Page 149 of She Who Devours the Stars

I let that one land. Lioren’s name was a knife in every conversation, but here, in this dead forest, it just made the hunger worse.

“So, what’s the plan?” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “We punch each other until the universe lets me out, or you going to lecture me about the importance of mythic containment?”

She leaned closer, until her lips almost brushed mine. Her breath was warm, scented like burnt sugar and the ozone just before a storm.

“Neither,” she whispered. “You walk into the ruins and see if you can hold together longer than the last Nullarch. It’s a trial by collapse, Fern. Don’t you love those?”

I wanted to say no. I wanted to say, “Let’s just get this over with, so I can kill you, fuck you, or both, and then go home.”

Instead, I let my body lean forward, closed the last centimeter, and for a heartbeat, our foreheads touched.

The mythic field snapped, sending a shock down my spine, and the world fuzzed out, then snapped back sharper than ever.

“So much potential,” Zevelune murmured, her tongue flicking out to taste the space between us, of which there was none. She licked my lips. I liked it. “So much like him. And still not enough. Not yet.”

I grinned, even though it hurt. “Give me five minutes.”

She laughed, and the laugh was so beautiful it made the petrified trees bend toward us, just to hear it again.

Without another word, she turned, and I followed her into the stone forest.

The narrative crucible was waiting.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Trivane

Axis Alignment: Aboard Vireleth

The first thing I noticed was the lack of pain.

This was not the same as comfort. This was the raw, exposed absence of suffering, like the universe had cut the wire to the part of my brain that made me feel anything, and left the rest of the system to reboot in a room with no gravity and no mute button for the alarms.

I opened my eyes and found myself lying in a containment pod, naked except for a clutch of green-gold vines that pulsed, faintly, where they wound around my chest and thighs. Each vine bloomed with a slick, wet flower, more surgical than pretty. The petals flexed open and closed, sipping at my sweat or whatever exudate the last mythquake had left behind.

Above me, the ceiling domed up forever, white stone curving into silence, broken only by lines of blue light that flared at my every breath. It was quiet, except for the humming undercurrent of the Vireleth, which was the kind of quiet you could only get on a mythship built to outlast eternity.

I flexed my fingers. They worked. I flexed my mind. It, too, worked, which was less of a relief.

My last memory was Fern, Zevelune, and the Eventide plaza peeling open like a can of scream. After that, nothing, except a cold sense of being watched. I didn’t know what day it was, or whether Fern was dead, or whether I was.

I sat up, peeled the vines off my chest (they retracted with a damp, satisfied sigh), and looked around. There was a glass of water at my side, and a single white jumpsuit, tailored to my size, hanging on a hook three meters away. The water was room temperature. The jumpsuit was clean.

I was not.

My body had been rebuilt, I could tell. The usual scars were there, but in the wrong places. My mythprint was threaded with unfamiliar patterns, tighter, brighter, almost buzzing against myskin. Asterra’s handiwork, no doubt: her signature was the floral undertone that lingered in my sweat, and the way the air now tasted of chlorophyll and half-digested honey.

I stood, feet unsteady, but the vertigo passed in a second. I slipped into the jumpsuit, too tight at the hips, as always, and stalked to the nearest door.

It slid open before I could even think, “let me out.”

I was in a corridor: white, silent, lined with the skeletal ribs of Vireleth’s containment core. Somewhere in the ship, a memory of Fern echoed, but I shoved it down and focused on the present.

“Welcome back, Dyris Vaelith,” said a voice, smooth and infinitely tired. Vireleth was never one to waste bandwidth on formalities.

“Status?” I snapped, already moving. “Where’s Fern? Where’s Zevelune?”

The ship didn’t answer. Instead, a hologram flared to life in front of me: Zevelune, wearing the same iridescent dress as last time, but with her hair down and lips painted a shade of mythic blood red. She winked, slow, as if she had all the time in the world.

“Don’t panic, darling,” Zevelune said, voice like silk dipped in arsenic. “I’ve taken Fern to the only place in this universe that might unbreak her. Think of it as a spa day. For gods.” She leaned forward, and I could see every detail, the gloss on her teeth, the barely concealed violence in her gaze. “I’ll bring her back better, or not at all. You’ll thank me later.”