Page 30 of She Who Devours the Stars

“It’s too quiet,” I said, louder now, like maybe the world would listen if I just spoke up.

Nothing answered.

But the silence was getting heavier.

And I knew, without knowing, that the next sound I heard would change everything.

I never heard the first round. Not the way you’re supposed to hear disaster, with the whine of ionizing air and the split-second preamble of a missile shrieking toward your face. The city was still silent, the kitchen still cold, and my mind still orbiting the simple fact that I didn’t want to be awake. So, I wasn’t ready, not even a little, when the world went from pre-dawn to post-mortem in the space between two heartbeats.

The only warning was a vibration, deeper, older than the city itself. Not even sound at first, just the kind of pressure you get when your insides know something that your brain refuses to log. Then, through the floor, the shockwave hit. It didn’t even bother to knock; it simply arrived, tore up the protocols, and made itself at home in the kitchen, the hallway, and the marrow of my bones.

I dropped the mug. It never hit the floor.

The apartment flexed around me, walls bowing, the fake marble counter shattering upward in a spray of flying white teeth. The toaster launched from the wall and clipped me in the shoulder, but I was already moving, slamming into the far cabinets by a force that felt like an argument with gravity. My hands hit the metal hard. My head followed, harder.

A second and third blast overlapped, so close they sounded like one long scream. The whole building yanked itself sideways, floors giving up the concept of “up” and “down” in favor of “fuck you, you’re falling.” I was weightless for a half-second, a floating myth with nothing to tether her, and then the ceiling folded in on itself and I rode it down, surfing a wave of cabinets and sparks and the splatter of my own blood.

For a moment, there was only the inside of my eyelids. It was red, and it was everywhere.

I opened my mouth to scream, but there wasn’t enough air left in the world to bother.

The hallway, or what was left of it, passed by in jagged stutters. The walls were torn open, exposing rooms I’d never seen, people I’d never met, their faces reduced to blurs of shock and panic and then gone, just like that. Some were screaming. Most were just gone, torn loose from their moorings by the kind of violenceyou only see in myth or the very first, very last moments of a planet.

I landed on something hard and unyielding, concrete, maybe, or the remains of someone’s life. The impact knocked every thought from my head except one: that this was what it felt like to be erased.

Time came back, a little. Enough for me to know I was upside down, wedged between a collapsed support beam and the remains of the kitchen table. My legs didn’t work. My left arm was pinned, the glow from my veins leaking out through a lattice of fresh cuts. The blood was real. The pain was not. Not yet.

I lay there, counting the seconds.

The air was thick with the scent of ozone, burning insulation, and the sharp, coppery aftertaste of city-wide betrayal. I tried to move, but the pressure only got worse. The debris shifted and settled with every aftershock. The world above was gone. The world below was still coming for me.

It wasn’t fair. I’d survived a mythship, outlasted three years of maintenance school and two of dockyard hell, dodged Accord security and every cosmic accident my luck could buy, only to get annihilated in my kitchen by a kill team that didn’t even bother to knock. There was a phrase for that. I tried to remember it, but the light in my head was fading, and everything sounded like water now.

Another impact, not from above this time, but from somewhere inside. My chest seized, a pressure building behind my sternum, hot and relentless and ancient in a way that made no sense. The blue-white glow from my veins ramped up, strobing so hard I thought my skin would burn off. I flexed my fingers and felt the world flex with them.

The noise returned, a rising, fractal howl that resolved into a single, perfect note. The kind you get when every possibility collapses into one last, inevitable outcome.

I was falling.

But I wasn’t alone.

The apartment, the city, the planet, everything peeled away in concentric layers, light and sound and memory stripped to the bone. There was no up, no down, no kitchen, no family, no fear. Only the taste of static, and the ache behind my eyes, and the feeling that this was, in some fucked up way, exactly what I’d been waiting for.

I reached out, grabbed the possibility of a future, and held on.

The building, or what was left of it, hit the ground a second later.

But I was already gone.

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin

Axis Alignment: Meldin Apartment Ruins

If you’ve never been inside a mythic event, let me explain: time doesn’t just slow. It fractures, then re-braids itself into a pattern only the most ruined versions of you can interpret. Mid-fall, I was all the versions at once: the girl screaming, the girl biting her tongue, the girl already bracing for the impact that might never come. Each one had a theory about what would happen next, but none of them were prepared for the moment it actually arrived.

I was falling, but also not. The blue-white light from my veins was a lighthouse, refracting out through the storm of debris and memory, turning every chunk of concrete into radiant, crystalline geometry. The air was thick, almost gelatinous, and every time I tried to move, the world offered me a thousand different vectors, none of them in the direction I expected. I reached out, and my hand caught the edge of a steel girder—except it wasn’t there, not quite. The impact rippled through me, and then through the rest of the building, and then through the rest of the city, like a stone skipping across the surface of a gravity well.

I screamed, but it came out wrong. Instead of sound, the scream was a pulse, an annihilation of everything within three meters. A shuddering ripple that bent glass, snapped rebar, and reduced the incoming shrapnel to a cloud of metallic mist. The mist hovered, every fleck of iron and copper rotating in a private halo, a miniature galaxy spinning out from the core of my panic.