Page 168 of She Who Devours the Stars

And waited for impact.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron

Axis Alignment: Eventide Labs

I’d always known I’d die for someone else’s narrative, but I’d hoped it would at least be a good one.

Aenna and I had barricaded ourselves in the mythlab, living off caffeine, freeze-dried apology pudding, and the raw, undiluted dread of knowing your favorite disaster girl was about to collapse the universe in real time. The place reeked of burnt ozone and terror sweat, the only light coming from the array of consoles that lined the room, each one locked on a different feed of Fern’s last known signature.

The lab was chaos: every surface buried under diagnostic holos, spilled energy drink, and the fragments of half a dozen “emergency stabilization” projects that neither of us had the heart to throw out. The AR overlays flickered so severely I could barely see my hands. Sometimes I’d get a glimpse of my face reflected in the glass, and it would be wrong, eyes gold instead of brown, mouth curled in a sneer I’d never practiced.

I knew what that meant. Solance and Kairon were piggybacking the signal again, each trying to one-up the other in a contest nobody had explained to me. They liked to mess with my overlays, but the side effect was a kind of emotional nausea, like having to watch your parents fuck just to get the WiFi password.

Aenna, for her part, was thriving on it. She’d gone full post-mortal, her mythprint so saturated it bled red through every sleeve and collar. She hadn’t slept, probably hadn’t even blinked, since I woke her up, and now she sat cross-legged on the main table, surrounded by a halo of diagnostic glass and her psychotic confidence.

“She’s still in the Ruins,” Aenna said, not looking up from the feed. Her voice was raw, threaded with feedback. “Resonance hasn’t flatlined, but the harmonics are spiking hard. Lioren’s signature keeps overlaying. It’s… beautiful, but also very, very bad.”

I nodded, because it felt like I should. “Is there anything we can do?”

Aenna’s eyes glowed, not metaphorically. “We can make it louder.”

I didn’t even pretend to understand. I just reached for the nearest diagnostic and tried to focus, but my vision kept doubling. When I looked at the monitor, I saw three overlays: Fern, hunched and shaking, her mythprint burning blue; Zevelune, all hungry elegance, never breaking a sweat; and Dyris, beautiful and terrifying, falling through mythspace like the world owed her a fucking apology.

The room buzzed with a static that got in your teeth. I blinked, and suddenly Kairon’s voice was in my head, smooth, bored, the kind of tone you could only get from a being that had watched the world end a hundred times and never been impressed.

“You’re all variables in the same equation, Alyx,” Kairon purred. “Be clever. Be cruel if you must. It’s what she would do.”

Solance cut in, her voice a harmony of love songs and nervous laughter. “Don’t think. Feel. Love her loud enough to make the world listen.”

I clapped my hands over my ears, which never worked but made me feel slightly less unhinged.

Aenna reached over and grabbed my wrist. Her hand was hot, like she’d swallowed a power core.

“You with me?” she asked, eyes wide, mouth split in a wild smile.

I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure. “You’re going to try it, aren’t you?”

Aenna’s smile sharpened. “We’re not letting her go down alone.”

She let go of my wrist and bent over the central console, fingers flying across the interface. The display filled with lines of mythvector code, each line a precise, violent argument against entropy. She was amplifying Fern’s signature, feeding it every last bit of local mythic bandwidth, and then some. When the system started throwing redline warnings, Aenna just laughed.

“C’mon,” she muttered, “just a little more. You can take it.”

I wasn’t sure if she was talking to the system, Fern, or herself.

I watched the feed. Fern was on her knees now, the ground beneath her alive with blue-white fire. Zevelune hovered above, part lover, part executioner, part mythic correction agent. I wanted to scream at her to leave Fern alone, but the voice wouldn’t come.

Instead, I did what I always did: I hacked the local net. Pulled up every dormant social channel, every comm system, every public address thread that the blackout hadn’t shut down. The maincampus feed was dead, so I rerouted through the old student meme server. It still worked. I dumped the raw event footage, every bit of data I could scrounge, straight into the mythlab console.

The effect was immediate. The system screamed, literally, a high-pitched warble that made my teeth ache.

Aenna’s laugh cracked and doubled, echoing off the walls.

Kairon: “Unorthodox. Reckless. Predictably her.”

Solance: “Oh, I like this one.”

I felt the pressure building, a physical weight on my chest. “Aenna, is this… is this safe?”