Page 141 of She Who Devours the Stars

I closed my eyes.

I heard the distant, sweet hum of Dyris’s field, straining against itself, trying to hold the city together even as the rest of the universe started to spin out of alignment. Something verdant was growing out of the cracks in reality, reaching for my Sexretary, but it was familiar and radiated… helpfulness?

I grinned, feeling the stretch of my lips, the way the smile was equal parts hunger and promise.

There were no more Döner, but I was still hungry.

I flexed my hands, watched the light flicker.

I felt of Zevelune’s laugh, sharp and pretty, the way she’d tossed the bag at me like she was feeding a zoo animal, and I was her favorite.

I saw Dyris, locked in her room, staring at the screens and the darkness, trying to fix everything and not realizing it was already too late, and that her room was now a botanical garden.

I thought of Aenna, sleeping inside my bones, but also sleeping in her dorm room. Exhausted by the extreme forces that had reforged her physical form during her mythic rebirth.

Alyx danced through my mind, all dark skin and defiance, dripping sauce and myth. She offered herself up as Snackrifice, her lips curled in challenge, knowing she couldn’t survive it and doing it anyway, in the dim hope it’d keep me from withering away for a few more minutes.

And I thought of myself, alone in the corridor, covered in sauce and myth, waiting for the next disaster to crash through the door and demand to be devoured.

I wiped my hands clean, then licked my fingers again, slower this time, just to see if the taste would ever go away.

It didn’t.

“Still hungry,” I said.

And the corridor echoed it back.

Chapter 19: The Sere Event

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: Eventide

The plaza was empty, which was weird for Eventide. Even weirder for a Tuesday, when you’d expect at least two brawls, a failed publicity stunt, and three holographic protests over whatever the cafeteria did to protein this week. I stood alone at the edge of the outer lecture stairs, coat zipped against the last spasm of autumn, eyes on the sky. For once, it wasn’t the sky I was worried about. It was the air: the way it pressed, thick and spongy, like the whole world had wrapped me in old memory foam and then punched out the oxygen.

If you’d asked me, an hour ago, what I was doing out here, I would have said “getting some fucking air” with my trademark sincerity, but the truth was: I’d wanted to see the next mythquake up close. Not the usual, meme-tier microdrift, but the real thing. The one everyone whispered about but nobody ever actually saw.

Of course, nobody ever thought to schedule a mythquake right on the plaza.

I shifted my weight, boots sticking a little on the stone. My AR overlay tried to compensate, adjusting my balance calculations, but the effort just made the floor seem stickier, like someone hadspilled a thousand bottles of premium reality and let it dry in the sun.

A voice behind me: “What are you even doing here, Trivane?”

I didn’t turn. I knew the voice—one of the upper-year Resonance kids, probably sent to monitor the perimeter in case I decided to go Nullarch on the quad. She sounded nervous, but I could tell she didn’t want to be seen caring about my well-being. Eventide never cared about its own, unless you were the kind of disaster they hadn’t yet figured out how to contain.

I flicked my AR to “disdain” and kept my mouth shut.

The pressure ratcheted up another notch. Static buzzed along the nape of my neck, an old, unwelcome friend. I could feel the mythprint on my spine humming, then stuttering, then pushing every nerve in my body to the edge of whiteout. There was a taste in the air—like ozone and burnt lemons and something just a little too sweet for its own good.

That’s when the world broke.

It didn’t announce itself, not really. No grand fanfare, no cataclysmic warning from the System, just a silent, sickening shift that dropped me to my knees. My AR overlay crashed and rebooted in a single judder, the world around me freezing and shattering like cheap mythglass. The sky peeled away, color bleeding out until there was nothing but the bone-white glare of an old CRT left on overnight.

I tried to stand, but the plaza buckled under me. The stone, usually so solid you could break teeth on it, rippled and cracked, each step a new disaster. Pillars of fire—yes, actual fire—ripped into view along the event horizon, curling up in slow, deliberate arcs that made the whole sky look like it was trying to eat itself.

The ground under my hands was suddenly… wrong. Texture like sandpaper, but dry, so dry, as if someone had blasted the world with a decade of drought in a single instant. My skin itched, burned, tried to flake away.

From behind me, the voices started.