Page 156 of She Who Devours the Stars

Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins

It was the hunger that led us, but it was Zevelune who kept the pace—never quite out of reach, always close enough that if I really wanted to bite her, I could. The Ruins deepened. Every step forward was an invitation for the world to disassemble itself a little more. The petrified trees blurred, then sharpened again as if some drunk god was refocusing the lens at random. The ground lost its conviction about whether it wanted to be stone, glass, or the kind of mud that stuck to your soul.

I followed, because it was either that or admit I had no control left.

About twenty meters in, the world broke harder.

The first sign was the wind, which reversed directions three times in a second. The next was the sun—no, not the sun, but the idea of sun, pasted onto a sky that was now split into angular facets like a crystal that hated itself. The taste in the air went from ozone and rot to artificial vanilla, then to the old solvent stink of my childhood, before cycling back with an undernote of Zevelune’s perfume.

“Nice weather,” I muttered, voice sounding a little too much like someone else’s.

Zevelune glanced over her shoulder, lips pursed. “It matches the company.”

I wanted to laugh, but the Ruins weren’t giving me room. They pulsed, like a migraine, or a mythic pressure drop, and every time I blinked, I saw the Eventide quad, charred and glassed and perfect, overlaying the stone forest like an AR glitch.

The world ran out of patience.

With no transition, I was in my old living room on Pelago-9, knees bruised from the tile, Mom screaming something about ruined boots, Dad holding a shattered compad and looking at me like I’d just confessed to arson (which, technically, I had). The room smelled like burnt hair and desperation. I looked down and realized I was still in my current body—too tall, too scarred, too hungry—but the voice that came out of my mouth when I tried to apologize was Lioren’s: low, precise, with the cadence of someone who knew the outcome before the sentence started.

“I’ll fix it,” I heard myself say, and Mom blinked like she hadn’t expected that answer.

I tried to stand, but the world reeled. The scene reset. This time, the kitchen was on fire, the table snapped in half, and Mom was gone—just Dad, staring down at me with a disappointment so dense it could have been weaponized.

“You can’t fix everything,” he said, only it wasn’t Dad, it was Zevelune, perched in the corner like she’d always lived there. Her eyes were gold this time, and she bared her teeth in what passed for a smile. “Sometimes you break it worse. Sometimes that’s the point.”

The air buzzed, and I was back in the Ruins, heart jackhammering, legs shaky. Zevelune was still walking, but now she watched me from the edge of her eye, tracking every microspasm.

“First drift?” she asked, casual as a cat.

I wiped my mouth. My hand came away slick with blood I hadn’t tasted. “Not even my first this week.”

The Ruins got the hint and stepped up their game.

We pushed deeper, and the logic of the place started to fail. The petrified trees were still there, but some had been replaced with pylons from the Eventide quad, their tops twisted into impossible fractals. A few steps later, the ground was replaced with the greasy concrete of the Taco Miracle’s back alley, but the sky was still the purple from the Ruins, and the air vibrated with a mythic hum so loud it pressed against my eardrums.

I tried to focus on my own breathing. The trick worked until I realized I wasn’t breathing in time with my body anymore. My lungs moved, but my heartbeat lagged. My hands clenched, then unclenched, and I caught myself flexing my fingers the way Lioren did in every holo I’d ever been forced to watch.

It didn’t stop. The more I tried to center myself, the more I slipped sideways into the Lioren drift. Speech patterns, sure, but also the way I stood, the way I squinted into the broken horizon, even the way I looked at Zevelune, measuring her for threat or maybe for dinner.

She noticed. Of course she did.

“Lioren always hated this part,” Zevelune said, voice soft, almost indulgent. “He was never good at losing control.”

I didn’t dignify that with a reply. Instead, I kept moving, one foot in front of the other, even when the path switched from forest to hex-tile gym mats, to a maintenance catwalk, to something that might have once been a road but now just looped around and bit itself on the tail.

After a while, my sense of time collapsed. Maybe it was thirty seconds. Maybe it was three years. I only knew I’d been walkingforever, and the world never stopped rearranging itself to fuck with me.

Then I saw it: a chunk of myth-stone, cracked in half, with a piece of paper sticking out like the tongue of a dead animal. It shouldn’t have been there, and yet I knew, absolutely, that it had always been waiting for me.

I reached for it, fingers trembling.

Zevelune watched, silent, her eyes now black and infinite.

I tugged the paper free. It was old—ancient, probably, though the handwriting was crisp, bold, and so self-assured it made me want to punch the author in the face.

I knew the script. Everyone did. It was Lioren’s.

I read aloud because I couldn’t not: