Page 45 of She Who Devours the Stars

Then Fern pulled back, eyes dark with myth and mischief, and said, “That was a great warm-up.”

Her grin promised ruin, and I wanted every second of it.

Fern’s shirt hit the floor. “Hope you cleared your schedule for the day.”

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin

Axis Alignment: Administration Center, Pelago-9

I’d barely managed to scrape myself off the couch, reassemble my dignity, and make it to the shower before the next wave of Accord panic-packets started pinging the suite. I ignored them, letting the water pummel my skull, letting the ache of the night settle into something that felt a little more like victory and a little less like self-destruction. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Dyris’s face, open, stunned, lips bitten raw by my own teeth and the shock of what she’d let happen. It was enough to make my bones hum.

I stepped out, dried off, and was about to raid the mini-fridge for another protein bar when the air crystallized. Not a mythic warning, but a high-priority Holo intercept: private, end-to-end, with a security signature so intense it cut the light in the room down by half. The smart glass on the wall flickered, then flashed the Vaelith crest.

I braced for a lecture, or a threat, or maybe just a very polite murder attempt.

Instead, the face that filled the display was ancient and predatory, with a beauty that had calcified into legend somewhere around her third century. Archduchess Kaela Vaelith, personal title “She Who Concludes,” the living fossil of diplomatic disaster, a woman whose reputation for sexual conquests was eclipsed only by her ability to survive five assassination attempts in a single lunch hour. Despite the gene-engineering and anti-aging technologies keeping her looking 32 at most, she was over three hundred.

She eyed me the way a taxonomist eyes an invasive species: with a mixture of disgust, admiration, and the thrill of imminent paperwork.

“Fern Meldin,” she said, my name an accusation that belonged in a dossier marked with a kill order and a dozen redacted annexes. In that one utterance, she managed to drag every syllable across granite and broken glass, her tone velvet-lined but razored underneath. “Vireleth and Lioren’s ghost call you Nullarch. Destroyer of my favorite grandniece’s composure.” Her gaze narrowed, dissecting me, vivisecting the towel-wrapped mess I was presenting as a face to the universe. “You don’t look like much.”

I grinned back, teeth bared, letting the towel droop just enough to imply war crimes. “I clean up nice,” I said, and fluttered my lashes at the camera in a way that made even my skin itch with bravado.

Kaela Vaelith’s lips compressed into a carnivorous crimson line, cosmetic, calculated, and completely unsmiling, but her eyes did something more dangerous. They flickered, just briefly, through hunger: the old kind, the kind from before people had invented guilt or hygiene or even words for wanting. For an instant, I could see every ancestor of hers who had ever murdered someone for being more interesting than themselves flickering behind those irises. Then it was gone.

“You broke Dyris,” Kaela said. It should have been an accusation or a note in a personnel file; instead, it landed like the punchline to a joke about natural selection. “They said it couldn’t be done.”

I shrugged hard enough for the towel to slip lower on my thigh, then scooped myself onto the edge of the bed with all the dignity of a half-assembled mannequin at closing time. “She wanted it,” I said. “Maybe more than I did.”

“Of course she did.” Kaela’s head tilted minutely, as if I were an unexpected data point in a long-running experiment. “She always did like chaos. Or was it pain?” Her teeth flashed brieflyin something that almost passed for amusement but settled for clinical detachment instead. “The distinction is largely academic.”

She reached offscreen; her hand returned bearing a glass of something black as unrefined sin and swirling with what looked like magnetic storm clouds, reminiscent of the old legend of Saturn. She sipped at it without breaking eye contact.

“You know,” Kaela continued mildly, “there was a time when Accord protocol would have simply atomized you and called it precedent.” She tapped one lacquered nail against her glass to punctuate ‘atomized.’ “Now my comms are full of Accord officers asking if they should buy you flowers or just hand over the keys to the quadrant.”

I couldn’t help it, I snorted out loud, nearly inhaling half a lungful of recycled station air in the process. The absurdity of being feared and courted by Accord senior staff at the same time threatened to short-circuit my last working neuron.

Kaela picked up on it instantly. “You’re not Accord,” she said.

“Gods, no.” My voice came out too fast, too sharp around the edges. I composed myself and tried again. “You’re Kaela Vaelith.”

That got her attention; she took another sip and let herself smile this time, though there was nothing warm about it at all.

“I am what Accord tries, and fails, to be,” she agreed with absolute certainty. “Which brings us to my curiosity: What do you want?”

Nobody ever asked me what I wanted unless they were contractually obligated to care about my answer or unless they intended to use it against me later. People who grew up on Rustrock knew there was no point in wanting more.

Still, it was almost seductive.

I considered how much truth I could risk per square centimeter of exposed skin in this conversation before settling on ‘all of it.’ Honesty is a paradoxical weapon: sometimes more dangerous for being true.

I flopped onto the bed fully and crossed my feet at the ankle so she could see both scars on my calf from childhood hoverboard accidents (the first from arrogance; the second from trying to impress a girl). Letting go of pretense meant letting Kaela see how little power those old wounds had compared to what I carried now.

“You called me Nullarch,” I said slowly, feeling each word before releasing it into wild orbit between us. “Do you believe it?”

Her eyes sharpened until they became tactical lasers aimed right through my mythic signature.

“I’ve watched hundreds of mythic surges in my lifetime,” she said curtly. “Most years have two or three, never more than five significant ones per calendar cycle unless there’s an election.” She licked her lips unconsciously; maybe remembering some distant legislative bloodbath where enemies were crushed not by weapons but by clever wording in footnotes. “All ended in disaster, some spectacularly, but never with so much style.” She paused, made a rhetorical flourish, then added: “Or with the ghost of Lioren Trivane lurking behind every move.”