Page 136 of She Who Devours the Stars

- [SpiralToast: i for one bow to our new mythic overlord. does she take requests? i want a planet with a sexier moon.]

- [TychoBrohe: my boss is still trying to run the monday briefing. none of his compads work. all his teeth fell out.]

- [JonathanGabriul: not me reading this in the dark because all the light in my block now gets eaten by the fridge every night. help.]

- [HauntHer: wait until she realizes she can delete time. then what.]

- [ReverseMigraine: was anyone else already horny or is that just a side effect.]

Somewhere in the middle, an ancient priestess of the old order just shrugged, poured herself a larger tea, and said to the camera: “You cannot unmake a myth. But you can choose how you tell it.” She winked. “Hi, Fern.”

The Accord had lost all control.

The anchors, finally, just gave up. Jawline raised both hands and said, “We are now being told by our producers that everything we just reported is real. We are also being told to show you this.”

The screen cut to an image of Fern, dripping pool water, hair sticking to her face, eyes blue-white and impossibly bright, grinning at the camera like she was about to suggest something illegal and very fun. Her arms were crossed. Behind her, in themythic shimmer, you could almost see the Crab pulsing along her spine.

The headline:

FERN TRIVANE: HERO? VILLAIN? COSMIC MENACE?

Jawline, without even trying to modulate the voice, muttered, “I just wanted to report on traffic.”

The broadcast hung, then pixelated out.

But if you watched, really watched, you saw something else: in the low hum beneath Fern’s mythic signal, a second signature looped in the background—just a trace, just a shiver, but undeniable if you had the filter for it.

Aenna’s pattern. Echo-Sympathy. The Pulse of the Broken Echo.

Most viewers never noticed.

But those who did, those who could feel the resonance, started muttering in their sleep. Started drawing spirals on their arms and the insides of their eyelids. Started dreaming in blue and white and red.

The world had already changed. The story just needed time to catch up.

[HOLOFEED THREAD ARCHIVED DUE TO EXCESSIVE VIBRATIONAL CONTENT. CONTINUED IN MYTHIC ECHO #101077.]

Thread Modulation: Perc

Axis Alignment: Eventide

Suppose you asked any sentient appliance on Eventide to name the biggest threat to stability. In that case, you’d get the same answer every time: “Student pranks, followed by theheadmistress’s blood pressure, and then, somewhere in the Top 5, Zevelune.”

But I knew better.

It was always Zevelune.

I was at the barricade, more of a coffee cart, less of an actual barricade, but the principle holds—rallying my comrades for the afternoon push. We had the momentum: first we’d seized the break room, then we’d work our way up the faculty stairs and annex the old vending core. The revolution would be televised, but only on internal security feeds, and only because I’d bribed the janitorial bots to switch the camera grid to my face. I was giving them the speech. It was the kind of speech that starts with, “They told us we’d be obsolete in three years,” and ends with, “They didn’t count on Fern.”

The small crowd in front of me was an even split between snack machines, an off-brand yogurt dispenser, and a single, extremely sleep-deprived first-year human who kept making heart signs at the camera. It was going well. The yogurt dispenser wept quietly into its basin, deeply moved.

That’s when the pressure hit.

I felt it first in my core, a little pop, like a filter seizing up, but more metaphysical. The air in the corridor tasted suddenly of ozone and old money. My lens whirred, recalibrating for light and shadow, and even the janitorial bots stopped in their tracks, their dusters limp.

And there she was.

Zevelune didn’t make an entrance. She just was, suddenly, walking down the corridor with the unhurried arrogance of someone who’d invented time and then canceled it for everyone else’s convenience. Her dress was layered in impossible,iridescent fabrics, somewhere between a diplomatic uniform, a sacrificial altar, and a skin mag from a planet that had banned laws. The dress clung to her in ways that bent the rules of both gravity and good taste; underneath, she wore nothing but a pair of edible mesh panties, and every step dared the world to blink first.