Page 15 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

After a while, I just sat and stared at the city through the warpod’s fogged window, the light outside bending and splitting as if the world was about to fracture.

I didn’t move until the rain stopped and the next shift arrived.

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Roof, Above Meldin Apartment, Pelago-9

I was back in the stairwell, three flights up, hunched with my back against the wall, a burner smoke hanging from my lips, and my hands tucked under my knees.

The chemical in the cigarette was illegal on at least seven worlds, but it numbed the cold and quieted the hunger, which was all I ever wanted from a drug.

My hair clung to my face, still wet, and my skin felt raw, as if the rain had stripped it down to something honest.

Below me, the Glimmer Zone was waking up.

People emerged from their holes and their hideouts, eyes wide and hungry, scanning the sky for the next disaster.

The kid with the ration-steak was still out there, still running, still chasing the impossible.

I found myself rooting for him, though I doubted he’d ever catch it.

Up above, the storm clouds had split, curling around each other like hands ready to wring a neck. There was a shimmer to the air, a tingle in my teeth, and I realized the city was watching. Not me, but the thing in me. The part that couldn’t be mapped or explained away.

I took a drag. Let the smoke roll out of my nose.

Somewhere, a voice whispered: “Nullarch.”

I didn’t know what it meant. Didn’t care. The word hung, heavy and perfect.

I laughed, a rough sound. “The fuck is a Nullarch?” I asked the sky.

It didn’t answer.

But the city did.

It shivered and waited.

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Meldin Apartment, Pelago-9.

I splayed across the Meldin couch like a casualty in a domestic war zone, one ankle draped over the percolating midlife crisis that was our kitchen appliance, the other wedged under a stack of “emergency” ration bars I’d pilfered during last week’s lockdown.

The only illumination came from a HoloNet tile balanced on my ribs, its light trying and failing to drown out the storm glare filtering through our window.

Pelago’s nights were never black, just an endless gradient of blue and burnt orange, but even the gas giant had nothing on Channel 5’s color scheme.

The percolator, Perc to friends, “seditious bastard” to the Accord, rumbled beneath my shin like he was personally offended by my body heat. I kicked him gently. He gurgled something that sounded like a death threat, then went back to brewing.

My parents were hiding. Just me, the coffeepot, and a parade of content designed to convince us that our problems were historic, and therefore sexy.

I flicked the HoloNet to Life Mode and let it blast my retinas. The first channel on default was always Accord MemoryCast, the self-congratulatory wet dream of whatever pencil pusher had survived the last four audits.

The opening montage: Lioren, shirtless but draped in one of his infamous Mythcoats—each one allegedly tailored from the skin of a slain concept—stood before a burning horizon like he personally invented sunsets and was already bored of their aesthetic.

His hair, frosted at the tips like he’d lost a bet with a supernova and won anyway, caught the light in all the wrong, perfect ways.

He wore pants so unnecessarily tailored they looked like a war crime against restraint—stitched with the kind of arrogance usually reserved for exiled royalty, or pop stars two scandals deep and trending for all the wrong reasons.

He looked good, I had to admit. I wasn’t usually into men, but the muscle-to-existential-despair ratio was catastrophic, and everything about him screamed mythic disaster.

Not the kind you run from, but the kind you follow, barefoot and knowing better.

If the goal was to make every HoloNet viewer question their sexuality, reality, and the purpose of pants, the director deserved a raise and a trial for crimes against common sense.

I wanted to hate him. I really did. But the problem with myths isn’t that they lie, it’s that the narrative always finds exactly the parts of you that are weak to them. I didn’t even try to look away, and I’d never looked at a man twice in my life, and this fucker was supposed to be me!?

Triumphant music swelled. A voiceover, timed for maximum Authority, announced, “Before the Nullwars, there was only chaos. Before Trivane, only fear. And then, he came. Lioren. Builder of mythships. Wielder of Light Absolute. He gave us structure. He gave us sovereignty.”

The footage cut abruptly to a playground.

I squinted. It was a bunch of children in starched uniforms, lined up like a glitchy marching band in front of a statue.

Of Lioren’s abs. Not even his face, just a limestone six-pack that managed to look like it’d taste salty, rendered with such devotion that it could have been the relic of a long-dead fertility cult.

The kids were singing something tuneless but catchy, waving banners with the Accord logo and the Trivane crest mashed together like a couple in the honeymoon phase.

“Is he even flexing in that one?” I muttered.

Perc whined in solidarity. I reached down, pet the steel edge of his brewing deck, and felt him warm under my touch. The machine loved attention. Not affection, just attention.

I swiped channels. 5.1, 5.2, 5.3; every subfeed had a different flavor of the same nostalgia.

In one, a dramatization of the “Siege of Sorrow’s Edge,” actors in badly color-corrected tunics ran through styrofoam corridors as stock explosions rattled the backdrop.

Lioren showed up halfway through, shirtless (again), this time wielding a blade of “pure mythic energy” that looked suspiciously like the plasma sabers from a banned cartoon series.

He decapitated a dozen cultists and then made out with the actress playing his archrival.

I rolled my eyes and flicked to Channel 9: “Deep Cut: The Real Lioren.” Their graphics were always two years out of date, their hosts never even pretending to play it straight. My kind of media.

The host tonight was someone I recognized, a career gossip, her hair dyed radioactive yellow and styled to look like the sun had exploded just above her scalp.

She grinned at the camera, mouth full of teeth and intent, then leaned forward and whispered, “We’re live, unfiltered, and unsanctioned.

Let’s talk about Lioren, hero, egotist, possibly allergic to shirts.

The man who once slept with a planet, the tectonic plates shifted.

Impregnated a moon. Fell in doomed love with Zevelune. Ghosted a sun.”

They cut to “archival” footage, all of it fake, but played with such conviction that I almost wished it were true.

Lioren, now with a facial scar and a cybernetic eye, was lounging on the deck of a mythship called Vireleth, one arm slung over the ship’s avatar, who looked suspiciously like a goth dominatrix from the last century’s fashion streams. Not that goth dominatrixes EVER went out of style.

The two posed for a selfie, Lioren licking the side of her head while she smirked, biting the tip of his ear.

The sight sent a jolt through my jaw, sharp and electric. My tongue darted out, as if expecting the taste of battery acid and cherry gloss. Under it all, low, dark, and velvet rich, something moved.

Mine , the thought whispered, oily smooth and far too pleased with itself. Always was. Would be again. Could be you.

I bit the inside of my cheek, hard. I told myself it was nothing, just resonance, the way myth bled through the screen when you stared too long. It definitely wasn’t an ancient, feminine, and far too intimate voice that sounded like a certain mythship I’d met.

Perc’s lcd flickered, switching to the coffee bean emoji, but the eyes were narrowed now, the smile gone.

“You okay, buddy?” I asked, suddenly uneasy.

He hummed a different note. “Do not trust the archival footage. It is mostly propaganda.”

I grinned, just a little. “You say that like you were there.”

Perc didn’t answer.

The footage jumped again, Lioren now stood at the edge of a cosmic singularity, one hand resting on the mythship’s control helm, the two of them glowing in tandem like they were sharing a joke only stars would understand.

Somewhere, deep in me, I felt something curl tighter, like a promise I had forgotten.

The Deep Cut host was still going, now gesturing at a star map riddled with dots of red.

“Lioren built gods and broke them. He was arrogant enough to name his own doctrine ‘benevolent obliteration.’ Would’ve wiped a colony if it meant saving two more.

Was he a tyrant? Absolutely. A genius? Undeniably.

A lover? According to 900 documented sources—divinely forgettable.

According to Zevelune? I quote—'not bad.’”

I snorted, but the sound felt too loud in the empty apartment. Of course, she’d say that. I hated how much I wanted to know exactly how not bad.

“He wasn’t a man,” the host said, lowering her voice to a reverent hush. “He was a myth in a mirror. And now we have a new one.”

The screen shivered, as if it knew what was coming.

Then a hard cut, a flash of blue-white, and there I was: caught by a floating security cam, eyes full of resonance, hair blown back by the shockwave of my own existence.

The video slowed, looped, zoomed in on the way my veins lit up along my left arm.

The color was wrong, the angle distorted, but it was me, no doubt, even if the girl in the shot looked ten percent more dangerous than I felt.

The host’s voice went soft. “While debate rages over whether she’s Lioren reborn, one thing’s unanimous across Accord-space: those cheekbones could slice through treaty law.” A long pause. “Her name’s not Lioren. But she glows the same.”

I watched the replay. My glare, mid-turn, catching the camera with a look that said fuck off and also please god let me sleep. The world froze on that frame.

I closed the tile with a flick, then lay back and let the afterimage burn through my eyelids.

For a long time, I just listened to the apartment.

The tick of the heating coil, the pulse of the coffeepot, the wind strafing the window with dust and last year’s pollen.

There was no drama here, just the sound of life refusing to give up.

I let my mind go blank, just for a second, and felt the buzz of myth and legacy hum through my bones.

Perc, after an eternity, muttered, “I liked the moon. She was polite.”

I grinned into the silence. “He didn’t deserve her.”

I stretched, feeling the pop and crackle of every joint. Let the history lesson leak out of me, molecule by molecule. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have been normal. But normalcy was for people who still got invited to their own birthdays.

I was about to slide into a nap when the first rattle hit the window. It sounded like hail, but the forecast was clear. I ignored it. The second hit was louder, more deliberate. The third time, the whole pane shuddered, and I felt the impact in my molars.

I stood, shuffled to the sill, and looked out. Nothing but the reflected lights of the city, the smear of Xenthis in the sky, and a single shadow on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket of static.

The storm had returned. This time, it knocked.

I turned back to the coffeepot, whose display now showed a single word: “Prepare.”

I didn’t laugh.