Page 76 of She Who Devours the Stars

He started with the safety lecture, which was always the same: “Please refrain from localized spacetime manipulations. Always check your stabilization cuff. If you experience bleeding, nausea, or quantum déjà vu, alert the staff immediately.”

I tuned it out.

Alyx was three rows ahead, but her presence pulled at me like she had her own event horizon. She wasn’t looking my way. She didn’t have to. You could feel her in the room, a pressure behind the ribcage, a question you’d forgotten how to ask.

The lesson began with a “simple” demonstration. The instructor placed three ball bearings on the projection table and asked for a volunteer to manipulate their paths in a controlled spiral. He didn’t call my name, but his eyes flicked to me, begging for a mercy kill.

I obliged, raising my hand with the lazy resignation of someone about to be bored to death.

He gestured, and I took the cue. Instead of levitating the balls in parallel arcs, I twisted the field just enough to send them into a triple-helix, then nested a secondary spiral inside the first, so every ball orbited two centers at once: the projection table and me.

The professor’s mouth made a perfect O. “Textbook demonstration,” he whispered, and his notes fell out of his hands, scattered like dead leaves.

The rest of the class just stared.

Except Alyx.

She was watching the ceiling, counting the gaps between the lights, jaw clenched like she was bracing for an impact nobody else could see.

I let the spiral collapse, caught the bearings as they fell, and palmed them back into place. The mythic field bled away, leaving the room tense and empty, like a birthday party that ended in arson.

The instructor clapped, but it sounded like the kind of applause you get at a funeral.

“Next,” he said, and didn’t even try to meet my eyes again.

#

Spiritual Mythodynamics was the one class I thought I might fail. The professor was a ghost, literally, her body was a hologram projected from somewhere else in the galaxy, her voice coming through at a fractionally wrong lag, so every word landed just before you were ready to hear it. She wore ancient Vellari robes and a crown of mythic lilies, which looked cool until you realized the flowers were extinct and she was the only one allowed to wear them.

Today’s lesson: the nature of recursive soul identity.

The room darkened, and a mythscape opened at the center dais. The school AI, not trusting its own safety settings, dimmed the physical lights to near-zero, then overlayed the whole class in a projection of shifting constellations. Every desk, every inchof marble, every trembling hand in the crowd—refracted by ghostly, stuttering stars.

The professor intoned, “Who will present the paradox of Infinite Mirror?”

Alyx stood.

I didn’t expect it. She was never first, not in this room, not in any room.

She stepped into the mythscape and let the System take her, every atom registering as stable, every heartbeat under ruthless control.

She cleared her throat, then began.

“Imagine,” she said, “that you are looking into a mirror. In that mirror, you see every version of yourself you ever were, every choice you never made. Some are dead. Some are monsters. Some are gods. But every single one is you, and every single one wants out.”

Her voice was steady, low, a line pulled taut across an abyss. The room’s air system shut down entirely, letting the silence eat at our ears.

“In the old worlds,” Alyx said, “they believed in reincarnation as escape. But here, now, it’s recursion. You don’t live again. You live backward, until the error corrects. Until the System finds the version of you that doesn’t break.”

She let that hang.

“For most, it’s a comfort. For some—” she looked at me, just for a second, “—it’s a warning.”

The room was not breathing.

She went on, words like a serrated blade. “I have seen myself die in every way possible. I have watched my own hands chokethe air from my own throat. But every time, I come back, and the loop tightens. The version that survives is the one that remembers every failure, every mistake, every hunger that was never satisfied.”

Alyx spread her hands, palms up, and in the mythscape the stars rippled. Two, then three, then a thousand versions of herself, each one refracted across the quantum split. Some were triumphant, some ruined, but all of them shimmered with the same gold-bright core.