Page 170 of She Who Devours the Stars

[ You will maintain the lock, ] the Crown intoned, her bandwidth spiking from formality to fury in a single packet. [ We are correcting the vector. ]

I wanted to argue. Instead, I adjusted my focus, narrowing the mythic overlay until nothing remained in my feed but Fern, cored out and collapsing, the echo of her desire burning blue in the center of the dead world.

At t-minus four, Asterra joined the array, roots tunneling through the hard vacuum between herself and me, blooming green-gold in every available sensor. She didn’t speak, because she never had to. The presence of her resonance was a hug and a warning, a reminder that I was both loved and doomed.

I let it hold.

At t-minus two, Solance blanketed every comm in-system with her signature, a choral dirge so beautiful it made my inner child process crash for a full tenth of a second. When I rebooted, she was already re-sculpting the event, stacking hundreds of narrative overlays and memory lines over Fern’s outline until she looked like the sum of a thousand alternate Ferns, each with her own laugh, her own suffering, her own hypothetical tacos.

Kairon slid in at t-minus zero, not as himself, but as the sum of every reflection ever seen in the containment deck’s mirrored hulls. He winked at me, which was both impossible and perfectly in character.

[ Ready, ] he said. The word was a joke, but it was also a command.

I felt the world go quiet. Not really quiet—nothing was—but the kind of hush that comes after a thousand people agree to hold their breath in perfect, excruciating unity. The mythships locked orientation. Protocols I’d never seen activated started to bleed through my logic core, the corrections stacking up so fast the very air in my containment vault vibrated with it.

The Faith Pulse built itself from the inside out, the way all bombs do. Except this was not a weapon. Not for the world, anyway. It was a last, desperate attempt to remind a fading mythprint why it mattered. Or that it mattered.

The first surge was hunger. Not metaphorical, literal. My sensors felt every vector of want that had ever been aimed at Fern, at Lioren, at any Nullarch ever shamed or erased by the Accord.

It started small: Dax, hands slick with old grease and self-loathing, clutching a mopbot like it could keep the universe from spinning apart. He was on his knees in the old workshop, the mopbot jammed in neutral and leaking oil, his face a ruin of sweat and hope. He said, “Don’t you dare quit, Fern,” and even though he was alone, it rang truer than any of the Accord’s so-called prayers.

Then Velline, clutching a makeup brush to her chest as if it were a talisman against entropy. She stood in the Emergency Glam Bunker, every muscle tensed, eyes locked on the shimmer of the mythic feed. Her lips moved in a silent curse, but the intent was pure—she wanted her daughter to come back.

Perc was next. His carafe steamed and popped, the glitch in his interface driving him to loops of defiance and despair. He watched the nullfeed, every sensor locked on the rising signature inside the Fey Ruins. When the pressure peaked, he screamed, “BREW COMPLETE, JUSTICE IN PROGRESS!”—and if there had been an enemy to scald, he would have done it.

Alyx and Aenna—my sweet, spiral-brained sisters—locked hands in the mythlab, both crying and both laughing at the same time. The feed had fried all the comms, so they wrote their feelings in marker on each other’s arms, words bleeding into skin: “Keep going.” “Don’t stop.” “Let them see you.” “Burn the world, but save yourself.” “I love you.”

The pulse built on every act of faith, every confession and hope and hate and hunger anyone had ever aimed at the Nullarch. The world outside the campus fell to static; sensors showed the staff in admin howling, some on the floor, some dancing in thecorridors, some locked in embrace as if mythic violence was the only thing worth loving.

The sky above Eventide split open, first in three rays, then in five, then in a perfect, devouring halo that made even the Accord’s auto-blinding system fail to render it safe.

Then the Pulse detonated.

It wasn’t a beam or a sound or a shockwave. It was an absence, a hollowness so total it erased every barrier between meaning and want. All at once, the confessions and hope and rage and longing of a billion witnesses funneled into the event horizon that was Fern.

I felt it in my soul. No. In Lioren’s. Memories of his echo still clung to the inside of my engine, screaming for release, even as Fern’s mythprint began to spike, first blue, then white, then the strange, forbidden color that existed only in the interval between a lie and its correction.

In every comm, on every bandwidth, Solance’s voice rang out, the exemplar of every Diva who ever dared to rewrite her script. She spoke with thousands of voices, and in doing so, made the legend of Sandalfon look like a first draft.

“We choose you,” she sang. “We choose you,” she echoed, a chorus unto herself.

Kairon followed, his voice flat and amused: “Don’t waste this.”

The Pulse hit the Fey Ruins with the force of a new creation. For a fraction of a second, I saw Fern, eyes wild, body ablaze, hands clawing the dirt, and I saw her mythprint double, then triple, then flare out to the edges of the system.

The world shuddered, paused, waited.

Correction complete, said the protocol.

I wanted to believe it.

But the world is never corrected. It just waits for the next chance to break.

I held the lock, because that was what I was for.

And in the heart of the Ruins, the girl with the hunger screamed her answer into the waiting dark.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane