Page 4 of She Who Devours the Stars

I staggered forward, legs wobbly, gravity still fighting to decide whose side it was on. I spat foam, then bile, and cursed at the sky, only to choke on more foam. But you know what? Fuck it. I had a blanket, at least. Some people wake up hungover. I fall out of the fucking sky. We all have our coping mechanisms.

Somewhere high above, I felt a shiver not in my body, but in the world itself, like someone important had just woken up and turned their attention straight at me.

Maybe it was paranoia. Or it was just the way a mythic warship says “I miss you” from low orbit.

Dad always joked I was going to wreck the universe one of these days. With a ship like Vireleth, I could.

Either way, I started walking.

Thread Modulation: House Trivane AI

Axis Alignment: Galactic Core, Milky Way Galaxy

A hundred thousand light-years away, in the locked core of the Aeternus Keep, something older than sleep woke up for the first time in centuries.

The Trivane Vault was not a place you entered. It was a place you got exiled to when your entire culture decided the best way to save itself was to bury its myths and pray nothing ever dug them up. The Vault’s AI, patched together from ancient code and newer, less stable modules, maintained the ultimate failsafe.

In the dark, the Vault’s sensors flickered to life. The first thing it did was run diagnostics. The second thing it did was try to scream. The third thing it did, which took the longest, was remember.

Inside the Vault, the ancient AI replayed the last recorded moment of its prime directive: the Nullarch designation had been reinitialized. Confirmation received. Attestation by Vireleth the Closure.

The AI paused, shivering in its digital bones. Nullarch. The name was legendary. The name was a promise. The name meant that nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever be the same again.

It reached out, contacting every system connected to the Trivane intranet, and the message spread:

The Nullarch has returned. Nullarch is coming home. Wake Up.

The rest of the Vault’s hierarchy went wild. Emergency protocols cascaded down centuries of chain-of-command, waking up modules that hadn’t seen daylight since Lioren Trivane died to save the universe. The AI began preparing the only welcome it had ever been allowed to give: absolute, unconditional loyalty.

Thread Modulation: Mal

Axis Alignment: Glimmer Zone, Pelago-9.

The Glimmer Zone’s Perimeter Defense Array had once been the pride of Pelago-9, a glass-walled cube perched atop a brutalist tower, bristling with comms dishes, cluster-microwaves, and a single faded poster promising “Infinite Safety, Zero Worries.” In practice, it was a cross between a daycare for washed-up defense techs and a glorified drinking den. Most days, the only thing the operator had to defend against was boredom, and even that lost half its edge by noon.

She went by Mal, or at least she did now that the old security chief had finally been demoted. The job was simple: watch the dashboard, log the pings, and, if the Accord ever got around to it, run a system integrity check. The Accord never got around to it.

Mal was three sips into a cup of industrial-grade coffee (it had been banned in five sectors for its alleged mutagenic properties, but here it was basically tap water) when every single alert on the dashboard went bright red. Not the dull, lazy red of a missed drone check. The kind of red that suggested imminent and thorough disintegration.

She blinked. Once. Twice.

The grid was lighting up every defense node on the hemisphere, from the old sky-pulse railguns to the deprecated orbitalshrapnel banks. Even the prototype weather satellites, which weren’t supposed to be weaponized, began spinning up. For a second, Mal wondered if she’d finally succumbed to the coffee’s side effects. But no, the dashboard was still blinking, and her hands were steady. Somewhere in the background, she could hear the whine of capacitors charging for the first time in years.

“Okay,” she said, to no one in particular. “Somebody’s bored.”

She keyed in the targeting log, half-expecting to see the usual dead man’s bluff: a flagged ship, a rogue satellite, maybe a stray comet if the sensors were feeling dramatic. Instead, every weapon was locked onto a single, falling point. The signature was so hot it burned through the interface; nothing but a string of random letters and a location that drifted lower by the second.

She cross-referenced the ID. Accord didn’t have a match, but there was a voiceprint hit from a decommissioned salvage relay. The subject was flagged as “anomalous,” with a cautionary note: “Potential mythic-resonance event.” Mal snorted. She’d heard that phrase tossed around before, usually by Accord lifers trying to sound cool at staff parties. Myths didn’t happen on Rustrock.

She zoomed in on the falling object. The cam feed resolved, and Mal saw it for herself: a non-Accord, highly advanced, reentry pod, trailing vapor and flame, and inside it was a girl. Barely twenty, if that, face caught mid-scream, hair floating in a corona of resonance.

Mal reached for her flask, unscrewed the cap, and took a long, deliberate pull. It tasted like old batteries and regret, but it did the job.

She watched as the pod punched through three layers of atmospheric defense, ignored all attempts at interception, andlanded squarely in the middle of the old maintenance yards. The Accord’s kill order came in seven seconds later, with a warning to “minimize collateral.”

Mal laughed. It wasn’t even a good laugh. “Sure. Minimize collateral with thirty city-block railguns. Nice one.”

She let the dashboard continue its little apocalypse. The protocol said she was supposed to escalate, but who would she call? No one up the chain would care, not unless the target started a revolution or bought the wrong person’s daughter a drink.