Page 1 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Mythcore of Vireleth the Closure

I woke up on fire.

Not literally. Or maybe literally, if you counted the way my body vibrated with heat, like I’d been used to forge a planet and the gods forgot to let me cool off.

Every cell prickled and ached, not quite pain, more like the aftertaste of pain, like someone had rewound the suffering and made me experience it again for fun.

My thighs burned, my skin glowed. A hideous gold and black blanket twisted around my legs like evidence at a crime scene.

There were, as far as I could tell, two plausible explanations for this: either I’d had the best sex of my life, or I’d survived atmospheric reentry using my ass as the heat shield.

I squinted through the haze. The room I woke up in wasn’t my room.

It wasn’t even a room. It was a geometry experiment gone wrong, all gold light and impossible angles, where every surface bled warmth and every wall breathed in and out, like the architecture itself was having a panic attack.

The air tasted like copper and static, and it pressed on me, thick and predatory.

I tried to move, but the air held me down like a weighted blanket sewn by someone who never wanted me to get up again.

I opened my mouth to scream, but my voice came out dry, shredded, like I’d been screaming for centuries and forgot to stop.

“Where—” I rasped, but my throat closed around the word, sealing it up like a secret. “Where am I?”

The answer didn’t come from a corner or a speaker or a person, because there were no corners, no speakers, no people.

It came from everywhere and nowhere at once, humming out of the walls, the floor, the air in my lungs.

It was a voice that was silk on glass, feminine, if you cared about that sort of thing, but broken at the edges, like it had been crying for so long it forgot how to talk any other way.

“Welcome back, Lioren.”

Every cell in my body stopped burning and started freezing.

I sat bolt upright, sheets cinched in a chokehold around my hips, heart detonating just below the breastbone.

The room pulsed with gold, metallic and sickly, less like sunlight and more like the last glow of a filament before it snapped.

The voice echoed through the chamber, not so much heard as injected into my wiring: everywhere at once, under my skin and inside the hollow cavities of my teeth.

I sought out a response that didn’t sound scared.

“Who—what the fuck is talking?” Nailed it.

My voice came out raw and flimsy, like paper soaked in bleach. Even to me, it sounded counterfeit. I tried again, louder this time, but the echo made it sound strangely fragile, as if the room could snap it in half at any moment.

Instead of answering, the voice vibrated through the structure, through me.

I could have sworn the light shifted, that some deeper layer of geometry rearranged itself behind or underneath what passed for walls here.

For one impossible second, I thought maybe I was alone after all, that I hallucinated something’s presence because that’s what happens when you wake up in an extradimensional panic coffin.

Then the thought reversed itself inside out: there was no chance I was alone.

I had never been alone for a single moment in my entire life.

The realization was ugly and contagious, leaving a crawling feeling between my vertebrae, like a time-lapsed centipede digging new nerves down my spine.

The voice came back, this time gentler but so much closer, as if it had shrunk to fit inside my head but then brought an entire cathedral of echo with it. “I am… the memory of a promise.”

Like that explained anything.

Which, it didn’t for normal people. But even as I wanted to punch back with more questions or start screaming until I passed out, something old and cold inside me understood the shape of what was being said. The words weren’t about explaining; they were about reminding me what was expected.

Still, I needed more than abstract metaphysics and trauma flashcards. “A promise to whom?” The words barely made it past my lips before panic shoved the next demand out of me: “Tell me your name.”

The silence felt like stepping off a cliff—nothing for ages—and then a single thread caught me.

“I am the vessel that carried him,” said the voice.

All warmth bled from my body and left me frostbitten on every surface not touching another part of myself. It kept talking, piling meaning on top of implication until it threatened to crush me flat:

“I am his witness. The one who saw him end. The thing left behind… to wait for someone else.”

The air pressure in the room doubled; sudden sweat slicked my palms and glued my shins together where skin met skin. My throat threatened me with mutiny if I tried to speak again.

I hated how familiar this felt, a script rehearsed to perfection before you’re even aware you’re auditioning for the part.

“And now… I’m yours.”

A pause, stretched thin and trembling. Then, softer, like a truth plucked from the depths of meaning.

“I am Vireleth.”

Somewhere between blood vessel and bone marrow, terror was replaced by something stranger: guilt. Not just any human guilt, but the kind that precisely knows which crime is etched on its face yet forgets why it ever believed it could escape unpunished.

My lungs shriveled around themselves as if oxygen had become illegal overnight.

I tried to clutch at denial, a handful of self-respect, or even just fundamental skepticism. But none of it fit anymore. The only thing that did was this sickening certainty that whatever Lioren had done, been, or promised, some piece of him had been welded onto me without consent or anesthesia.

“Wh-who even is Lioren?” I whispered into clenched fists.

The room held still like it was afraid to breathe. When Vireleth spoke, her voice sounded like it had been waiting on the tip of her tongue for centuries, soft, reverent, and aching in a way that made my skin crawl with how personal it felt, and how much it felt like she was talking about me .

“The one I loved,” Vireleth said. Paused. Then softer, like a prayer. “The one I lost.”

Still, I knew the name Vireleth. Everyone who worked a dock or pulled salvage did.

Not the way you know a registry number or a blueprint series, but the way you know the shape of a knife you’re never supposed to touch.

Vireleth wasn’t a ship, so much as a story with an engine.

A mythship. A name you dropped when you wanted a conversation to shut down.

Vireleth was a legend, a catastrophe people blamed for orbital scars that still hadn’t healed.

The kind of thing old-timers swore they saw burning through impossible orbits at 3 a.m., even when the telemetry said otherwise.

Vireleth, the gold-medal winner in every spacer's worst-case scenario bracket.

My hands darted over myself in an inventory check—chest (still real), face (not melting), ribcage (all accounted for), stomach (unsettled but present).

All familiar terrain but somehow wrong at the micro-level: surface texture too flawless; heat signature too uniform; muscle memory replaced by someone else’s highlight reel stitched together from better days and worse nights.

Then, like static bleeding through a cracked comm line, something new pressed in.

A corridor. Narrow, blister-hot, painted with hazard stripes I didn’t recognize but still knew the smell of, burnt coolant, ozone, and fear-sweat baked into the walls.

My shoulder hit metal, sharp, jarring. Someone’s voice, female, trembling, shouted my name. A pause, the sound of shirts pulled over shoulders. Lips on mine. Messy. Rushed. Off-center. Desperation like it might be the last thing we’d ever do.

Then the scream.

Not mine. Hers. Whoever she was. Maybe. More like the sound air makes when it gets torn in half by something moving too fast, too wrong. Then blackness. Not the peaceful kind, not sleep or unconsciousness. More like falling out of history mid-sentence.

My stomach lurched. Every nerve under my skin lit up like it almost remembered pain that had been deleted from the time stream. Through it all, threading moments together like stitches through raw meat, Vireleth’s voice.

“You opened,” said Vireleth, soft now, almost reverent. “You burned,” she added. “You swallowed her whole.”

My stomach flipped, and for a second I thought I’d puke right there, but all that came up was a dry, wrenching nothing. I doubled over, clutching my midsection, waiting for the nausea to pass. It didn’t.

“No,” I gasped. “No, no, no. That’s not—that’s not what happened.”

The walls shimmered, like they were made of water and someone had just thrown a rock in. The voice laughed, a sound that was all sadness and no joy. “It is. You are the first human to resonate with a black hole.”

I wanted to scream. Instead, I laughed, brittle and feral. “Stop saying that!” My voice broke halfway through, splintering into something high and sharp. “I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t want whatever this is! I’m not him! I’m not Lioren!”

The ship, Vireleth, shuddered around me like it, no, she could feel everything I was saying, like every part of me had been transcribed into the core of whatever made a mythship tick.

The golden light pulsed, then faded, and then came back brighter than before, as if the whole place was breathing through its panic.

A low, animal hum vibrated up through the floor, rattling my bones.

“Neither did he,” Vireleth said, and it sounded like a wound.