Page 66 of She Who Devours the Stars

That cut deep, but it wasn’t the insult I wanted. “So, I’m a monster now,” I said.

Dyris shook her head. “Not a monster. A precedent.”

I snorted, wiped my nose with the back of my wrist, and stalked to the wall console. I hammered at the controls, pulling up system admin, user protocols, identity overlays, anything that might give me a backdoor. Every menu led back to the same cold summary: LEGAL DESIGNATION: FERN TRIVANE. No option to revert, no rollback, no trace of the old me except as a footnote in the system logs.

I tried to crash the system with a forced override. The console locked me out. I tried yelling at the AI. It let me vent, then piped in, “This designation was not imposed. It is the only identity capable of carrying your resonance without collapse.”

I slammed my fist into the wall, felt the old pain shoot up my arm, the familiar ache of childhood accidents and unpaid bills. It was a real hurt, at least.

Dyris watched, eyes steady, arms folded. “You can break the interface all you want. It won’t change what you’ve already become.”

That was the worst part. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even disappointed. She looked at me like I was a storm she’d seen on every planet: expected, inevitable, beautiful only from a distance.

I sagged, my body going soft, all the anger draining out as fast as it had flared. I let my forehead rest on the glass, the cold shock of it grounding me. My reflection, now officially Fern Trivane, forever, stared back, hollow-eyed.

“I didn’t want a new name,” I said, voice so small I hated it. “I just didn’t want to be forgotten in the old one.”

Dyris stepped forward. Her hand touched my shoulder, warm and real through the fabric of my myth-stitched suit. “Then don’t be,” she said, barely a whisper. “Be remembered as Fern Trivane, who made it mean something again.”

I let the words settle. For a minute, they hurt more than the erasure. Then, gradually, they didn’t.

Vireleth chimed: “Docking sequence complete. Academy protocol requests immediate transfer.”

I rolled my eyes, but the old anger was gone. What remained was a kind of cold, clear focus. I straightened, squared my shoulders, and turned to Dyris. “We’re not using the fucking shuttles,” I said.

She smirked. “You want to make an entrance.”

I grinned back, teeth bared. “I want them to see what happens when you try to kill an idea and it refuses to die.”

Dyris reached for my hand. I let her take it.

“Ready?” she asked.

“No,” I said, and then snapped us out of existence.

The command lounge vanished, the glass, the view, even the taste of melon-mint on my tongue. All that was left was the burn of her palm against mine, and the certainty that when we reappeared, the universe would have to learn my name all over again.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron

Axis Alignment: Eventinde Athenaeum Reception Hall

I picked my spot three columns from the back, shoulder wedged into the cold marble just far enough from the neural dampeners to keep my head clear. The Aethenaeum Reception Hall could have passed for a luxury detention facility—vaulted ceilings, mythstone ribbing, more glass than actual wall, and enough security presence to make an assassination attempt look like a scheduling error.

They’d crammed the entire student cohort onto the floor in concentric tiers, scholarship rats and baseline nobodies orbiting the outermost ring, nobles and myth-adjacent prodigies monopolizing every row up front. I counted nine microdrones in the upper truss, each with its own paranoia algorithm; two failed to mask their grav pulses, their positional jitter off by less than a micron, but enough to make my nerves itch every time they passed overhead.

I stood with arms folded, ankles crossed, my jacket hung half-off my shoulder—noncompliant, but not so far gone the faculty could write me up for insubordination. You learned fast in places like this: attention was a currency, and the only way not to drown in it was to act like you’d never heard of water.

The Aethenaeum had gone all-out on ceremonial junk for this “containment induction.” Banners in every shade of ancient, inscribed with sigils only half the room could read. Air thick with hyper-sterile filtration, but underneath that, the stink of nervous sweat and ozone. The kind of manufactured solemnity that made even the bored kids hold their breath. It was a stage for drama, and I was not the only one waiting for the show.

My eyes tracked everything—posture shifts, micro-expressions, social drift. The front row was a study in genetic engineering:three siblings in the same suit, teeth flawless, eyes chemically tweaked to match the Vaelith House crest. They made a sport of ignoring the crowd, occasionally glancing back to make sure we were still real. Behind them, the Vellari twins, interchangeable as always, with their perfect hair and skin and matching expressions of practiced contempt. I’d heard a rumor they once swapped places during a final and no one, not even the scan system, caught it.

At the edge, the rest of us: kids with too much time and not enough background, leaning into whatever performance they thought would keep them unremarkable. Some kept their heads down, feigning interest in the holo-notes. Some traded nervous glances, seeking confirmation that this wasn’t just a bad dream. A few tried to merge into the walls entirely.

Me? I watched the faculty.

The headmistress wasn’t here. That was unusual—she never missed these. The lectern was manned by Ipsum, the senior Ethicist, whose career was a string of cautionary tales and nervous breakdowns. He was sweating through his collar, running breathing exercises in a loop, but the numbers on his wrist monitor only climbed. The rest of the staff milled around the periphery, forced smiles, eyes flicking to the main doors every twenty seconds.

The room was off, and everyone felt it, but no one said a word.