Page 134 of She Who Devours the Stars

She flexed her hand, and for an instant, every muscle in her body rippled with the afterglow of the new resonance. Power arced down her arm, a blue flicker running the length of her veins. She inhaled, then exhaled, and the temperature in the air went up three degrees.

“…This,” she said, softly. The smile she wore was brighter, meaner, and a little bit holy.

I stared. I could have said anything. I chose honesty.

“Fuck.”

Alyx, still balanced on the edge of the pool, tried to drag Aenna out by the ankle. The effort was doomed, but she persisted, hissing, “The electric glowworm won’t get out of the tequila pool! Fern, help me!”

Fern made a show of standing, stretching, then padded barefoot to the pool’s edge. She reached for Aenna’s wrist, but instead of pulling, she leaned over and said, “You can come back, you know. The story needs you.”

Aenna blinked once, and for a second her eyes were so wide open the blue in them bled out into the air. She rolled onto her back, started spinning slowly, and as the pool rotated, her body began to glow even brighter. Her eyes were pure emerald, now that Fern’s blue mythfire had left dissipated. She was smiling, the kind of smile you see in saints and addicts.

Fern watched her, then turned to me, conspiratorial. “I told you she was fine.”

I made the mistake of thinking it was over. I should have known better. With Fern, nothing ever really ended; it just gathered mass until it became the next disaster.

She walked over, took my hand, and held it up to her chest. Her pulse was faster than usual, wild and eager. She didn’t let go.

“You worried?” she asked, voice low.

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t need to. She already knew.

“Good,” she said. “Because I am, too.”

We stood there, side by side, hands clasped, watching Alyx try to coax Aenna out of the pool with reason, force, and finally the promise of “a taco and a full day of print-shop access.”

None of it worked.

Eventually, Fern laughed, sharp and bright, and the sound of it echoed off the glass, off the water, off the very edge of the world.

Alyx gave up, collapsed onto the nearest lounge, and threw a towel over her face. “We’re all going to die here,” she said, voice muffled but sincere.

Fern grinned. “Not today. Today, we swim.”

I rolled my eyes, but the gravity in my chest said: Yes. Today, we swim. And then we save the world, if it’s stupid enough to need us still.

On the pool, Aenna spun, glowing, unconcerned. The sun caught her hair and scattered it across the water in a corona of impossible color.

Fern squeezed my hand.

“Can you hear it?” Fern asked, her gaze fixed unwaveringly on the pool, the tilt of her chin that of a sovereign daring the cosmos to answer back. I wanted to scoff, to tell her not to be ridiculous,but my mouth dried up, the words trapped behind my teeth like prisoners who’d glimpsed the executioner’s axe.

Because I did hear it. Not the laughtrack of Alyx’s grumbling or Aenna’s half-mystic humming, not the syrupy slosh of the margarita pool, not even the staccato of Fern’s predatory-lovely pulse beneath my hand. No: what I heard was astronomy itself, a kind of deep, bleak, aching resonance that started somewhere in the death-rimmed silence outside Eventide and worked inward, toward the soft center of every atom in the city.

It was absurd. And it was happening. The resonance grid’s needles jittered, the diagnostics spat out null after null, as if the machine were embarrassed to confess what it was seeing. The air itself had the taste of burnt neon, the ache of ozone after a reactor surge. If I closed my eyes—which I did, just for a moment—I could map the new shape of destiny with my tongue.

What Fern had done wasn’t an anomaly. It was a declaration of war. The mythic grid, which should have been flat-lining after the last event, was instead bending itself into new forms, not just accommodating the new celestial resonance of an entire fucking Nebula, but mutating to serve it. I could feel the world’s perimeter flex and ripple, like a sealed room’s air pressure when something much, much larger than you enters through a door you forgot was there.

I opened my eyes. Fern’s pupils had gone wide, black holes rimmed in blue, swallowing the sun’s reflection and returning it as a challenge. The pool spun, and Aenna spun with it, but it was Fern who anchored the room, Fern who, despite her sweatpants and tattered shirt, looked for all the world like the axis upon which every disaster and miracle in the universe now rotated.

Alyx stood there, open-mouthed, holding a towel like it might shield her from whatever was coming next. Above us, the skyhad changed. The blue was too saturated; the clouds had lost their laziest edges and now curled around the tower’s spires with purpose, as if even the weather was closing ranks. I flicked my attention back to the diagnostics, and this time, I let myself see what it was telling me: the baseline was gone. The world had no baseline anymore. There was only Fern, and whatever new order she was slamming into place, one brutal, beautiful resonance event at a time.

I thought of all the simulations, all the post-Lioren mythic cases, all the times I’d stared at impossible outcomes until my eyes bled. None of them had ever predicted a convergence like this. The universe was supposed to resist, to isolate her, to starve her out with entropy and narrative exhaustion. Instead, it was feeding her. She’d gone from a volatile null to something more. A force that devoured stories and spat out better ones, whether reality liked it or not.

Fern’s lips parted, and I realized she’d been watching me, waiting to see whether I’d flinch or run or merely combust on the spot. I didn’t. I couldn’t. My own heart was thrumming in time with hers, my skin prickling with the voltage of proximity. I wanted to touch her again, to test the edge of what she’d become, but I knew that if I did, I might not come back out the same.

She looked down at our clasped hands, then up at me, grin as sharp as a wolf’s. “You feel it, don’t you? The new myth. The hunger.”