Page 139 of She Who Devours the Stars

She walked away, hips swaying in a rhythm that could only have been engineered for maximum torment. Her laughter drifted back, thin as a razor and twice as sharp.

I finished the kebab before the echo died.

But the hunger, if anything, got worse.

I licked my fingers clean, then pulled another kebab out of the bag. When that was gone, I sat back, shuddered, and waited to see what the next part would bring.

I wasn’t scared.

I was ready.

But I knew, deep in my mythic bones, that Zevelune was right.

The fun hadn’t even started.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Trivane

Axis Alignment: Eventide

The quarantine lights were supposed to be orange. But here, in my quarters, they flickered in every color but.

I’d locked myself in hours ago, possibly days, though the mythdrift had eaten the clocks again, and built a nest of AR projectors, defense holos, and the one honest smoothie machine in the entire sector. I could have gone to ground in the Academy’s reinforced panic cell, but that was for people who believed containment was an option.

I didn’t.

The walls trembled with every mythic bulletin from the outside. I had them set to silent, but they still clawed at my attention, each new ping flashing blue across my left retina, then lingering until I looked it straight in the face.

- [ MYTHDRIFT: Perseid sector at 99% mythic saturation. Accord recommends prayer. ]

- [ Fern Trivane risk index: 11.2 and rising. System models suggest non-linear escalation. ]

- [ New mythic signature detected: “Pulse of the Broken Echo.” Origin: Unknown. Destiny: Catastrophe. ]

Every time Fern’s name hit the feed, I felt it in my teeth.

I was supposed to be analyzing convergence fallout, writing the postmortem that would let the Accord sleep at night. Instead, I was watching old classified feeds of Lioren in combat, over and over, trying to convince myself that what Fern had done wasn’t just a rerun of history, set to a new soundtrack.

The feed I kept coming back to was the worst: Lioren on the crust of an uninhabited planet, sleeves rolled to his elbows, voice steady and cold as a dead star. He said, “Observe.” Then he bent the planet in half. Not metaphorically, he actually folded it, mythic fields blooming from his hands, until the crust shattered and the world snapped in on itself like a broken toy. The noise was beautiful and awful. The afterimage left black on the screen for a full thirty seconds.

I always flinched.

I couldn’t stop watching. Not because I admired him, but because I was terrified. Of Fern, of myself, of the way I’d looked at her the last time I’d touched her shoulder and thought: This is what it’s like to be myth.

The AR in my room kept escalating itself. Every hour, my Accord clearance increased, and my House Trivane access doubled. It made no sense; security didn’t work like that. But I was getting pinged with files I’d never requested, incident reports so recent the ink hadn’t dried, even the ancient, pre-Accord blueprints for the city’s mythic grid. It felt less like a promotion, more like a countdown.

Kaela Vaelith pinged in on video, the feed so glitchy I could barely recognize her. She looked hungover, or maybe just scared.

“Dyris?” she said. “What the fuck is happening over there?”

I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because the air was too heavy for words.

Kaela’s face shimmered, pixelated, then reassembled itself at double size. “You’re not responding to the Accord,” she said, tone brittle. “The comms say you’re present, but the mythic grid—” She trailed off, staring at something on her screen.

She looked at me again. “Dyris, tell me you haven’t—”

The feed went black.

I stood up, or tried to. My legs worked, but the room fought back, every surface charged with static, the lights pulsing in sync with my pulse. The world didn’t want me on my feet.