Page 37 of She Who Devours the Stars

The comms station flickered, then resolved. The image: Fern, hair wild, eyes glowing, looking up at the mythship with a calm Dyris recognized immediately.

She’d seen that look before, in the mirror, after a job well done.

On the planet, Fern turned and looked straight at the camera. She mouthed a word, and Dyris, even without sound, could read it.

“Lioren.”

Dyris shook her head, laughed softly, and leaned back into her chair.

Across a burning planet, beneath three stunned suns, the two of them said it in perfect, inevitable unison:

“Fucking Lioren.”

Destiny was always going to be a group project.

Chapter 6: Galactic Fallout

Modulation Thread: Dyris Vaelith

Axis Alignment: Vaelith class Cruiser (ACV Abeyance) bridge

The Abeyance’s bridge stank of ozone, nervous sweat, and something sweetly metallic, the signature of mythic bleed, which no amount of recirc could mask. Every surface glowed just a shade too bright, as if the hull itself was still learning how to refract light after the planet-side detonation. Even the shadows seemed wrong, gathering around the crew in fractal patterns that were, by strictest protocol, supposed to be impossible.

Comms had not stabilized. Every five seconds, the main screen flickered between three overlays: Accord disaster orange, a quarantine map that kept blooming in concentric rings, and a looping freeze-frame of Lioren Trivane’s face, shirtless, beaming, and absolutely in command. Even dead, the man knew how to haunt a war room.

I stood at the tactical rail, hands gripping the bar hard enough to set off the local haptic alarms, and watched the disaster unfold. The sensor feeds were corrupted, mythic contamination warnings pulsed in every direction, and somewhere behind me, the executive officer had gone white-haired with the stress of trying to explain to Command why their mythic suppression protocols weren’t worth the paper they’d been printed on.

It was never supposed to be like this. For the last one thousand and six hundred years, the Accord’s entire job had been to keep myth in its box. They did it with containment satellites, with psychoemotional monitoring, with whole branches of the diplomatic corps dedicated to negotiating ceasefires with entities that didn’t technically exist. It was a brutal, thankless, incrementally successful tradition. There had been incidents, sure, mutiny cults, lost moons, the occasional apostate sovereign trying to DIY themselves into legend, but nothing on this scale.

Nothing like a full Trivane Recursion.

Lioren had been a problem when he was alive, and a mythic plague ever since. Accord history made him out to be a martyr for stability, but even in the sanitized feeds, the man radiated a kind of dare. Every time he went on-screen, you could feel the protocol teams tensing, waiting for him to break out and do something stupid, beautiful, or both.

The war room was full of people pretending they weren’t watching. Every time the loop started again, Lioren’s smile, the offhand swirl of mythglass in his hand, the two-second pause where he made you believe he could see straight into the bridge, at least half the crew would flinch, then catch themselves and glance away, hoping no one noticed.

I noticed. I always did.

This time, though, he wasn’t looking at us. The broadcast had locked on Fern Meldin, The Nullarch. I watched the moment over and over, skipping back and forth, each time trying to convince myself I’d missed something, that it was a trick of light, or a visual artifact, or a deliberate hack of the sensor suite. But no. Each time, it was Fern in the crater, hair blown wild, her skin leaking mythic energy like a fusion candle at end-of-life. She wasbattered, dirty, wearing the same expression as her progenitor: equal parts challenge and open wound.

“Pause,” I ordered, and the system complied. Lioren’s face froze in mid-smirk, but Fern’s was still lit in the corner. The lighting rendered her profile in impossible clarity: the sharpness of her jaw, the way her hand glowed brighter than her eyes, the constellation of fresh bruises like a message spelled out for only me to read.

The tactical officer cleared her throat. She was new, third cycle out of training, all nerves and no sense of survival. “Ma’am, the Accord’s requesting we move to direct engagement. Quarantine teams are—”

“Dead,” I said, not turning. “Or repurposed, if they’re lucky.”

She hesitated. “Planetary defense says local force is still up. We can launch the payload, if you give the order.”

Behind her, the junior sensor team was busy deleting the Lioren broadcast from every storage node, but the more determined they became, the more the file multiplied. I watched as it spawned on the side panels, then on the status board, and finally, inevitably, on the tactical officer’s screen. She tried to minimize it, but it kept popping back, as if it knew it was the only thing that mattered.

I pointed to the freeze-frame. “You ever seen a resonance like that?”

The tac shook her head. “Not even in simulation.”

“Exactly.” I forced myself to breathe. “We’re not engaging.”

The rookie blinked, uncertain. “But—”

“We’re negotiating.”