Page 61 of She Who Devours the Stars

I rolled my eyes. “Can ships get crushes?”

Velline considered. “If any ship could, it’d be this one. Besides, you’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

She shrugged. “Like you’re about to punch a ghost.”

I laughed, but it came out short and jagged. “Maybe I am.”

She reached out and squeezed my shoulder, just once. “You need anything, I’m a room away.”

Then she was gone, trailing the faint scent of sugar and ozone.

I lingered, letting the paranoia settle. My hand found its way back to my neck, and I pressed hard, half-expecting to draw blood. The sensation didn’t fade, but now it felt less like a warning and more like a countdown.

I walked to the end of the hall, found myself staring at the ship’s primary bridge display. Vireleth’s systems ran quiet, but every so often, a single console would flicker, then reroute its output through a series of encryption gates before vanishing from view.

I’d seen this pattern before: just after the mythship had erased a kill team from the planet’s surface. Back then, the reroute felt like a closing of ranks, a reflex to protect itself, or maybe its pilot. Now, it felt different. Less defensive, more… curious.

I let my fingers drift over the inactive keys, feeling the ship’s pulse vibrate through the panel. The chill was gone. In its place: a distant warmth, like the echo of laughter after a blackout, or the memory of a hand that never quite left your shoulder.

I closed my eyes. I could almost hear a voice, deep in the ship’s bones:

I see you.

It wasn’t menacing. It wasn’t even kind. It was just… attention. The kind you get when the world finally stops looking past you, and instead decides to watch, really watch, to see what you’ll do next.

I opened my eyes, and the feeling faded to background noise. The reroutes on the console stilled, and the news feed scrolled on as if nothing had happened.

I left the bridge, mind buzzing with the sense of being both more minor and more important than I’d ever been before.

In another place, maybe inside the mythship, maybe nowhere at all, a presence blinked. It remembered me. Or perhaps it had never stopped.

A thread had been pulled, and now the universe was waiting to see if I’d unravel or just get a little more interesting.

I flexed my hand, tracing the shape of the sensation, and smiled.

If someone was watching, I hoped they had a good seat.

This was going to get weird.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith

Axis Modulation: Inside Vireleth the Closure, Captain’s Cabin

When I finally got off comms, my brain felt like a used battery: heavy, hot, and two seconds from leaking acid all over the rest of my body.

The captain’s quarters were dark, lit only by a pinprick of city-glow from the planet below. I expected to find them empty, but Fern was there, sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs tucked to her chest and a ration bar balanced on one knee. She stared straight ahead, chewing with the kind of intensity usually reserved for last meals.

I closed the door behind me, let the hiss of recycled air fill the space between us.

“Good news,” I said, voice flat. “We’re not being nuked. Bad news: they’re making us wait twenty-four hours before landfall. Something about ‘ceremony, tradition, symbolism.’” I mimed a jerk-off motion, just to see if she was still in there.

She didn’t look up. “Can’t wait to see what they roll out for ‘welcome the new mythic deviant.’”

I moved closer, but not too close. The last thing I wanted to do was crowd her.

“What’s that?” I nodded at the bar. It was half-unwrapped, mostly untouched.