Page 144 of She Who Devours the Stars

[ CONTAINMENT: hilarious ]

Somewhere, the campus’s alarm siren died for good. The backup tried to start, but only managed a strangled, human-sounding wail before giving up.

It didn’t matter. Nobody was listening now. The people still standing were locked in place, eyes skyward, faces slack with the terror of recognizing the names that had never, ever, been meant to walk in a single system at once.

Asterra’s voice curled through me again, less sensual this time and more maternal, pitying.

“Little root, little wound. I will hold you together when the world cannot.”

I wanted to protest, but my throat was full of glass.

A student next to me, braver than most, tried to run for the admin building. She made it three steps before her mythprint collapsed her knees, and she vomited all over the steps. She kept crawling, sobbing, until another wave hit and she just… stopped.

A guy further back, his name didn’t matter, but he had beautiful hands, let out a single, shocked grunt, then lost all control. He pissed himself, face a mask of pure disbelief. Nobody laughed. There wasn’t enough left in any of us for laughter.

Above, the sky fractured. Three rings, one black, one gold, one a color that had never existed. They spun around each other, faster and faster, until the plaza started to lift off the ground, pebbles and bits of debris caught in microgravity, everything wanting to ascend but unable to break free.

Through all of it, Fern just stood. Not moving, not blinking, as if daring the universe to try harder.

At the edge of vision: Zevelune.

She wasn’t running, wasn’t bracing, wasn’t doing anything but strolling into the storm with a wine glass still perfectly, impossibly full. Her smile was the kind you’d see on a wolf that already knew how the story ended.

The world bent. The plaza stones started to float, slow, then faster, bits of ash swirling in weird, lazy vortices. The myth-pressure was now so bad I couldn’t tell where my own body stopped and the Eventide’s ambient pain began.

I screamed Fern’s name again, even though I knew she wouldn’t hear it.

I tried to reach her. I tried to force my legs forward.

For the briefest, wildest second, I thought maybe the mythquake would break me before I broke myself.

Then, all at once, the pressure vanished.

A calm, dry voice in my skull, old as hunger, said:

“You don’t get to die here, Dyris.”

The world went white.

And I was still standing, but I had no idea if there was anything left of me inside the outline.

Thread Modulation: Vireleth the Closure

Axis Alignment: Eventide

Some people hated Zevelune because she never broke a sweat. That’s what they said, anyway, in the corridors and dark lounges where mythics traded gossip as currency. The rumor was: Zevelune had no blood pressure, no pulse, no bodily secretions at all, just a dry, cosmic disdain for the world and everything in it.

But if you watched closely, like I did, like everyone at Eventide was forced to in the moment, she didn’t just not sweat. She made everyone else sweat for her.

She walked into the mythquake like she was late for a matinee and mildly annoyed by the line. The plaza was still ground zero, charred and unpeopled except for the two mythic signatures that held the world together by mutual dare: Fern, radiating blue-white, and Zevelune, soaking up the leftover spectrum and dripping it back into reality like nothing.

She was impossible to misplace. Her dress, torn open and fluttering around her legs, showed more skin than it covered, and the skin was pale cerulean, star-lit, dusted with the aftershocks of every war she’d ever refused to lose. The wineglass in her right hand never spilled. Her left hand was open, fingers flexing like they’d just remembered what it was like to be a weapon.

Nobody challenged her. Nobody even wanted to.

She didn’t walk toward Fern, she walked through the mythquake, the storm parting around her, the air itself reversing direction in deference. Stones that floated in the grip of myth-pressure drifted toward her, like she was the center of a new and better universe.

A kid in admin, just a normal, not a mythic, hid behind a reinforced window and tried to record what happened next. The footage would later play on every late-night recap, and nobody would believe it was unedited.