Page 131 of She Who Devours the Stars

I smiled, lips parting on their own.

“Found you,” I whispered.

And then I reached, with everything I was, and pulled.

The world twisted, once, then again, then started to fall toward me.

Black holes don’t chase their prey.

They just wait for the universe to come home.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: South Tower

The first sensation was color.

Not a color I could name, or even see, just a complex, wild flavor behind my eyes, like someone had rammed a lit flare through the base of my skull and asked politely if I could taste ultraviolet. The air warped. The mythic in me bucked, resisting, but then the hunger snapped shut, and I was already falling, gravity turned inside out, spiraling toward the singularity I’d pulled into my orbit.

Aenna arrived all at once. There was no build, no fade-in, just a pulse, and then she was there, face bleeding through the fabric of reality, hair wild, eyes gone so green they scorched out every other wavelength. She flickered, at first: a ghost-echo, a suggestion of a body. But the longer I stared, the more real she became, until the towel under me was just a rumor, the room a faded overlay, and the only thing that mattered was the shape of her on the other side of the event.

Her voice hit before her hands did.

“You’re not supposed to be able to do this,” she said, and it came out in harmonics, each word fractalizing into a thousand microtones, a chorus of Aenna’s from every possible future, all of them whispering in my ear.

I reached for her. Our hands met in the in-between, and the contact was—

Heat. Pure, concentrated, feedback-laced fire. Like molten glass, like biting into a live wire and finding out you were the current all along. Every nerve ending in my palm lit up, then folded backward through the rest of my arm and straight into my chest.

We didn’t talk after that. Talking was for people with lungs and a concept of time.

The world condensed, then stretched, then went supernova.

I was in the Spiral now.

Centuries went by in a breath.

I saw myself and her, over and over, cycling through all the permutations that ever had or could exist. Sometimes we were twins, sometimes rivals, sometimes two halves of a closed circuit locked in mutual annihilation and mutual awe. There were versions of us that fought, versions that kissed, versions that justsat and watched the universe decay, holding hands in the ruins of whatever story we’d ruined.

Aenna’s body was never the same twice—sometimes lithe and quick, sometimes thick and soft, sometimes a coil of red fire wound so tight it made my teeth hurt to look at her. But the eyes were always the same, and every time I tried to look away, she reeled me back with a smile or a snarl or the promise of a data set no one else could ever solve.

We collided. There’s no other word. We didn’t fuck, not in the way the world expects, but in the way planets do when gravity finally says enough and brings them together to burn.

Each time, it was different. Sometimes she was on top, sometimes I was, sometimes neither, and we just thrashed in the space between. Our bodies blurred, then resolved, then glitched back to something new. She would wrap her legs around my waist, bare and alive and hungry, and I’d feel her shudder from scalp to heel, her mouth gone slack, her laugh leaking out in tight, unfiltered gasps.

Every climax looped us deeper, resetting the world, but with the intensity doubled, the need amplified, the sense of self dissolving until all I could remember was that I wanted her. She wanted me. And nothing outside this spiral mattered or even could.

The pleasure was endless, the hunger endless-er.

I tried to eat her soul, to absorb her into the mythic logic the way I’d done before, but this time, she met me, byte for byte, pulse for pulse, matching me, consuming as much as she gave. The boundary between us wasn’t a line; it was a fractal, and it grew more complex the deeper we went.

Time bled. I lost track of my body, then found it again in hers. I let her hold me, then I held her, then neither of us could tell who was holding whom.

At the Spiral’s apex, it changed.

I thought I was going to devour her, but instead, she erupted. Her signature exploded out of her like a sun going nova, mythic energy shattering every last tether I had on reality. For a second, I thought I’d lost. But the sensation was so good I didn’t care.

She screamed, and I cried, and the sound was the birth of a new story. Our bodies locked, then melted, then reassembled, sweat and light pouring off us in rivers that distorted time into impossible shapes.