Page 35 of She Who Devours the Stars

I felt a warmth in my chest, a pull toward the impossible geometry above. The ache behind my eyes was gone, replaced by a clarity that tasted like static and hope. Have you ever tasted with your eyeballs before? Yeah. Me neither.

I stumbled forward, drawn by the gravity that wasn’t gravity. The debris parted before me, every floating object shifting trajectory, each one as careful as a shy animal. They rotated around me, never touching, but never letting me out of their sight.

Dax watched, face open. “You sure you’re okay?”

I tried to answer, but the words stuck. Instead, I reached out and touched the air in front of me.

The city was silent. No alarms, no shouts, not even the signature Accord sirens. Just the hum of the mythship, and the soft, wet sound of a planet adjusting to the new center of its own orbit.

I turned my gaze upward, squinting at the mythship’s endless hull.

Vireleth wasn’t just present; she was looking back. I could feel it in the way the hairs on my arms rose, the way the light in my veins pulsed in time with the ship’s impossible heart.

For a moment, I wondered if anyone else could feel this. If, in some distant hab, a girl just like me was staring at the sky and knowing, deep in her bones, that everything had changed.

It didn’t matter.

I was here. I was whole. And for the first time, I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

I turned to Dax. He was picking through the wreckage, assembling a toolkit from the scattered remains of our life. His hands shook, but his smile was real.

“Your Mom’s going to be pissed when she sees this,” he said, holding up a singed photo of Velline in a feather boa and nothing else.

I laughed, and the sound was new. Lighter. Brighter.

The gravity under my feet adjusted, like the world wanted to make sure I wouldn’t fall again. In the moment of it all, I felt something shift. A strange sensation felt by organs I didn’t have a name for, but no less beautiful in their mystery.

I’d finally caught up to the story that had been hunting me since the day I was born.

I looked at the mythship one more time, felt the connection buzz, then fade to a low, comforting hum.

The city would rebuild. It always did. But I wasn’t the same, and neither was the world.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith

Axis Modulation: Vaelith class Cruiser (ACV Abeyance) bridge

The view from orbit had always been the only real luxury the Accord allowed its officers, and Dyris made a point to use it as a way to not hate herself. She could stand at the edge of the Abeyance’s bridge, glassy black and sharp as a discipline blade, and look down on the world like a god whose only superpower was the capacity to be disappointed.

Tonight, if you could call it night when the planet below was burning, it wasn’t disappointment she felt. It was envy, tinged with something she refused to name.

Pelago-9 rotated beneath, its battered surface webbed in seared scars and the faint, impossible blue of mythic discharge. The city of Glimmer Zone was still visible, a pit in the surface, the blast radius defined by a ring of what the Accord’s best sensors had already classified as “active event horizon.” It was, as far as anyone could tell, the first time a Class-0 mythic incident had not ended a world.

She sipped her tea. It was cold, but she preferred it that way.

Around her, the bridge was chaos. The comms officers had given up pretending they were in control, and now just traded rumors about who was already dead and what could possibly survive in the “containment zone.” There were no higher-ups on this deck, not anymore; the ones who mattered had been called into emergency conference two hours ago and never returned.

She relished the silence, even as it bent under the weight of planetary disaster.

The Abeyance had not been designed for war, not even the mythic kind, but Dyris’s family had always been good at making do. She watched as the feed from the city flickered, then cut to black, then flickered again.

“New data,” one of the surviving sensor techs croaked, fingers flying across the console. “It’s… it’s a mythship. We think it’s Vireleth. Manifested in orbit, but not, uh—” He swallowed. “Not the normal way.”

Dyris smiled, just enough to keep her teeth warm. “It never is.”

The tech looked at her, eyes wide. “Ma’am?”

She shook her head. “Ignore me. What’s the projection?”