Page 87 of She Who Devours the Stars

It wasn’t a cruel sound. It was honest. Joyful. She stepped forward, hands out, and cupped the air around the shrine like she was coaxing a kitten from its den.

“Look at this,” she breathed. “It wants to eat me alive.”

The double sky lit her face, white hole and black hole, opposite ends of want. Her hair, wild and staticky, turned into a corona around her head, a mockery of sainthood. She moved with zero fear, even as the dais trembled under her feet.

I wanted to warn her. I wanted to run.

Instead, I followed.

My fingers brushed the edge of the altar, and the pulse-code jumped to my skin, hot and bright as a live wire. In my mind, I heard every version of my own voice, all at once: “Align. Accept. Collapse.”

Fern grinned at me. Her eyes, for a split second, went pure white, then pure black, then a color I had no word for, a color that did not exist in the spectrum of human sight.

“Ready?” she said, voice low, like it was a dare and a prayer and a seduction all at once.

I couldn’t answer. My mouth had stopped working.

She touched the shrine.

The city howled.

Every train in the world derailed at once, lines of light exploding in the sky. The buildings folded in, then out, then vanished. The stadium of empty chairs went up in fire, the flames spelling a code that I knew, deep in my bones, was the story of my own life, reduced to four letters: A-L-Y-X.

Fern’s hand found mine. She squeezed, and the energy running through us snapped back into the ground, pulsing outward, rippling the city from the core to the edge.

“Why does it feel like dying?” I whispered.

She smiled, sharp as a knife. “Because you’re about to be reborn.”

I wanted to hate her for it. I wanted to punch her, or kiss her, or collapse the world just to make the feeling stop.

Instead, I held on tighter.

The shrine’s code began to rewrite itself, threads of data crawling up Fern’s arms, over her shoulders, into her hair and down her spine. The world went blue-white, then black again. The only thing I could see was Fern, bright and alive and so beautiful it hurt.

She shuddered, the energy almost too much to contain.

And the city moaned.

I could feel it, through the soles of my feet, through every nerve ending: the world was hungry for her, and it wanted to make her part of it, forever.

“Let go,” she murmured. “If you want to survive, let go.”

But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

“That was mine,” I said, out loud, even though I knew it wasn’t true anymore. The city, the trial, they had belonged to me, once. But now, all of it bent toward Fern, and I was just a passenger.

She grinned, feral and triumphant. “It still is.”

Fern leaned in, lips grazing my ear, and whispered, “Take it back.”

I did. I kissed her.

The world ended.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron

Axis Alignment: Trial Realm