Page 172 of She Who Devours the Stars

She looked at me like she knew the outcome, but wanted to see the violence of my refusal anyway.

I bared my teeth, wiped the dirt from my face, and walked toward her.

Each step was a denial.

I’m not him. I’m not the myth. I’m not the fucking end.

But I wasn’t done.

At the edge of the Ruins, I stopped. Looked up, into the raw mythlight that was still building, still hungry. The Pulse was coming, again, or maybe it had never stopped.

I opened my mouth, and the sound that came out was mine.

“I’m not him,” I said, voice shaking, but whole. “But I’m still not done.”

The world shivered. The Pulse wrapped around me, and this time, I let it in.

“And I’m not fucking alone anymore, if I ever was,” I whispered.

And for once, the world listened.

Chapter 23: Riding the Pulse

Thread Modulation: Dyris Motherfucking Trivane

Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins

I had thirty-eight seconds to regret every choice that led me here, and the universe didn’t let me waste a single one.

It started as a vibration in the bones. Not the pleasant kind—more like being tuned, in real time, to a note the world wasn’t supposed to play. I’d been standing on Vireleth’s observation deck, heels locked, hands curled around the cold edge of the hull window, replaying Fern’s last broadcast in every spectrum I had. The feed was on loop. She was on her knees in the Ruins, mythprint flaring, every light in the system bending to her hunger. I’d watched it twenty, maybe fifty times, each repetition a study in how narrative gravity works: how a body can warp the fate around it, just by existing.

I’d thought I understood mythic escalation. I’d lived through three war collapses, two coups, and a romance with a woman who’d rather eat glass than say what she meant. But I’d never, not once, felt it hit this hard.

The Faith Pulse was supposed to be a metaphor. It wasn’t.

When it fired, it hit the station first. All the containment alarms triggered at once, and for a moment the observation deck wentnegative: black, then blue, then an impossible gold. Every comm channel screamed, then died. My body, already burning from Asterra’s “aftercare,” tensed up so hard I thought my bones would break.

Jhenna the Crown’s vector signature landed like a razor in my neck.

For one beautiful, unrepeatable second, I was nothing. Then everything.

My vision fractured. A HUD bloomed over the real—clean lines, no nonsense, just the bare essential: vectors, pulse traces, mythic surge data. The interface was Trivane code, classic, arrogant, built to impress and intimidate at the same time. I ignored all of it.

There was only one signal worth tracking.

Fern.

She was in the Ruins, blue-white and raw, fighting the world for every centimeter.

And I was done waiting.

The station’s safety interlocks whined as I left the observation deck. I didn’t run. I didn’t need to. The world ran for me. The floor under my feet bent, the lights widened into a corridor, and the next step brought me to the launch bay. The doors were sealed, but I walked through them anyway. Reality was, in this moment, a suggestion.

Vireleth’s voice chased me, more anxious than usual.

“Dyris. Reconsider. If you breach containment, I—”

I cut it off with a glance. “You won’t do anything, old man. You want this as bad as I do.”