Page 86 of She Who Devours the Stars

Then a laugh echoed through the chamber. Not a human laugh. A mechanical laugh, the kind A.I.’s on the HoloNet used to mock politicians or cancel old gods.

Alyx’s hands balled into fists. “They’re watching us,” she said, voice thick with something I’d never heard from her before: rage.

I cracked my neck, rolled my shoulders, and smiled. “Let ‘em. I’ll give them a show.”

She looked at me, and for the first time, I saw fear. Not of the room, or the trial, or even the mechanical planet we’d been sent to. Instead? Fear of what she might do if she lost control.

I felt something break loose inside me, and I knew exactly what I wanted.

I closed the distance between us, put a hand on her wrist. She didn’t pull away.

“You get that this is a trap, right?” I said, voice low. “They want to see if we eat each other, or fuck it up so bad that the trial collapses.”

She blinked slowly, then exhaled. “I know.”

I tightened my grip, dragged my thumb across the back of her hand, and watched the gold in her eyes surge.

“Then let’s break it together,” I said.

She nodded, once, and her mouth twisted into a smile that made my knees go weak.

In the center of the chamber, the chair dissolved, replaced by a second, then a third, then an entire ring of empty seats.

The room was a stadium, and the only audience that mattered was us.

I leaned in, close enough to smell her; a mix of salt, iron, and the promise of static. “If you want to win,” I whispered, “you have to want it more than you’re scared of losing.”

She swallowed. “Is that how you do it?”

“No,” I said. “That’s how I survive.”

She grinned, baring teeth. “Show me, then.”

I did.

We took the dais together.

And the city screamed.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron

Axis Alignment: Trial Realm

The city was dying.

Not all at once, but in the way systems die when you overload them with more signal than they were ever designed to bear. The buildings bent inward, their windows flexing, then snapping, glass falling in beautiful, silent arcs. Every streetlamp went nova, then guttered out. The air above the dais stank of burnt ozone and caramelized static.

We stood in the open, bodies backlit by a fractal of light so dense it had gone blue-black at the edges. Fern’s hand hovered over mine, not quite touching, but every time she inhaled, the hair on my arms tried to lift off and fly away. My skin was ice and fire, every nerve ending on the edge of revolt.

At the center of the dais, the “shrine” pulsed with mythic charge. It wasn’t a real thing, just a relic in the Athenaeum’s databanks, like someone had tried to code a cathedral from scratch and got bored halfway through. The altar was cracked in half, the control board fused to slag, the console still humming, just barely,with raw pulse-code. In the air above it, a flicker: an avatar, fragmented, its face shifting too fast to read.

I heard my own voice, everywhere, out of phase, as though I was narrating a disaster that was happening to someone else.

The avatar’s mouth moved. “Initialize,” it said. “Align. Accept.”

My jaw locked. I knew this loop. I’d run it a thousand times, in every nightmare that started with “prove yourself” and ended with “lose everything you ever touched.”

Fern laughed, and the city cracked.