Page 49 of She Who Devours the Stars

Worse: Kaela knew exactly what she was doing when she attached this photo.

The Accord had pivoted. No more hard containment, no more threat of planetary annihilation. Now it was all about narrative shaping, about controlling the myth from the inside. I was to be the vector, the narrative leash, the “handler” for a myth that had never, in any generation, tolerated handling.

In the glass, my reflection was unrecognizable: cheekbones sharp, eyes fever-bright, skin gone too pale even for Vaelithstandards. I’d lost ten pounds since the last debrief, and gained a nervous twitch in my left hand. I ran the numbers, tried to predict the outcome, but the math never worked. Every simulation ended with me on my knees, one way or another.

Zevelune’s voice haunted the quiet, a memory from a Holo I’d seen years ago: “If you don’t want the world to change, don’t start a fire with your own hair.”

At 0600, another update: Kaela, again. “House intelligence indicates rival Great Houses are moving to secure the Nullarch. If you wish to retain her, remove her from the Glimmer now. There is a program called Mythic Stability. Remote site. Rimworld. Untraceable. Your best play is to convince her it’s her idea.”

In the silence, I rehearsed the speech. I knew she’d see through every word. Knew she’d probably strip it down to the bones, then set the bones on fire just to see what I’d do.

I put on my uniform anyway.

When I reached the containment garden, Fern was waiting. She looked me up and down, grinned, and whistled through her teeth.

“Didn’t expect you to show,” she said.

“Me neither,” I replied, and for a moment it vibrated between us like an open wound. I could hear the garden’s atmosphere pumps laboring through the silence, their hiss a metronome for the blood hammering in my ears.

She watched me with a kind of predatory patience, the way you’d eye an unfamiliar narcotic: curious if it would kill you, or just make everything burn better. Then Fern stepped forward, not sudden, not slow, just with that inevitability she wore better than any uniform, and that was it: air gone, boundaries gone,the whole garden shrinking until it was two people and a hunger that kept failing its own containment.

“What’s the Accord want now?” she said, and her voice was a little raw around the edges from laughing too hard or not enough.

I handed her the file. It was all there: Kaela’s secondment order, my new job description (“narrative liaison,” as if there were any narrative left to liaise), even the part where Fern was supposed to sign off on my full-time assignment as “Sexretary.” The last bit was underlined in VR-bold, like Kaela expected I’d miss the joke if she didn’t annotate it.

Fern took the slate, scrolled through all fifteen pages with one brutal flick, and tossed it onto the bench beside us. She didn’t even look where it landed.

“So, I own you for real now?” She cocked her head just enough to make her hair slide over one eye; on any other mythic, it’d be calculated; on her, it was just physics. Like gravity had picked her as its favorite toy.

My mouth was dry. “If you want.”

For a second, she just looked at me. No masks, no weaponized smile, just something old and starving waking up behind the gaze of the most consuming woman I’d ever met. I knew in that instant that every previous cycle of my existence had been prep work for this moment of being devoured alive.

“Good,” she said. The word hit like an event horizon.

Then Fern kissed me. Not gentle or cruel or even theatrical, just total, like she wanted to see what else in me could collapse. Her hands found my collar and yanked me down into her orbit (yes, literally; yes, my toes left the ground), and her mouth burned wild against mine with all the subtlety of a star going nova.

In another life, I would have counted: three seconds until loss of breath, five until complete dissociation from reality, eight before surrender took over completely. But here it wasn’t about numbers or power curves or mythic escalation, it was about how much of myself I could pour into a single point of contact before my own legend ran dry.

I let her.

I let her drag me into the present tense, tasted the sweat and static off her skin, felt her hands thread through my hair, and clench like she could pull out every memory of anyone who came before her. There were sensors everywhere in this garden; half a hundred feeds would be flagging this as “inappropriate,” “not suitable for security review,” “potentially hazardous to galactic morale.” Let them watch. Let them broadcast every second of it across three spiral arms. For once in my office-caste life, I was exactly where I needed to be:

Under someone else’s thumb, mouth, will, or name.

When she let go (or maybe when I remembered how lungs worked), we stumbled back against the cold glass wall and stood panting there for a minute while the sky rotated silently above us.

I meant to say something scathing or clever about power dynamics or public relations, but instead what came out was: “You’re really not afraid of anything anymore.”

Fern smiled with her whole face, a wild, stupid grin nobody would ever believe unless they saw it up close, and said, “Do you know what it means when you run out of things to lose?”

I shook my head; she smelled like ozone and truth serum.

“It means you start making your own rules.”

“You’ve still got things you could lose, Fern. Your parents. A sentient coffee-pot. Me.” I countered.

Something ancient, dark, and terrible, older than consequence, deeper than reckoning, rippled through the air as Fern’s eyes changed.