Page 62 of She Who Devours the Stars

She shrugged. “Lunch.”

“You know you don’t have to eat those anymore, right?” I tried for a joke. “You could conjure a five-star meal just by wishing it, or ask the ship for a nine-course tasting menu and get it instantly. Why ration paste?”

Fern peeled another sliver of the bar, popped it in her mouth, and chewed. “Because it doesn’t taste like anything.”

I sat on the floor, cross-legged, and let the silence stretch. I’d spent a decade learning to read every kind of hunger, but this one was new.

She picked at the wrapper, voice barely above a whisper. “The more I say yes, the tacos, the mythship, the fizz, the louder it gets. The resonance is building up, and I want more every time. I can feel it in my bones. In my teeth. Even when I sleep.” She licked her lips, like the words themselves were a flavor she couldn’t get rid of. “This stuff? It doesn’t want anything from me.”

I thought about that for a while. The mythtech in my blood, the way my body sometimes forgot to breathe because the need to control, to suppress, was more substantial than the need for oxygen.

“Maybe you’re allowed to want things too,” I said. Not gently. Not cruelly. Just true.

Fern let the words hang, then finally looked at me. Her eyes were rimmed in blue, the resonance pulsing there. “That’s the scary part,” she said. “Not being hungry. Being allowed to eat.”

She set the bar down. Didn’t finish it.

I scooted over, so we were almost shoulder to shoulder, and leaned my head back against the wall.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “we’ll have to look like we’re ready for this.”

She snorted. “Do you even own a shirt with sleeves?”

I grinned. “I’ll make you a deal. I wear sleeves, you wear something other than regret and trauma.”

Fern smiled, real and small. “No promises.”

We sat together in the dark, just breathing. Sometimes that was enough.

Most times, it was all you got.

I closed my eyes, and for the first time in months, the ache behind them wasn’t from loss or terror.

It was just… wanting.

And that felt almost human.

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin

Axis Modulation: Inside Vireleth the Closure

I was, to put it mildly, deeply fucked up on sugar and existential dread. The mythship’s corridors blurred at the edges, lighting striping my vision in aquatic colors as I navigated them barefoot, a half-dissolved churro clutched in my left hand like it was the last honest thing in the galaxy. Some asshat had adjusted the grav settings, and every few steps my weight rebounded, like the deck wanted to launch me through the ceiling or push me into the floor. I loved it, mostly. It meant I could float down the halls and not feel so heavy for once.

Six hours until Eventide drop, and I should have been prepping, studying, or at least pretending to be the futureof mythic containment. Instead, I was humming the theme to some ancient anime about cyborgs who fall in love with their own mecha, chewing on industrial-grade fried dough, and leaving a trail of powdered sugar and skin-oil smears across the mythship’s high-polish surfaces. Every wall panel I passed blinked with a blue-white afterglow, my signature, now. Nothing so subtle as a shadow; just cosmic-level vandalism.

At the first junction, I caught my reflection in a security glass. It was an accident. The cameras always followed me, Vireleth had a sick sense of humor, and she loved to watch me fail at hygiene, but this time the image was so clear it stopped me. I looked like I’d lost a bet with three gremlins and a discount rave. My hair was full Medusa, static-curling around my face in knotted halos, and my eyes were so bright they looked backlit. The skin under my nails was black with engine grime. My shirt hung twisted, taco stains on the hem, and my sleep shorts had slipped far enough down one hip to expose the deep scar from the time I fell off an engine and landed on my own goddamned pride.

“Disaster goblin,” I said, grinning at myself. Then, quieter, “Fuck, I can’t go like this.”

For most of my life, that sentence would’ve ended with “so I won’t.” I’d just show up as-is, own the mess, let people underestimate me until I ate their heart for breakfast. But now, suddenly, the way I looked wasn’t a joke anymore. I had a meeting tomorrow. I had a name, again. Worse, I had to stand next to Dyris, my perfect ice queen in a tailored uniform, bones like the blueprints for a better species, the kind of woman planets took seriously on sight. And I? I looked like the sideshow she forgot to leash.

Worse still? She was mine, and I wasn’t about to let the galaxy think she’d claimed me out of pity, on a dare, or because she had to.

It wasn’t shame, exactly. More like the slow, rising horror that comes from realizing people are actually going to remember you. That you might be the story, not just the punchline.

So I did what I always did when the world got too sharp: I found my mother.

Velline’s quarters were at the edge of the main axis, in what had once been a VIP suite but was now less a room than a living moodboard. She’d spent years terrorizing Accord cargo decks with her designs, and here she had finally achieved the singularity: fabric, color, chaos, and ego woven into a palace of self-expression that never, ever slept.