Page 175 of She Who Devours the Stars

“You don’t get to break here,” she said, voice low, lethal. “Not now. Not when I came this far for you.”

My knees buckled, but she held me up.

For a moment, there was no war, no mythic drama, no memory of Lioren burning in the back of my head. There was only Dyris, and the pressure of her touch, and the fact that she still wanted me enough to chase me across the universe and straight into hell.

I opened my mouth, about to say something—maybe “thank you,” maybe “I love you,” maybe “fuck you”—but she beat me to it.

She leaned in, forehead to forehead, her breath hot on my lips.

“Hold the line,” she whispered.

I nodded, once.

And just like that, the world stopped spinning.

The next instant, all the mythprint in the Ruins snapped into perfect focus, every fragment of blue and gold pointing at a single, flickering silhouette at the edge of vision.

Lioren. Or what was left of him.

He looked as surprised as I felt, caught between a smirk and a scowl, his form half-collapsed, the mythprint in his veins leaking out like a bad dream.

I felt Dyris’s arms around me, the pulse of her mythic presence, and for the first time, I didn’t want to run.

I wanted to fight.

Together.

I grinned, wild and reckless, and let the blue-white fire build in my hands.

This was going to hurt. And for the first time in my life, I couldn’t fucking wait.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: What’s Left Of The Fey Ruins

The mythic battlefield had rules, and the first rule was this: whatever you feared most would come for you, wearing the face you could least afford to see.

I’d barely squeezed Dyris’s hand before the world unstitched itself, the old stone forest liquefying, re-forming into a spiral of ruins and dead sky. The mythdrift wasn’t gone—just condensed, like a psychic tumor, blue-white and cancer-bright. You couldn’t miss it. You couldn’t run from it. It formed a body, slow and deliberate, out of the ghosts of every bad choice ever made.

It was Lioren, but only at a glance.

He was taller, meaner, built like the silhouette in every nightmare where you realized your parent’s love was a lie. His face was a fracture of all the portraits, every historic holo, every dirty meme, fused together with a sneer that didn’t know how to stop. His eyes were twin event horizons, and his hands glowed with the promise of never letting go.

He didn’t speak at first. Instead, he laughed: a sound that didn’t echo, just expanded, like a virus or a song you couldn’t get out of your head.

Dyris stepped in front of me, not shielding, just calibrating the world for maximum violence. “My turn,” she said.

She didn’t wait for a response. Her mythprint flared, a lattice of gold lines from toe to scalp, each line a story of someone she’d outwitted, seduced, or buried. She snapped her fingers, and the ground between us and the Echo snapped to grid: five meters wide, five deep, the classic killbox.

Lioren’s Echo reached out, fingers clawing the air. “You can’t kill an origin,” it said, voice doubled and trebled by every failure I’d ever had. “You can only inherit it.”

Dyris rolled her eyes. “Inheritance is for cowards. I’m here for the hostile takeover.”

She moved, and the world agreed. One second she was next to me, the next she was inside the killbox, hands slicing through narrative logic with the precision of a heart surgeon.

Lioren’s Echo lunged. It was fast—faster than I could track, even with AR maxed—but Dyris didn’t blink. She let the hands get close, let them wrap her neck, then phase-slipped out of their grip, leaving a nimbus of gold static that burned the Echo’s arms clean off.

It screamed, but the scream was the sound of every ex who ever told me “you’re just like your father” and meant it.