Page 47 of She Who Devours the Stars

On Kaela’s side, nothing moved except maybe the invisible hands stacking every word into a razor-wire snare for later retrieval. She watched me with professional detachment and personal delight; both emotions equally hazardous to anything resembling hope on my part.

But what neither of us said, what never made it across the light-years between us, was that we both knew how myth worked. You couldn’t hide your longing without feeding it energy; you couldn’t kill hunger without giving it a name.

So, we just stared at each other across that digital chasm and let our secrets expand in the vacuum until even light would need centuries to bridge them.

Finally: “I want her to stay,” I said.

The line crackled in my own ears, half confession, half curse, and there was nothing mythic about it except how violently ordinary it sounded after all those centuries of people making wishes that ended civilizations.

Kaela’s eyes narrowed again, not in suspicion or contempt but with a sudden focus so sharp it could have bisected electrons for sport. “That’s it? You could be a god,” she said, and somehow made godhood sound like an entry-level position nobody wanted anymore, “and you only want Dyris?”

If she expected me to flinch or backpedal or start monologuing about power fantasies (which was statistically likely given my entire idiom), she did not show disappointment when I simply said: “I don’t need anyone’s help to become a god.”

True as gravity and twice as heavy coming out of my mouth.

Kaela threw her head back and laughed outright, a sound equal parts opera and open grave, and every echo bounced off the smart-glass walls like an accusation with its own cometary tail. The laugh wasn’t cruel so much as cosmically amused: here we were at the center of three dying mythologies, and all I wanted was for one nightmare girl to keep holding my hand when shit got weird again.

“You know,” Kaela said when her breath returned from whatever hell dimension she stored it in between disasters, “there’s something almost quaint about your kind of ambition.” She swirled her glass once before adding: “Lioren would have hated you.”

“He can eat me,” I replied before thinking much about phrasing regarding my past incarnation, but either way, it was true.

Kaela paused mid-sip, gaze going hard diamond-edged for one lethal heartbeat. “I believe that’s already been arranged.”

Both our faces held steady, hers icy and unyielding; mine presumably broadcasting every shade of embarrassment known to posthuman physiology, but there was a tempo adjustment neither missed: now we were negotiating terms instead of threats.

I watched her watching me, counting down the beats until someone blinked first or until Vireleth crashed the call with another extinction-level protocol. But nothing happened except a kind of mutual acknowledgment settling over us like dust on relics nobody dared move anymore.

At last Kaela nodded once, a gesture so final and deliberate that whole star systems might have pivoted on its axis somewhere far away from here, and said:

“Done. House Vaelith will support your claim, or at least refrain from sabotaging it further.” She allowed herself another smile (fractional this time; more flavor than substance). “Dyris is yours for as long as you can keep her.” Then: “Consider it a dowry.”

I sat up straight enough for my towel to slide dangerously close to public indecency, but didn’t care because right now, dignity was secondary to victory and also because I wanted Kaela Vaelith to remember precisely what she’d just signed off on forever:

“My very own Sexretary,” I murmured experimentally into the holo-pickup, tasting each syllable like forbidden fruit or stolen oxygen after blackout sex behind enemy lines.

Kaela’s lips parted, a hairline fracture, and maybe this time it wasn’t performance at all but genuine shock that someoneless than three hundred years old could still surprise her after everything else she’d seen devoured by time.

“Is that a formal title?”

“Depends if you want the job next.”

For the first time, she looked genuinely rattled.

Then she straightened, composed herself, and said, “If you survive, Fern Meldin, you may just outlive the Accord itself.”

I grinned. “Plan to.”

She closed the call, but her afterimage lingered on the glass, refusing to die out.

I sat back, stretched, and looked out the viewport. Vireleth was still there, holding position, waiting for her cue.

It was my move.

And for once, the whole galaxy was ready to watch.

Thread Modulation: HoloNet

Axis Alignment: The Internet