Page 38 of She Who Devours the Stars

The sensor team stopped, mid-frantic keystroke. The only sound on the bridge was the soft, wet buzz of failing suppression fields.

“Ma’am?” the tactical officer said. It was the voice of someone who’d never heard a mythship talk back, let alone lived through a mythic event. “Protocol says—”

“Protocol failed.” I didn’t bother to raise my voice. “We’re going to make a new one.”

For a long moment, no one moved. On the main screen, Lioren’s face grinned, looping back to life. His laugh, a low, unkillable thing, bounced off every wall on the bridge, gaining echo and volume with every cycle. I was supposed to hate it, but instead, I found myself wishing he’d step out of the feed and explain what I was supposed to do next.

There was no precedent for this. Not on the books. Not in the emergency doctrine. Not even in the stories my mother told after too much wine, about the time House Trivane broke the galaxy and then fixed it, barely, with a layer of mythic duct tape.

I released the rail and wiped my hands on my uniform. I watched as the pause screen glitched, and for a split-second, Fern’s face replaced Lioren’s. She looked straight through the lens, like she was watching me watch her, and I felt my pulse spike in a way I’d only ever experienced in simulations, where you knew the consequences weren’t real, but your body reacted anyway.

It was the oldest Vaelith tradition: let the world think you’re in control, even when you’re in free-fall.

I turned away from the screen, walking the length of the bridge with measured calm. Behind me, the command staff started whispering, but I didn’t care. Let them report it. Let them spin up the containment teams, the post-mortem inquests, and the inevitable disciplinary tribunal. I’d lived through three wars,two family coups, and a nepotism scandal so messy it nearly collapsed half of House Vaelith’s standing in the Accord. I survived all of it.

And none of it mattered anymore.

Because nobody and nothing survived the motherfucking Nullarch.

I was halfway to the exit when the tac called out, “Ma’am, are you sure this is the play?”

I stopped. Looked back. Saw my reflection, fractured across thirty different panels, each one a little less stable than the last. I thought about Fern, about the blue-white glow burning under her skin, about the way she’d stood there in the crater with half the city collapsing around her and still stared down a mythship like she’d been born for it. I thought about the way my chest tightened every time I watched her, and the way my brain kept glitching on the emotional math of what any of it meant.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about the ships. All of them. Every Accord cruiser and orbital defense platform that had been dumb enough—or unlucky enough—to paint Fern Meldin with a target lock in those first few seconds after detonation had ceased to exist. Every single one had vanished into stray atoms the moment Vireleth arrived, like the universe itself had decided to run a purge on bad decisions.

It wasn’t that my crew was stupid. It was that House Trivane’s dormancy for the last six hundred and sixty-six years had allowed forgetfulness to creep into the Accord. In a galaxy full of other Great Houses like Zarex, Indrathi, Calderet, and my own House Vaelith, people had normalized the idea of House Trivane, and now people had paid the price for forgetting.

“Yeah,” I said, softer now, more to myself than anyone else. “It’s the only play we’ve got.”

The junior comms officer, who hadn’t spoken since the blast, piped up from his station like someone testing the air after a fire. “So… do we stand down the weapons?”

I considered it, let the shape of the thought settle, then nodded. “Put them on standby. But don’t advertise it.”

He exhaled, the relief visible even at a distance.

I stepped off the bridge. The doors hissed shut behind me, sealing the chaos in with a faint, ozone tang. The corridor stretched out ahead, empty and waiting, but I could still hear Lioren’s laugh bleeding through the comms, skipping off the bulkheads like a ghost that hadn’t learned when to quit.

I wanted to be afraid. I really did. But all I felt was a kind of exhausted anticipation, the sensation you get right before the world shifts sideways, and you realize too late that you were always going to be part of the story, whether you wanted to be or not.

As I walked, I replayed the words in my head: “We negotiate.”

Why was I turning off the weapons? Why wasn’t I afraid?

It was more than survival instincts; it wasn’t duty, it wasn’t even loyalty to the Accord.

Unlike High Command, sitting safely in the Tenevar System, arguing doctrine and deniability over breakfast, we were staring at Vireleth the Closure, the mythship that ended wars by deleting the reasons for them, and that had loved Lioren Trivane in his last life. A loyalty that had transferred to Fern Meldin.

I didn’t want to die. Not now. Not here. I wanted to live long enough to see where this story was going.

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin

Axis Alignment: Pelago-9 Administrative Center.

I’d always figured my first time in an Accord diplomatic suite would involve at least three sets of handcuffs, a bottle of high-ethanol vodka, and maybe a bar fight in the lobby for flavor. Instead, I was alone, unless you counted the three surveillance drones pretending to be light fixtures, and the handcuffs were made of geometry, not metal. The door wasn’t even locked, but I knew better than to test the perimeter. The air in here had the taste of old ozone and new regret: Accord’s version of “hospitality.”

They’d dressed up the suite as best they could. No expense spared on the surface polish: faux-starlight ceilings, silk couches the color of war wounds, a table in the center so glossy I could check the status of my teeth without bending down. But it reeked of a rushed cleanup. The scorch marks on the doorframe had been buffed, not replaced. The window overlooking the city still showed a hairline crack, artfully overlooked by whoever had done the inventory. The only thing that felt truly high-class was the silence, calibrated to a level of hush where you could hear your pulse if you cared to.

I didn’t care to. I was too busy staring at the viewport.