Page 143 of She Who Devours the Stars

Axis Alignment: Eventide

I’ve always been good at ignoring pain. Not the sharp, useful kind—the sort that tells you to move your hand off the fire—but the dull, planetary ache that wraps itself around every muscle and decides it’s a new baseline. House Vaelith calls it “adaptation.” Eventide called it “clinical dissociation with prestige.” Either way, it’s why I made it this far.

But nothing, nothing in my entire career of walking into disasters could have prepped me for the mythquake that hit the Eventide quad.

It was a wall, but not a real one. Walls at least let you bounce off. This was… a suffocation. Every step from the admin wing tothe main plaza was a fight against air that wanted to be solid, a universe that had decided, arbitrarily and with zero warning, to invert all its permissions. The pressure was worst at the joints: knees, elbows, the vulnerable spots of old scars. By the time I’d made it halfway across the lawn, my teeth were grinding themselves to powder.

Every blink of my AR brought new warnings. “CONTAINMENT BREACH – CLASS ZERO,” “SIGNATURE VECTOR: UNMODELED,” “MYTHIC DRIFT: NON-LOCALIZED.” I dismissed them as fast as they spawned, but they just kept layering, until the whole world was a jittering patchwork of hazard tape.

Somewhere up ahead, through the glass-walled corridor, I could see Fern. Or at least, the residue of Fern, outlined in blue-white corona so bright it threatened to overwrite my retinas. She was at the epicenter, of course. Always the center, even when she tried to run.

I pressed forward. Each stride shrank by a third; the world bent like a slow-motion funhouse, but one that wanted you dead at the end. I tried to tune out the noises—my own breathing, the screaming from the quad, the arrhythmic klaxon that kept failing and restarting, like the building’s soul was stuck in a death loop.

At the doors, my hand barely worked. I mashed the panel, missed, then finally slammed it with my whole palm. The glass parted, and the mythquake hit me full in the face.

For a second, nothing. No sense, no self, not even a name. Then the pain flooded back, not as agony, but as raw, uncut signal: every atom screaming its coordinates, every heartbeat a punch to the inside of my ribs.

I could see her—barely. Fern, on her knees, head up, staring the mythquake in the eye. The plaza around her was a blasted, blackened nightmare, every stone split and glassed by heat that hadn’t existed a minute ago. The sky over her wasn’t a sky anymore, just a vertical rip of red and white and the kind of color you only saw on the other side of detonation.

I called her name. I think I did. Nothing came out but static.

I tried to move closer, but the world refused. My feet skidded, my lungs locked, and my own mythprint—usually so reliable, so elegantly engineered—just shrieked and shut down. I could feel it, the old familiar resonance, but it was as useless as trying to light a candle in a hurricane.

The narrative pressure collapsed in. The only way forward was to override the pain, burn through it, brute-force my way to her.

I focused on her outline. On the pull. My body strained, but my mind just kept repeating her name like a war-drum.

That’s when the voice hit.

It was not Fern. Not Lioren. Not even the building’s overloaded intercom.

It was Asterra the Bloom.

She didn’t speak with air. She was a scent, a heat, a soft, organic ache that crawled up my spine and into the deepest, most private crevices of my mind.

“Little root…” she said, warm and so intimate it made my vision blur. “I’m coming.”

I wanted to scream, to claw her out of my head, but the only thing I could do was stand there, trembling, as the pressure tripled. The world went wet, all my scars opening at once, sweat or blood or something in between leaking through my pores.

Then—sharp, clean, a scalpel after the fever—a second signal.

Colder. Metallic. Unforgiving.

[ VECTOR CORRECTION INBOUND ]

[ JHENNA THE CROWN – SYSTEM ENTRY PENDING ]

My AR exploded. The display didn’t just glitch; it recompiled itself, the warning banners stacking into infinity until my vision was just red.

The pain was gone. Only the cold remained.

I tried to move, but my own body was foreign. My arms didn’t want to lift. My legs were numb from mid-thigh down. Only my face still worked, and even then, I could barely focus past the corona around Fern.

She was no longer kneeling. She was standing, somehow, but she wasn’t just herself anymore. The Lioren ghostprint overlayed her perfectly, like she’d been double-exposed on the film of reality. Her eyes were wide, blank, reflecting nothing but the firestorm in the sky.

Three Mythships in-system, my AR screamed.

[ VIRELETH // ASTERRA // JHENNA ]