring. And you don’t sweat through two towels.”

“It’s a three-towel minimum,” I said, eyes closed. “Ask any janitor.”

We could’ve basked in it, but the hunger was already building. It’s like that, after the first round: the body wants more before the brain even finishes cataloguing the wreckage.

Dyris noticed. She glanced at my hands, saw the way my knuckles flexed, the blue-white pulse already climbing my wrist, and for a second her expression flickered.

“Don’t even think about it,” she warned.

Alyx rolled to her side, pressing her face to the mat, and groaned, “She’s thinking about it. Oh god.”

I reached for the next word, found it in my throat, and let it out:

“Again.”

Silence.

Dyris froze, her perfect lips open in the middle of some biting comeback. The color drained from her face, only to be replaced by a slow, spectral blush that ran ear to ear. Alyx went wide-eyed, then scarlet, then somewhere past ultraviolet, and started to laugh—but the sound was all panic.

“Oh no,” Alyx said, half giggle, half genuine fear. “No, no, no. I am not equipped for round two. I need electrolytes and, like, a full diagnostic. And probably holy water.”

Dyris shook her head, the motion so sharp I heard her neck crack. “Absolutely not. I have appointments. With people who won’t liquefy me.”

“Liar,” I said, but she was already trying to stand.

Alyx tried to follow, but her knees buckled and she collapsed into a puddle on the floor. “Okay, I think I’m dead. Someone tell my parents.”

Dyris scooped up her shirt, tried to put it on, then realized it was inside out and just clutched it to her chest instead. Her eyes never left mine, and for a second, I thought she might stay. Might let the pull win.

But then she muttered, “We need to shower before she figures out how to anchor us.”

Alyx, still horizontal, managed to roll off the towel and toward the exit. “Last one there gets… whatever’s left of her.”

I watched them go, the void of their absence instantly heavier than the bodies themselves. The towel beneath me was ruined, the floor a crime scene. But I didn’t move. Couldn’t. The hunger had shifted, deepened, turned from heat to something colder, older. Like the aftershock of a gravity wave: all the violence spent, but none of the pull gone.

I lay there, breathing, watching the mythic residue drift in lazy spirals above my head. It was almost pretty. Like snow, if snow could hum.

That’s when I felt it.

A shiver, not in the air, but in the bones of the world. A thread, so thin it was almost imaginary, slicing through the edge ofreality. My vision fuzzed, and for a second, the world tilted thirty degrees left. My ears rang with a high, sharp whine—like the time the paint mixer at Pelago exploded and coated the whole block in glitter and lies.

I closed my eyes. The thread sharpened, the pitch rising, the taste of it on my tongue so raw and bright I almost choked.

She was here.

Not in the room, not even in the building, but somewhere just outside the event horizon of my mind. Aenna, the red echo. She was bleeding into my world, a ripple at the edge of the pool, a note so pure it made my teeth ache.