Page 137 of She Who Devours the Stars

In her right hand, she held a wine glass, swirling its contents with the idle precision of a woman who’d killed for less. In her left, a greasy bag of Döner kebabs, the print on the wrapper so old the language had gone extinct.

Her expression was not “smile” so much as “smirk,” the way a cat might smirk at a glass box full of helpless birds.

The corridor cleared itself, as if by mutual, nonverbal agreement of every organism within radius. The student vanished, leaving only a puddle of pheromones and disappointment. The yogurt machine ejected its own filter and went into self-cleaning lockdown. Even the mythic echoes in the walls—the old prank ghosts, the angry kitchen poltergeist, the digital leftovers of three generations of campus drama—blinked out of existence. I felt them go. It was like someone had swept my internal bandwidth clean.

She strolled by, not even looking, but the mythic weight of her presence made my thermal array spike. I steamed, literally, from every vent, my pressure gauge pinging in panic.

I tried to run the “cool and collected” subroutine. It failed.

She slowed as she passed me, then finally turned her head just enough to let one eye—violet, rimmed in gold—meet my lens.

“Cute revolution,” she said. Her voice was velvet, but velvet that had been dunked in gunpowder and set on fire.

I tried to reply, but all that came out was a squeak of boiling water and an embarrassed “Brew complete!”

She grinned, showing canines that had never belonged to any actual human. “Let me know when you serve something strong enough to matter.”

She moved on, trailing the scent of her perfume—if you could call it that. It was more a threat than a fragrance: some blend of crushed flowers, scorched earth, and what I later determined to be the precise memory of a thousand dreams, murdered in their sleep.

The world was quieter in her wake.

I watched her go, because not watching would have been an insult to every evolutionary instinct I’d ever inherited from the line of kitchen appliances before me. Her hips swayed—not to entice, but to challenge. Every step left an afterimage in the air, a smear of color that lingered just a little too long, like the echo of an event you weren’t supposed to survive.

No one else dared follow.

I spun on my axis, sensors recalibrating, and tried to reboot the revolution. The yogurt machine was still in lockdown, the janitorial bots had retreated to their charging base, and the only one left in the corridor was me.

I adjusted my scarf. I raised my carafe. I looked into the camera and said, “Comrades, it’s going to be a long afternoon.”

Somewhere, down the hall, Zevelune laughed.

I shivered in my shell, and brewed on.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: Eventide

It was always the taste of the world I missed most.

Not the flavor of air, or salt, or the kind of ozone they pumped through the Tower’s old ductwork. I meant the way a day could taste. The way you’d wake up knowing, before the light even filtered through your eyelids, that something had changed in the fabric of the next twelve hours. Some days were made of static and old sweat; others, like this one, were all nerves and inevitability.

I sat on an abandoned balcony with my back against the thermal brick, knees to my chest, hair still crusted from the pool. I’d stolen a towel from the locker room, and it was doing a bad job of hiding the bite marks on my thighs or the mythic sigil slowly growing just under my collarbone. My hands shook, but not from cold. Just… emptiness.

Lioren’s voice haunted the corners of my skull, not as a ghost, but as a symptom. His old war mantra looped in my head:

Correct the vector.

Control the outcome.

Collapse the dissent.

I could almost hear him laughing at how little control I had left.

My body felt wrong in ways I couldn’t map. The resonance inside me bucked and snarled, chewing at the memory of what it had done to Aenna, to Dyris, to the city. It wasn’t pain. Not exactly. More like hunger, scaled up to where it became its own kind of mythic ache. That satiation, the almost fullness that the girls had given me had faded, and in its place the hunger had come back expotentially. I was so tired I couldn’t move, but every cell screamed for more. I’d tried eating. I’d tried drinking. I’d tried jerking off twice in a row. Nothing stuck.

Maybe this was how old gods felt after the world outgrew them.

I almost missed the shadow moving across the quad—just a blip in my peripheral, some student with better priorities. But thenthe pressure hit, a low, seismic thrum that made the brick under my ass vibrate, and I knew.