Page 69 of She Who Devours the Stars

By the time the crowd started shuffling out, I was already halfway down the side stairs, headphones in and tuned to adeepfake mashup of pre-Earth club hits spliced with screaming goats. I considered it my contribution to the war on nostalgia.

Outside, the air was crisper than usual, the mythship’s external system having decided today was a “scattered clouds and UV hazard 3.2” type of morning. Across the quad, students milled in shifting clusters—some trading gossip, others locked in ceremonial hand-slap greetings that always ended in someone getting their fingers broken. I ignored most of them, zeroing in on my favorite bench under the only remaining living tree on campus, a mutant hybrid that, according to rumor, once survived being set on fire, poisoned, and proposed to by an intoxicated legend studies major in the same afternoon.

I parked myself, propped my feet on the root bulge, and tried to sketch out the opening to my paper. Something suitably biting, but not so sarcastic that it’d get flagged by the censors as “meta-disrespect.”

I managed maybe two lines (“The core of my resonance is inertia, and so is my cosmology; everything begins as a tendency toward stillness, except where violently interrupted by grades”) before the shadow hit.

“Hey,” said a voice, too close, low enough that I nearly thought it was the tree itself talking.

I looked up, and Fern Meldin was standing over me. She had the kind of presence that made you think of black holes before you thought of people—heavy, wrong, bending the air even when she was still. Her hair, rumored to have been dyed with stolen blood and the tailings of collapsed stars, was tied in a loose, uneven knot at the nape. It gave her a look like she’d just finished running from a disaster, or had started one and was about to finish.

She looked down at me for a second, weighing her next words like she didn’t want to waste them on someone who wouldn’t notice.

“Is the assignment real,” she asked, “or is he trolling us again?”

I shrugged. “Real enough that if you don’t turn it in, he’ll put you in a ‘self-knowledge’ study group. Last semester, they made everyone hug for an hour.”

Fern’s face did something at the mention of hugging, like she’d swallowed a wasp and the wasp was winning. “Thanks,” she said, voice soft but not fragile. Then she just… left.

I watched her walk across the quad, movements weirdly smooth for someone who looked like they never slept. Every few meters, a ripple of attention followed her. Even the Vaeliths, who had been bred for generations to never notice anyone not on their list of priorities, flicked their eyes her way. I didn’t blame them. There was something about her that made you want to look away, but you didn’t.

I stared at my compad for another ten minutes, managed three more sarcastic sentences, then gave up and went to lunch.

The next cycle, every student with a pulse showed up to see if Fern would break the assignment or if she’d break Ipsum.

It was neither.

When her name was called, Fern didn’t hesitate—just walked straight to the front, clutching something bundled in blackout cloth. She yanked the drape off with zero fanfare and set the thing on the presentation altar.

It was supposed to be a diorama. What it actually was: a full-blown, mythic-tier sugar sculpture. Edible nebulae drifted in zero-g suspension fields, layers of stardust swirling around a central white hole modeled from spun sugar and iridescentcaramel. At the base, tiny planets orbited on invisible wires. Some of them trailed ribbons of molten syrup. A few exploded gently if you watched long enough, releasing clouds of edible glitter that floated until sucked up by the room’s vent system.

Every person in the hall stopped breathing, even Ipsum, whose jaw had become unmoored from his skull.

Under the mythlights, the sculpture threw wild, shifting shadows across the marble floor. For a second I thought I’d imagined it, but no: the shadows spelled something in warped, fractal script. The words reassembled themselves as the model spun, never quite stable, but I caught them between flashes:

I don’t know who I am. But I know I’m hungry.

That’s when the cinnamon-sugar smoke started. It rolled off the diorama in little puffs, making everything in the room smell like a childhood you’d never had but always wanted.

No one spoke. Half the room looked ready to sob or riot.

I didn’t watch the diorama, not really. I watched Fern.

She leaned against the edge of the altar, hands in her pockets, body language so casual you’d think she hadn’t just detonated the emotional core of the entire class. Her head tilted, chin tucked, eyes scanning the sculpture with a kind of distant satisfaction. But then the sugar model flickered—just for an instant, the resonance field pulsed brighter than planned—and Fern flinched. Small, quick, and very real.

I marked it. Noted it the same way I noted which faculty feigned their smiles, or which nobles signed their threats with fake courtesy.

That was honesty, plain and unvarnished. She wasn’t performing for effect. She wasn’t defying for sport. She was justraw, exposed, and so goddamn present that it made my skin want to slough off and find a new host.

I felt something hard twist in my chest. Not a crush, not even awe—just the rare, sharp click of respect, and something more dangerous curling underneath it.

I didn’t unpack it. Not here, not now.

I just kept watching, quietly stashing the moment in the mental folder I used for things I wasn’t ready to let go of.

Behind me, someone whispered, “She’s going to eat the world.”

I didn’t disagree.