Page 153 of She Who Devours the Stars

Zevelune’s smile softened—not with sympathy, but with a darkness that felt honest. She spoke softly, voice velvet and broken stars.

“He stood here too, once. Lioren.” She looked away, just for a second, as if embarrassed to mention his name. “He tried to beat the universe into shape with his bare hands. Bled for it. Burned for it. And when the world told him no…” She shrugged, slow and mean. “He just made it a yes anyway.”

She rose from the stone, stepped in close—closer than anyone had ever dared. Her mouth was right at my ear, breath warm and thick with the scent of chocolate and sweet wine.

“So what’s it gonna be, darling?” she whispered, tongue flicking out to almost touch my cheek. “You weaker than a shirtless flirt with frosted tips, or are you building something even worse?”

She pressed a hand to my chest, right over the spot where the mythprint flared brightest. The touch was electric. My whole body tensed, every muscle ready to shatter.

I couldn’t think. I could only burn.

“Again,” I said, teeth gritted, every cell in my body screaming for more.

She laughed—low, indulgent, almost proud.

Then the world went white.

When I came back to myself, I was on my knees, hands digging into the black earth. My mythprint was lit, blue-white and jagged, crackling down my spine and out through my fingertips. I was shaking, but not from fear. I was alive, and I wanted to kill something just to prove it.

Zevelune stood before me, arms open, as if ready to catch me or let me fall, depending on which was funnier.

I got to my feet, swaying.

“Better?” she asked.

I nodded, once. “Still hungry.”

“Good,” she said, and her eyes flared with something like approval. “Now let’s see what happens when you stop pretending you’re not the center of the story.”

She turned, and I followed her deeper into the ruins.

Behind us, the stone forest twisted, closed, then vanished.

Ahead, the world waited, already on fire.

I was ready.

Maybe, this time, I’d burn the right things.

Thread Modulation: Aenna Caith

Axis Alignment: Eventide Lab

I’d locked the door, but it didn’t matter. Nothing outside the lab was real. Not anymore.

My hands jittered over the console, running simulation after simulation, each one a slightly more warped version of the event. I had Fern’s mythprint mapped to seventeen decimals, every quiver of the Eventide plaza replayed in a dozen models: spiral logic, hunger vector, meta-narrative pulse. The Magnetar. Eirona-Null. The aftermath that should have erased us both.

I hadn’t slept in three days. My body said it needed to, but the new me—the mythprint me—overwrote fatigue with pure, recursive terror.

The room was bright, brighter than I remembered. The walls seemed to glow, then fade, then pulse with the rhythm of my heartbeat. Sometimes my hands looked wrong: too pale, too long, fingers trailing blue and white, the skin semitransparent. I’d check, and it would be normal again, but then the next scan would show the fingers two centimeters further apart, or warped, or fusing into each other. I logged the phenomenon as “perceptual phase bleed.” I didn’t mention the part where it hurt.

I looped the Fern data again. Spiral collapse at t-minus zero: hunger curve trending positive. Re-entry: mythprint loss of self. Post-crisis, she still functioned, but something inside had begun to… breed? That wasn’t the right word. It was more like she wasgrowing a mythic cancer, each “event” feeding it, making her resonance more dangerous, more unstable.

I watched the part where she left the world for the Spiral, where she met me and ate my signature in a way that was both a compliment and a war crime. I’d replayed it a thousand times, searching for the seed of her new behavior. I was convinced I’d caused it. I let her “go again” with me, over and over, until she couldn’t stop.

“Recursive hunger,” I muttered, tapping the phrase into my notes. “Self-sustaining. Nonlinear. Feedback loop.”

My own mythprint responded: the band around my wrist flared, then sent a jolt up my arm, so sharp it made me cry out. The lab lights flickered; a panel in the ceiling groaned and warped, as if gravity had tripled for a half-second. I logged the effect as “local warp anomaly.” I didn’t log the part where I nearly bit through my tongue.