Page 80 of She Who Devours the Stars

She shrugged, as if she understood, and walked away, leaving a trail of mythic afterburn in her wake.

I watched her go, the taste of my voice echoing on my tongue, and wondered if maybe, just maybe, there were hungers even a Nullarch was afraid to name.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: South Tower, Eventide

South Tower wasn’t really a tower. It was a mythic prank built into the bones of the Academy, a gravity flex, a void with windows, a place where the rules got tired and let you do whatever you wanted as long as you didn’t bring glass. The spa floated in the middle, a disk of mineral water and soft blue stone, the temperature set exactly to “don’t ever leave.”

I did not leave. I hovered over the pool, half-dressed, hair in lazy zero-G orbit around my head, body stretched the wrong way across three deck chairs I’d magpied from the lounge. My boots were missing; I’d lost them in an earlier, less dignified argument with the anti-slip mats. The only thing I wore right was the jacket, because it was bonded to my pulse and would have started a small civil war if I tried to take it off.

Dyris sat at the edge of the pool, one knee hugged to her chest, the other foot dipping circles in the water. Her hair was up, face framed by the kind of casual shadow you only get when you’ve mastered self-illumination. She didn’t lounge, didn’t sprawl; she arranged herself with the geometric precision of a knife block.

She watched me, silent, for a long time.

I broke first. “I thought the point was to get stronger,” I said, staring at the ceiling. “Instead, it’s all ‘find yourself’ and ‘harmonize your trauma’ and ‘what are you terrified of?’”

“You’re afraid of yourself,” Dyris said, without judgment. “So is everyone else.”

I let my arm flop into the pool, watched the refraction cut my hand in two. “You’re not.”

She smiled. “I didn’t say I was everyone.”

We let the water ripple.

Outside, the campus was a soft chaos of other people’s dreams. In here, it was quiet enough to think, if you dared.

“Doesn’t it get old,” I asked, “being the only one who knows what you want?”

She considered. “Not really. Most people don’t want anything real. They want something they can lose without bleeding out.”

I rolled onto my side, slouching so my head hung over the water’s edge. “You ever lose something that mattered?”

“Once,” she said. “Never again.”

For a second, the room hummed. Mythic tension, the kind that makes the walls want to tell secrets. I almost asked her what she meant, but I didn’t. Because that would make it real.

We watched each other. Or maybe just listened.

The silence made my skin itch.

So I did what I always did: sabotage.

I flicked my fingers, called the smallest possible white hole, and let it hover between us. It was a trick I’d learned by accident: call the void, shape it, feed it a little memory, and see what it spat out.

This one, barely big enough to swallow a marble, spun and glowed and then birthed a butterfly: pure energy, wings made of mythic math and old heartbreak. It zipped once around Dyris’shead, then spiraled into the pool, shedding blue stardust as it died.

I grinned. “Look,” I said, “education.”

Dyris tracked the butterfly until it vanished, then turned back to me, eyes sharp. “You make jokes like someone who’s never seen what happens when a white hole doesn’t close right.”

I bit my thumbnail, hiding a smile. “Then you haven’t seen my jokes land.”

Dyris’s mouth twitched. She didn’t laugh. But she let herself smile, and that was a bigger win than breaking a practice dummy in half.

“That’s why I’m planning ahead,” she said.

I let my hand drift, splashing water toward her. “You expecting me to blow a hole in the school?”