Page 65 of She Who Devours the Stars

I watched my own cartoon mouth eat stars on infinite repeat. My hair was too perfect in the edit, my jaw too sharp, the filter-logic making my eyes strobe blue-white as I chomped through the spiral arm. The caption read: NULLARCH’S LUNCH BREAK. The comments were split fifty-fifty between worship, thirst, and requests for franchise rights.

I slurped the last of my drink, snapped the glass back onto the bar’s auto-wash, and let my body melt sideways on the sofa. Vireleth had started routing more and more of its diagnosticsthrough my personal HUD, even though I kept telling it to stop. Every ten minutes, a new alert. Every hour, a system query for “Emotional Baseline Update.” If I’d had a real therapist, I’d have brained them with the interface pad.

The only thing not pulsing was my wrist comm, which meant Dyris was either deep in Accord paperwork or, more likely, doing pushups to burn off her daily quotient of self-loathing. The ship’s AI had tried to track her, but I’d set a filter so tight that even my name triggered a security lockdown. I was, for the first time in three days, deliciously unobserved.

Then the notification hit.

Not a polite ping. Not the subtle shimmer of a HoloNet request. No, this one brute-forced itself into my vision, hijacked the overlays, and splashed a red band across every input channel with the subtlety of a nuclear alarm.

[SYSTEM NOTICE: IDENTITY SYNC COMPLETE.]

[Accord Register Updated.]

[Legal Designation: FERN TRIVANE.]

[Titles: Nullarch. Sovereign Heir of House Trivane. Accord Myth-Class Entity.]

[All previous identifiers archived.]

It took a second for the words to mean anything. They hung there in midair, burning into my retinas, and then my stomach caught up. I froze, body gone heavy, all the fizz and hunger from a minute ago gone to battery acid. The room wobbled, gravity not quite right.

It was the “all previous identifiers archived” that did it. The erasure.

I stared. The letters stayed, crisp and pitiless, in the center of my HUD. There was no “accept” or “dismiss” option. This wasn’t a notification. It was an edict.

My hands shook. I tried to clear the alert; it replicated, every command fizzling out into a cruel little animation of a lock snapping shut. I tried again, harder. It multiplied, the words stacking atop themselves until the whole view was nothing but my name, my name, my name, until I couldn’t breathe through it.

Then I screamed. Not a rage scream, a terror one, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than the lungs. I grabbed the nearest glass, hurled it at the wall, watched it shatter into nothing and then auto-heal, watched the bar’s surface flicker as the system rerouted power to “User De-Escalation Protocol.” Even in my breakdown, the ship wouldn’t let me have a single mess.

“What the ever-loving fuck, Vireleth!” I spat, and every syllable pulsed in the system log, echoing in the walls.

The AI’s voice, saccharine, bored, replied from the speakers: “Protocol update complete. Congratulations, Nullarch.”

I kicked the sofa so hard it slid a meter across the deck. “You can’t just rewrite me. That’s not how it works. I’m—” I bit down on the old name, the one the system had just archived, and nearly gagged. There was nothing left to say but the new one.

I collapsed backward, head cradled in my arms, and stared at the endless recursion of my new identity on the glass. There was no pride in it. Not even fear. Just the sick, hollow certainty that I’d lost something I hadn’t realized was still mine.

The doors hissed, and Dyris strode in.

She wore the formal black, hair twisted back so tight you could’ve used it to saw bone, and carried an expression so composed it belonged in a postmortem. She took in the scene: the shattered glass, the displaced furniture, the wall of system notices, and then me, sprawled on the sofa, knees tucked up to my chest and hands white-knuckled.

Dyris stopped a few meters away. “You’re trending,” she said, voice softer than I expected.

“Fuck off,” I answered, not looking at her. The words were weaker than I wanted. They trembled.

She took a step closer, cautious, like I was a cornered animal instead of a newly minted galactic sovereign. “Vireleth’s diagnostics flagged a biohazard. Are you—”

“Do I look okay to you?” I cut in. “They deleted my whole life and replaced it with a press release.”

She knelt, slow and careful, and put a hand on the edge of the sofa. Her knuckles brushed my ankle, and the touch was so gentle it made my eyes sting. “It was always going to happen,” she said.

I jerked my leg away. “Not like this. Not without—” I didn’t finish the sentence. There was no “me” left to finish with.

Dyris let her hand rest on the upholstery, fingers curled like she was holding the whole galaxy together with that single point of contact. She didn’t argue. She just let the silence fill the room until I couldn’t bear it.

I bolted upright, feet hitting the deck with a slap. “You knew they’d do it, didn’t you? You just stood there and let them rewrite me. I’m not even a real person anymore. I’m a myth in a fucking pantsuit.”

Dyris’s mouth twitched, but not in cruelty, more like she wanted to say something sharp and decided against it. “You devoured a star,” she said at last. “You made tacos from it. You crashed the HoloNet and sparked three cults before you even got off your moon. You earned the name. This isn’t inheritance. It’s conquest.”