Page 84 of She Who Devours the Stars

When my name finally paused in the queue, I nearly missed it.

[ALIGNMENT CANDIDATE: VIERRON, ALYX.]

I gripped the edge of my desk, knuckles white.

The system hesitated. The next name should have materialized instantly. Instead, the boards glitched. All the lighting in the room flickered, then blue-shifted, then cut out for a full three seconds. In the darkness, someone made a noise, an honest-to-god whimper, and then the lights slammed back at double brightness.

The next name was not a surprise, but it was a problem:

[ALIGNMENT CANDIDATE: TRIVANE, FERN.]

I stared at the screen. My pulse went from resting to “run for your life” in a single heartbeat.

A click behind me. I whipped my head around. Every eye in the room was on us. Even the Vellari twins, whose default setting was “nothing in the universe can surprise me,” looked momentarily rattled.

Professor Ipsum’s voice failed for the first time I’d ever heard. “That’s… not—” He blinked, and a visible shiver passed over his whole body, like someone had iced his bloodstream. “That’s not an alignment. That’s a contradiction.”

Fern made a noise that might have been a laugh or a cough or both. She shoved her noodles aside, feet up on the desk, and just grinned, wide and wolfish. “Guess we’re the pilot episode,” she said, loud enough for the back row.

The algorithm, already in freefall, started sparking errors. The holo over the mainboard jittered, stuttered, then resolved into a split screen: me on the left, Fern on the right. Our faces ghosted in and out of the display, overlaid with fractal sigils and mythic math that looked like it wanted to eat the universe.

“Is this a joke?” hissed Vessa, voice razor-thin. “They can’t let them—"

“They shouldn’t let them,” muttered someone else, too low to catch the face.

The overhead lighting gave out completely, plunging the room into a wash of blue emergency LEDs. I felt every hair on my body go cold. Next to me, a support drone fizzed and fell from the ceiling, trailing a ribbon of ozone and regret.

“Are you seeing this?” I whispered, not sure if I was talking to Fern or the program or to god.

Fern stretched her arms overhead, then turned her entire body toward me, so close I could see the little veins of silver in hereyes. “Yeah,” she said, voice soft. “It’s like they built the whole place for this exact disaster.”

Another drone fell, harder this time, and shattered on the floor. The mythic bands on the walls snapped from blue to white to raw daylight. The temperature dropped ten degrees, then spiked, then normalized as the Athenaeum rerouted all power to the main alignment console and mythic dampeners.

[ALIGNMENT ACCEPTED.]

[TRIVANE—VIERRON VECTOR: 99.9% COMPATIBILITY.]

[INITIATE TRIAL.]

Somebody laughed, high and hysterical. I think it was me.

I couldn’t breathe.

The board pulsed once more, then blacked out. In the dark, Fern’s voice found me, steady and sharp as ever.

“Hey,” she said. “Don’t fuck this up. I want to see how far we can break it.”

I couldn’t even muster a comeback. The adrenaline was a physical thing, hot and wild in my blood.

This was how the world ended.

The last thing I saw before the room flickered out was Fern, already half out of her seat, hair in her eyes, face lit by the promise of pure chaos.

Then the lights died, the computer howled, and I was falling.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: Trial Realm