Page 140 of She Who Devours the Stars

I paced a circle, three meters, then back. My AR kept pinging:

[ TRIVANE VECTOR: CONVERGENCE ESCALATION ]

[ Mythship Connection Detected: Proximity Echo – SOURCE: CLASSIFIED ]

The air changed.

I noticed it first in the taste, like the moment before a thunderstorm, when all you can do is brace for the flash. Then the scent: ozone and the sweet rot of cut flowers, something so rich and strange it felt like it was blooming behind my eyes.

The lights in the walls cycled, brightening, then dimming to an intimate low. The shadows stretched, twisted, began to curl in on themselves. I could hear the softest whisper, not from the speakers, not even from the feed, but from somewhere else:

“Little root…” the voice said, soft and wet and impossibly close, like the words were being grown inside my own skull. “You touched the grave-light… and now I see you blooming. What will you grow next?”

I shivered. The voice was nothing like Fern, or Lioren, or even Vireleth. It was ancient, sweet, patient, hungry. It made me want to curl up in a ball, or let myself be eaten alive. Maybe both.

I pulled up my compad, tried to type a message to Fern:

I think I broke something.

Deleted it.

Are you hearing this too?

Deleted that.

I tried again, hands shaking: Just stay you.

I didn’t send it.

The AR in the room flickered again. For a second, I saw my own reflection, but it wasn’t me—just a version of myself with flowers growing from every joint, petals pressed between my teeth, eyes gone soft and green.

I shut off the news, the feeds, every screen and sensor I could find. But the voice kept whispering, weaving through my bones like a vine in heat. It wasn’t going to stop.

I sat in the middle of the floor, sweating, and waited for morning.

The room was dark, but I could still see the flowers.

And outside, somewhere, I knew Fern was growing hers, too.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: Eventide

I ate the next Döner on the floor of the corridor, alone, half naked, grease and sauce dripping straight onto my towel and the tiles below. I wasn’t even trying to be hot about it; it was pure survival, no room for shame or seduction. Still, I could feel the way my own body responded, tongue buzzing, hands shaking asI licked every last shred of meat from the flatbread, then ran my finger along the inside of the wrapper and sucked it clean.

I’d never been this hungry in my life. Not even during the ration riots, not even the time Dad spent three weeks in the medbay, and Mom “cooked” nothing but instant algae chips and hydrogenated sadness. This was a mythic hunger. An urge so big it hurt, so deep it echoed in the base of my spine.

I finished the first, then the second, then the third, all in the space of a few minutes. I didn’t slow down until my jaw ached and my chest started to burn with the weird, sweet heaviness of a world that wasn’t built to contain you.

When the last bite was gone, I pressed the paper to my lips, licked the wrapper until it tore, then sat back and let myself breathe.

Still not enough.

I wiped my mouth on my arm, then looked down at my hands. They glowed faintly, blue at the knuckles, white at the fingertips, like the mythic was leaking out in slow pulses, trying to escape the meat and bone it was trapped in.

I leaned back against the wall, cross-legged, letting the adrenaline die off. In the distance, I could hear HoloNet still howling, screams, memes, and the sound of three quadrillion people losing their minds in perfect synchrony.

Somewhere under the noise, I could sense Aenna, her signature curled up inside me like a sleeping animal, soft and safe and so alive I almost started to cry. She wasn’t gone. Just… folded in, echo on echo, nested inside the mythic hurricane that was eating the world.