Page 171 of She Who Devours the Stars

Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins

It was a stupid thing, how you could burn a whole world and still end up on the ground, cheek pressed to the dirt like the universe needed you to apologize for existing.

I was awake. Not really, but enough to notice my body was still mine—arms, legs, lungs, the mythprint running my spine like a live wire. I didn’t remember collapsing. I remembered the Pulse, though, because you don’t just forget being hit by the weaponized faith of every single person who’d ever wanted you to survive.

The Ruins around me were in pieces, reality stacked in unstable layers: petrified trees phasing in and out, the Eventide quad flickering over the stone, shards of my childhood spinning past like someone had thrown my memories into a woodchipper. Every time I blinked, I saw another version of myself—alive, dead, trying to crawl up the inside of my own bones.

The Pulse had hollowed me. There was nothing left but the sound.

It was like every radio in the sector had tuned to a single, primal frequency and dialed the volume to the edge of pain. At first, it was just noise: a hundred thousand voices, screaming in unison. Then it split into layers, each one a different flavor of hunger, of hope, of absolutely refusing to give up on me.

The worst flavor of all? Love. Every one of those dumb bastards loved me too much to let me die.

I heard Dyris first. Of course I did. Her voice was the signal spike in every transmission: “Don’t collapse, Trivane. You do that, and I’ll break every mythic law in the book to drag your ass back.”

I wanted to laugh, but it hurt too much. Instead, I dug my fingers into the dirt and tried to breathe around the taste of ozone and mythlogic.

Then Alyx, stuttering through the haze, her words looping in desperate, recursive fragments: “Don’t let it eat you, Fern. Don’t let him, don’t let you, don’t let it.” It wasn’t elegant, but it was honest.

Aenna’s voice, sharp and clinical, but trembling on the edges: “Vector correction in progress. Hold, please. Hold. Hold. Hold.” Each “hold” was a lifeline thrown across the abyss, and I grabbed every one.

Perc was there, somehow, screaming from the heart of the mythic net, his signal so raw it made my teeth itch: “CAFFEINATE THE NULLARCH! CAFFEINATE HER!” It should have been funny. But my chest collapsed inward, and the laugh caught halfway, broke, and came out as a sob.

My parents. Fuck, my parents.

Dad, quiet, trying to hide the fear in his voice: “You’re better than this, kid. You always were.” Mom, loud, uncompromising, even in the middle of a mythic event: “Get up. Fix your makeup. Remember who you are, even if you have to make it up on the spot.”

The Mythships, all of them, layered their own signals over the feed.

Vireleth, cold and possessive, a lullaby made of threat: “Contain the self. Seal the fracture. Remember the vector.”

Asterra, her resonance wild and invasive, rooting through my mind until I wanted to scream: “Grow, little wound. Bloom, little failure.”

Kairon, slick as polished glass, his voice fractal, every syllable a reflection of who I was, who I wasn’t, who I could never be: “Choose your reflection, or choose them all. Each facet holds a fate.”

Solance, the Choir, drowning everything in her choral wash of pure, unfiltered need: “Be the story, Fern. Be the only story that matters.”

Jhenna the Crown, heavy with judgment and unbearable clarity, her words the sound of a guillotine blade beheading the concept of royalty: “Stand. Rise. Rule your myth.”

I heard Lioren, too. I heard him best of all.

His ghostprint crawled under my skin, mapped its way along my nerves and settled at the base of my spine, whispering: “If you can’t overcome me… You don’t deserve to not-be me.”

I hated him, for the record. I hated him more than I’d ever hated anything. But as I lay in the ruins, the sound of the Faith Pulse still rippling through my atoms, I realized: hating him wasn’t enough. I had to refuse him. I had to be me.

Or at least, not him.

I forced myself to move. Fingers first, then elbows. My body was heavy, full of static, but the mythprint was still online. I curled my hands into fists, then opened them again. The blue-white glow was stronger, cleaner—like the Pulse had burned away all the bullshit and left only the core.

For the first time in days, I knew who I was.

Not what. Who.

I wasn’t Lioren. I was Fern Trivane, and even if I didn’t know what that meant, it was mine.

I pushed to my knees. The ground hated me for it, but I didn’t care. I stood, swaying, every muscle in my body shaking, but upright. Alive.

The world was chaos, mythic signatures warring for supremacy, the sky still fractured, the trees caught between centuries. But through it all, I saw Zevelune, standing at the edge of the ruins, waiting.