Page 56 of She Who Devours the Stars

“She’s horny,” I said.

Dyris, at the comms console, did a double-take. “Is that safe?”

Perc blipped in. “Consent confirmed. Propulsion now at 92%. Caution: emotional feedback loop approaching parabolic curve.”

Velline laughed so hard she had to brace herself on a wall. “You always did have a way with machinery, love.”

I ignored them and let my mind wander through the ship’s nervous system, feeling out the shape of every corridor, every hatch. Vireleth didn’t just remember Lioren; she mourned him, every bulkhead and data node still shaped to his wants and whims. But as I settled deeper, something started to shift. The lines of the corridor softened, just a little. The language packs in the display screens flicked to Glimmerstreet dialect. The navigation prompts started using my favorite cuss words as variable names.

By the time we reached Eventide orbit, the ship had rewritten three major control systems and changed the gravity gradients to mimic the slant of my old bunk on Pelago-9. The walls glowed with soft, shifting sigils, none of them from the standard Accord icon sets. If Lioren’s ghost still haunted the place, it was watching from a safe distance.

I sat on the throne, hands folded behind my head, boots up on the railing.

The future was coming, fast and ugly. The only thing to do was let it.

Vireleth purred, and I purred right back.

Chapter 8: A Small Kindness

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin

Axis Alignment: Inside Vireleth the Closure, Mid-Transit

The HoloNet lost its mind at exactly 02:18 GST.

I was in the mythship’s rec lounge, slouched on a mesh hammock with my feet propped on the emergency snack bar, when the first feed burst in. It was a local station, probably pirated from a leftover cult terminal in Glimmer, but the anchor’s face was all real. She wore a vintage Vaelith blazer, eyes fixed on some off-screen catastrophe, and you could see in her expression the moment everything in the universe failed to make sense.

“It’s true,” she whispered, voice shotgunned by static. “They’re… they’re real.”

The screen cut to shaky footage: a mob of people, not fighting, but queued—lined up like it was a black-market water sale on payday, only instead of buckets, every hand clutched a waxy paper tray. The trays overflowed with tacos. Real, actual tacos. Fat with shredded carnitas, dribbling sauce, with fresh limes and diced onions glowing like artifacts under rain-drenched mythlights.

The caption below the feed read: “The Nullarch Delivers. Carnitas Confirmed.”

Next to me, Perc the brewservant let out a low, impressed whistle. “Statistically, this is the most compelling event since the last mythic incident. But with better seasoning.”

I watched in a trance as the feed shifted to a viral split-screen. On the left: the original carnitas taco, filmed seconds after I’d dropped them into existence. On the right: a three-hundred-year-old Accord educational video demonstrating how to synthesize protein slabs into “taco-like foodstuffs.” The right side looked like someone had hollowed out a sadness and deep-fried it in confusion. The left side was already gone, eaten by a woman who licked the grease off her hand and then burst into tears.

I bit my lip, not sure whether to be proud or just profoundly sorry for every alternate universe me who’d tried to pass off soy protein as actual joy.

Within twelve minutes, the tacos hit the moon.

Literally. HoloNet’s next package came from a commercial relay outpost on the far side of Pelago’s largest satellite, where a pair of maintenance techs—possibly still drunk from shift change—had rerouted a supply drone to make a “test run” at the surface. The drone’s cargo hold opened mid-hover, and two hundred tacos rained down on the observatory’s landing pad. The techs devoured them with the reverence of true believers, one biting her own hand in disbelief before sobbing “I never believed this day would come” into a backup towel.

By hour two, the memes were already art.

Someone with too much time and a physics engine had rendered the carnitas taco as the central force holding a miniature galaxy together, with lesser satellites, queso, cilantro, and dicedradish, caught in orbit around it. The caption: “THE TACO OF GRAVITY.” There was also a loop of my face, pulled from the aftermath at Glimmer, with the mouth edited to take a fresh bite every time the mythship’s hull lit up behind me.

Every channel, every node, every single slice of the net, all tacos, all the time. Accord officials tried to launch a “don’t panic, it’s just a snack” campaign, but that only made the hysteria worse. By dawn, half the world’s news channels had broken their protocol and gone live, just to replay the moment of cosmic snack liberation.

The highlight reel:

- At 03:47, a veteran anchor for Accord News Network started sobbing on-air, tried to wipe her eyes with a taco, and accidentally revived her ratings by 900%.

- At 04:02, a scholar from the Accord’s Cultural Conservation Office fainted mid-lecture after seeing the carnitas tacos flash on her monitor. The teaching feed cut out, but the last thing she said, “we thought the taste was extinct,” became the top meme slogan within seventeen minutes.

- By 04:18, a self-proclaimed “Earth culinary historian” named Willex, broadcasting from the New London archipelago of Pelago-3, witnessed the first shipment of tacos arrive via black market courier. He took one bite and exploded. Not figuratively. Biologically, right there on camera. His co-host swept up the remains and tried to sell them as “relics of true flavor.”

They were calling it The Feast of Return.