Page 154 of She Who Devours the Stars

The simulations were supposed to help. They made it worse.

On loop #1002, I saw it: a signature I didn’t recognize, riding Fern’s mythprint like a parasite. It wasn’t Lioren. It wasn’t Fern. It was cold, recursive, a logic engine bent on eating every line of difference until the world was blank.

I froze the feed, zoomed in, split the waveform.

The third signature was there, hiding in the gaps between Fern’s own pulses. Every time she reached a new mythic threshold, it got clearer—darker, more precise.

My mouth went dry. I’d missed this for three days.

“No, no, no, no—” I whispered, hands frantic on the glass, dialing back the simulation, checking against the original Eventide feed, then my own. The signature was there, too, in the Spiral, lurking just outside perception.

I pulled up the Magnetar logs, desperate for proof I’d imagined it.

It was there.

It had always been there.

My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t slow down. My own mythprint was now fully active, the nebula cluster in my chest burning blue-hot, every breath feeding the growing panic.

I reran the feed.

Every time Fern reached out to “devour” someone, the third vector twitched, adjusting itself to the new context, eating the old narrative and spitting out something sharper, more beautiful, more doomed.

The air in the lab thickened. My eyes watered, then stung, then started to burn.

I tried to stand, but my legs didn’t cooperate. I crashed against the edge of the table, caught myself, then kept typing, because if I stopped I knew I’d lose the thread and probably never find it again.

I muttered to myself, “It’s not her. It’s not Lioren. It’s—” but I couldn’t finish. My tongue wouldn’t make the words.

The third vector was watching me now. I could feel it: in the cold behind my eyes, in the way my shadow stopped matching my body, in the hunger that was no longer Fern’s but mine.

The nebula in my chest flared. My hands turned to starlight, the flesh and bone burning away, replaced by pure, blue-white fire. My hair lifted off my scalp, red shifting to gold, then to white, then to nothing at all. The world lost color, then shape, then meaning.

The lights went out.

A new voice, neutral and flat, echoed in the darkness.

[KAIRON THE MIRROR HAS INTERVENED.]

Every system froze. My hands stopped moving, but the pain didn’t. My mythprint collapsed, the nebula turning to cold ash. My body was paralyzed, not with fear, but with the knowledge that something had overwritten my every protocol.

[SLEEP,] the voice said, as if it had never known the concept of failure.

I tried to resist, but my body obeyed before my mind could protest.

I slumped forward, my face landing on the console, starlight leaking from my fingers as they spasmed once, then went still.

In the final moment before oblivion, I felt the third vector settle over me, like a shadow or a lover or a god.

It was amused.

It knew I’d found it.

It wasn’t done.

Neither was I.

But for now, I slept.