Page 33 of She Who Devours the Stars

It wasn’t like the first time, the city-destroying precision of a coordinated strike. This was messier, more personal. The sky overhead split, not literally, but in the way that makes you wonder if you ever understood “sky” to begin with. The three suns of Pelago, all gassed-out, overworked, and underloved,dipped in unison, their light folding back on itself. In the new shadow, something else arrived. Something vast enough to bend attention, hungry enough to make the air taste wrong.

Have you ever looked at a cathedral and felt a twinge of horror at how much of the building exists to make you feel small? Vireleth was that, multiplied by every failed religious metaphor I’d ever read. She didn’t descend, didn’t land, didn’t even seem to take up space so much as convince space to want her more than anything else. Her hull, if you could call it that, was a shifting silhouette, sometimes all angles, bristling with weapons that couldn’t possibly fit in three dimensions, sometimes a smooth, organic spire that looked like it could worship itself without help.

To the people on the street, she must have looked like a god, or a threat, or both at once.

To me, she looked like the answer to a question I’d never dared to ask.

The mythship hovered over the city, not casting a shadow so much as erasing all others. The sensors in the drones, the targeting cameras on the city’s defense array, all turned to face her, but their data feeds just returned static and an error code: INSUFFICIENT MYTHIC BANDWIDTH.

Even the streetlights below started to flicker in patterns, some kind of organic Morse Code that made my teeth itch.

For a long minute, the world held its breath.

Then, with a silence so total it hurt, Vireleth spoke.

Not aloud. Not in any language that made sense. But in the marrow, in the pulse between each heartbeat.

“Nullarch Confirmed. Trivane Awakens.”

This time, it wasn’t an echo. It was a command.

I felt my knees give out, but Dax caught me before I went down. His eyes were wide, unblinking.

“Is that…” he started, but didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

Above us, Vireleth shuddered. The hull twisted, reshaping itself into a new configuration: a crown, a blade, a heart, and then back to something less literal but infinitely more menacing. Her presence radiated out, covering the city, the moon, maybe the planet, in a blanket of resonance so thick you could taste it in the back of your mouth.

A flash. A single, blinding moment where every window in the city reflected her mythic silhouette, even ones that had been shattered in the blast. The light was cold, but it left a heat behind, a memory of warmth, maybe, or just a warning.

Somewhere in the ruins, a group of cultists started to chant. The words were nonsense, just fragments of old Trivane slogans smashed together by time and trauma, but the rhythm was precise, almost militarized. The air pulsed with it, every syllable syncing to the beat of a doctrine no one fully remembered but everyone still obeyed.

“Mercy through fire! Light through ruin! Order by dissolution!”

Their voices rose, overlapped, some out of tune, some hysterical. I caught more lines, each one more unhinged than the last:

“Ten mythships, ten lost gods, one perfect man!”

“Build the myth, become the wound!”

“Trivane saves! Trivane unbuilds! Trivane is the shape of the end!”

They weren’t even trying to make sense. Instead, they invoked the aesthetic of belief, drunk on the legend of a man who treated annihilation like a love language and thought shirtless diplomacy counted as governance. Lioren’s entire doctrine,benevolent obliteration, had been a cosmic joke with a body count. And still, they chanted. Not because they understood, but because the myth had made understanding irrelevant.

Across the moon, reality pulsed with them, as if trying to remember whether it had survived him. It decided that it had, but survival had forced an adaptation to the taste of collapse.

Vireleth didn’t react, but I did. My skin buzzed, the blue-white glow returning, stronger now. The veins along my arms, my legs, even my collarbone, all lit up in sync. I glanced at my reflection in a broken pane of glass, and there it was. Her silhouette, the mythship’s, superimposed over my own like a second skin. Like she was already inside me, waiting.

Dax still held me, steady as gravity. He didn’t seem scared; he seemed resigned.

“She’s not orbiting the planet,” I said, the realization slow and heavy.

He blinked. “What, then?”

“She’s orbiting me.”

It sounded insane, but it felt true.

I took a breath, and the air tasted like ozone and unfinished business.