Page 166 of She Who Devours the Stars

“You are a recursion,” Zevelune said, softer now. “But you could be a vector. You could be the break in the pattern.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Every muscle had locked up, the mythprint on my spine burning cold, the blue-white light now bleeding from my eyes.

Zevelune stepped closer, her breath hot on my skin. “Or you can let the world eat you. Up to you.”

The Ruins trembled. The ground caved, and I dropped to my knees, palms pressed to the dead earth. The mythprint on my arms went nova, light arcing from every pore.

“I’m not afraid,” I heard myself say.

But it wasn’t my voice.

It was Lioren’s.

And it was terrified.

I collapsed, the world spiraling in on itself, and as the light died, I heard Zevelune’s last words, soft and sweet as a curse:

“Make the choice, darling. Or the Ruins will make it for you.”

Thread Modulation: Dyris Trivane

Axis Alignment: Aboard Vireleth the Closure

I’d always considered myself immune to melodrama, but the universe never tired of calling my bluff.

Three hours had passed since Zevelune hijacked Fern out of the mythquake, and I’d spent each minute of it in the observation deck, cycling through every replay, every glitch, every last frame the AR feeds could scavenge from the spiral. The rest of the ship had gone dark for “containment protocol,” which was mythship for “nobody wants to witness a war widow’s breakdown.” The only light came from the surface: blue-white corona rising in the west, a mythic dawn that didn’t obey planetary logic or any Accord rules worth the memory bytes.

I wore Velline’s last and greatest outfit as armor. The bodysuit pinched my waist so hard I’d lost the will to eat, and the heels, fuck the heels, added just enough altitude to make every move feel like a battle. When I glanced in the glass of the viewport, the effect was obscene: all sharp lines and cold silver, my mythprintstitched across my neck like the signature on a contract I never agreed to sign.

I reran the feed. Fern, outlined in blue, locked in a face-off with Zevelune at the center of the Ruins. The way she moved: unpredictable, but weirdly graceful, even as the world bent around her. When Zevelune whispered something in her ear, Fern didn’t flinch, not even a little.

She’d always been better at pretending to be fearless than I was.

I punched pause, rewound, stared at Fern’s face, then my reflection beside it. We looked nothing alike, but I felt the narrative pressure all the same, the sick, exquisite certainty that if Fern were going to burn, I’d be the fuel.

The deck was silent. I liked it that way. It kept the mythship from getting too chatty. Vireleth had been pacing me for hours, running security pings and emotion audits at random intervals, but I knew the old bastard’s real trick: if you didn’t speak, he couldn’t answer back. A warship built for a dead god, now stuck with me and my mess.

The mythprint on my skin ached. Sometimes it stuttered, going dim, only to flare up when I thought of Fern. The doctors said it was a “resonance bleed,” a side effect of the Magnetar event, but I knew better. It was want, leaking from every cell, trying to claw itself into Fern’s orbit and stay there forever.

I blinked, once, and the feed jumped forward, except this time, the playback was wrong.

Fern was still in the Ruins, but the background had changed: the petrified trees were gone, replaced by a cathedral of bones, arches made from the ribcages of extinct megafauna. The sky was black, the only light coming from the blue-white of Fern’s mythprint, now so bright it cast shadows across the altar at the center.

At the altar, Zevelune waited.

She looked up, smiled, and said: “Little root, the field still waits for you.”

The voice wasn’t Zevelune’s. It was older, warmer, ruined by history but not by malice.

Asterra.

I blinked again, and now the feed was back to normal, Fern and Zevelune, locked in mythic standoff, the world barely holding itself together.

I shivered. The mythprint on my neck pulsed in time with my heart.

Another voice broke through, cold as a star’s corpse:

“Your duty remains unfulfilled.”