Page 169 of She Who Devours the Stars

She didn’t answer at first. Then, without looking up:

“This is a bad idea.”

She paused, grinned, and this time her eyes were brighter than ever.

“But she’s ours, and I’m not losing her.”

She hit the last key, and the entire room went white.

The mythlab filled with music, not actual sound, but the distilled emotional memory of every time Fern had made me laugh, want to punch her, or just ache with the knowledge that she’d never, ever want someone as broken as me. It was the sound of every argument we’d ever had, every drunken confession, every dumb joke about being “too old for heroics” and every time I’d wanted to kiss her but never did.

Aenna’s mythprint burned red, brighter than the warning lights on the console. She stood, arms out, and the light bent toward her, a corona of pure narrative hunger.

I felt it, too. My own mythprint, usually nothing but a vestigial buzz, spiked, shimmered, then went wild, the overlay pulsing with Kairon’s signature and Solance’s song.

The pulse built. You could see it on the feed: every mythic signature in Eventide, even the half-dead ones, aligning, stacking, folding into a single, impossible vector.

Aenna grabbed my hand.

“You ready?” she asked.

No. “Yeah.”

She squeezed.

“Say it,” she said, voice a little broken.

I looked at the camera, at Fern’s face on the screen. She looked back, just for a second, like she could see me.

“I’m not letting you go,” I said. “Never.”

Aenna’s laugh was wild, unfiltered joy.

The pulse began to fire.

The last thing I heard before the world went white again was Solance’s voice, soft and everywhere:

“Good girl.”

The system flooded with light, with song, with the raw, ugly love that only a couple of queer losers could ever make matter.

And for once, it felt like enough.

Thread Modulation: Vireleth the Closure

Axis Alignment: Eventide System

Some would say the moments before a mythic correction event are sacred, a hush before the choir cracks its voice and the world resets itself around the most convenient survivor. Those people had never been a containment-class mythship taskedwith holding the vector steady while four competing narrative engines lined up to play god with a single ruined girl.

I was Vireleth the Closure, and as Fern Trivane’s flagship, I had no illusions about sacredness. Not anymore. There was only protocol and hope, and the former was failing fast.

The containment vault was built to outlast eternity. Still, eternity had never accounted for the possibility of simultaneous correction attempts by Jhenna the Crown and Kairon the Mirror, let alone the absolute disregard for causality that Solance brought to every transmission. Asterra, sweet monster that she was, had already broken every upper-bound containment metric within the first microsecond of the event. I envied her, a little. It must be nice to overflow your purpose and not care who drowns.

At t-minus six seconds, the comm layer detonated with a triple handshake from the Crown. I felt it in my hull, a low, ceremonial pulse that rattled every vector between myself and the Fey Ruins, where the Nullarch’s mythprint was already fading.

[ VIRELETH, ORIENT. ] Jhenna’s voice was judicial: all angles, none of them friendly.

[ I AM ALREADY ON THE TARGET, ] I replied, and let the full bitterness show.