Page 50 of She Who Devours the Stars

“Not happening,” Fern said, low, certain, dangerous. “Besides, like EternaDiamonds…” She leaned in, breath warm against my ear, her tongue micrometers from contact as she enunciated each word. Somehow, I almost heard an old HoloNet jingle playing throughout the garden, Fern’s mythic narrative grasping the garden and shaking the music out of it.

“Sexretaries are forever.”

We both laughed then, because what else could you do? The joke wasn’t on us; we were the punchline baked into every Accord protocol from here to whatever endgame waited outside causality’s reach. For the first time, I understood: I wasn’t just hers to ruin, I was hers to keep. I had signed up for the long haul, signature still wet, scrawled messily with a pen made of red flags.

And honestly? You’d have done the same.

The garden’s perimeter alarm went off at that exact moment, a polite chime that somehow failed to diminish our mutual intoxication by even one photon, and Fern reached past me to grab the still-warm file slate off the bench.

She tucked it into her waistband without breaking eye contact. “So, what’s next? You're going to try to talk me into compliance? Guilt me with House duty?”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” I said honestly (and hated how true it sounded).

She came closer again, not for kissing this time but so close our foreheads touched, and whispered, “Then let’s go break something important.”

It wasn’t an impulse. It was a new law of motion.

We left together through three layers of security field (all sufficiently distracted), ducked under two redundant surveillance drones (one of which Fern disabled by flicking a pebble at its lens), and made it halfway across Glimmer’s upper deck before either of us realized we’d forgotten our shoes.

She didn’t slow down; neither did I.

Chapter 7: The Accord Concedes

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith

Axis Alignment: Blacklight Hall

Blacklight Hall was built to intimidate, but it only ever made me bored. No, it wasn’t that I was riding a doll; it was just as boring when I was there in person. The old Accord architects designed it as a war room for extinct gods: blackglass walls ten meters high, ceilings that flickered with orbital fire, a single table so reflective you could check the status of your own nervous breakdown in its surface. Most visitors described it as “colder than a banshee’s audit,” but the real signature was the silence, the kind engineered by centuries of policy, the hush that said any scream would bounce forever.

Tonight, it was almost a full house.

At the long edge of the table, Accord Chief Consul Serevin, his suit so void-black it made the wall behind him look like a mistake, tapped his finger, once every second, on an AR display. Each tap released a faint ripple of containment field: a gesture of power so petty it might as well have been a nervous tick. To his right, the new Director of Mythic Oversight, a woman named Pril, had already deployed her first four minions and was on her third espresso. The rest of the seating filled in with the predictable: Security, Spin, Legal, half a dozen disposableunderlings, and stationed directly opposite me, the proxies of House Vaelith.

I counted five. Three wore flesh; two wore Mythprint, stamped with the fresh shimmer of emergency fabrication. I ranked them based on threat, boredom, and the likelihood of making eye contact with me intentionally.

Kaela Vaelith herself was not here, but her absence pressed into the room like an occupied grave. Her proxies wore matching lipstick, identical silver rings on their left index fingers. They never looked at each other. Vaelith code. I could taste the House’s intent in the air, beneath the artificial chill: a faint sweet note, like ancient fruit candy left to rot in a crypt.

I took my seat last, as per protocol, though I allowed myself a microsecond of satisfaction as the entire table tensed at the sight of my uniform. The new cut was controversial: I’d had the tailoring done in black-on-black, Accord insignia ghosted so subtly it was only visible to the paranoid. It looked sharp, but it broadcast a single, unmistakable message: I was not here to negotiate. I was here to finish.

Pril started before the glass had even finished syncing. “Thank you, Former Director Vaelith, for deigning to attend. Your House’s proximity to the Nullarch Incident—”

I cut her off with a smile that said, “try again.” “The Incident had a name and a body,” I said. “Best to start there.”

A shuffle of discomfort around the table. Good. Every careerist in this room had already received Kaela’s last-minute briefing, but no one wanted to speak first.

Serevin obliged. He dropped the mythic containment ripple and let his hand hover. “Fine. Fern Meldin. Host to the most dangerous resonance the Accord has documented since—”

“Since Lioren.” I let my voice go glacial. “That’s what you meant to say.”

“It’s not a compliment,” Serevin said, the words as brittle as his hairline. “We have three planets still recovering from the original. That’s over fifteen hundred years of recovery, for those not keeping track.”

“History repeats,” I replied. “But it doesn’t always get the casting right.”

That drew a tight smile from the lead Vaelith proxy, a woman whose name I didn’t know but who’d trained on Kaela’s old feeds. Her gaze was perfect: flat, silver, depthless, reflecting nothing unless you counted the ghost of every career she’d ever ruined.

She said nothing.

Pril cleared her throat, signaling the shift to “documentation phase.” She had her AI ready and a swarm of sub-legalities queued for release the second anyone in the room suggested doing something that hadn’t already been reviewed and sanitized.