Page 17 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

A second and third blast overlapped, so close they sounded like one long scream.

The whole building yanked itself sideways, floors giving up the concept of “up” and “down” in favor of “fuck you, you’re falling.

” I was weightless for a half-second, a floating myth with nothing to tether her, and then the ceiling folded in on itself and I rode it down, surfing a wave of cabinets and sparks and the splatter of my own blood.

For a moment, there was only the inside of my eyelids. It was red, and it was everywhere.

I opened my mouth to scream, but there wasn’t enough air left in the world to bother.

The hallway, or what was left of it, passed by in jagged stutters.

The walls were torn open, exposing rooms I’d never seen, people I’d never met, their faces reduced to blurs of shock and panic and then gone, just like that.

Some were screaming. Most were just gone, torn loose from their moorings by the kind of violence you only see in myth or the very first, very last moments of a planet.

I landed on something hard and unyielding, concrete, maybe, or the remains of someone’s life. The impact knocked every thought from my head except one: that this was what it felt like to be erased.

Time came back, a little. Enough for me to know I was upside down, wedged between a collapsed support beam and the remains of the kitchen table.

My legs didn’t work. My left arm was pinned, the glow from my veins leaking out through a lattice of fresh cuts.

The blood was real. The pain was not. Not yet.

I lay there, counting the seconds.

The air was thick with the scent of ozone, burning insulation, and the sharp, coppery aftertaste of city-wide betrayal. I tried to move, but the pressure only got worse. The debris shifted and settled with every aftershock. The world above was gone. The world below was still coming for me.

It wasn’t fair. I’d survived a mythship, outlasted three years of maintenance school and two of dockyard hell, dodged Accord security and every cosmic accident my luck could buy, only to get annihilated in my kitchen by a kill team that didn’t even bother to knock.

There was a phrase for that. I tried to remember it, but the light in my head was fading, and everything sounded like water now.

Another impact, not from above this time, but from somewhere inside.

My chest seized, a pressure building behind my sternum, hot and relentless and ancient in a way that made no sense.

The blue-white glow from my veins ramped up, strobing so hard I thought my skin would burn off.

I flexed my fingers and felt the world flex with them.

The noise returned, a rising, fractal howl that resolved into a single, perfect note. The kind you get when every possibility collapses into one last, inevitable outcome.

I was falling.

But I wasn’t alone.

The apartment, the city, the planet, everything peeled away in concentric layers, light and sound and memory stripped to the bone.

There was no up, no down, no kitchen, no family, no fear.

Only the taste of static, and the ache behind my eyes, and the feeling that this was, in some fucked up way, exactly what I’d been waiting for.

I reached out, grabbed the possibility of a future, and held on.

The building, or what was left of it, hit the ground a second later.

But I was already gone.

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Meldin Apartment Ruins

If you’ve never been inside a mythic event, let me explain: time doesn’t just slow.

It fractures, then re-braids itself into a pattern only the most ruined versions of you can interpret.

Mid-fall, I was all the versions at once: the girl screaming, the girl biting her tongue, the girl already bracing for the impact that might never come.

Each one had a theory about what would happen next, but none of them were prepared for the moment it actually arrived.

I was falling, but also not. The blue-white light from my veins was a lighthouse, refracting out through the storm of debris and memory, turning every chunk of concrete into radiant, crystalline geometry.

The air was thick, almost gelatinous, and every time I tried to move, the world offered me a thousand different vectors, none of them in the direction I expected.

I reached out, and my hand caught the edge of a steel girder— except it wasn’t there, not quite.

The impact rippled through me, and then through the rest of the building, and then through the rest of the city, like a stone skipping across the surface of a gravity well.

I screamed, but it came out wrong. Instead of sound, the scream was a pulse, an annihilation of everything within three meters.

A shuddering ripple that bent glass, snapped rebar, and reduced the incoming shrapnel to a cloud of metallic mist. The mist hovered, every fleck of iron and copper rotating in a private halo, a miniature galaxy spinning out from the core of my panic.

The world paused, for just a moment.

I could see everything. The firestorm above me, the black-lace network of snapped power lines, the arc of a second kinetic round slicing the sky in perfect, blood-orange parabola.

Down the shaft of the ruined building, I saw the rest of my life replayed in twenty frames per second: every time I’d run from pain instead of facing it, every time I’d said no when I should have said yes, every time I’d let someone else take the hit because I was too tired to be strong.

I saw Dax.

He was three floors below me, upside down, tumbling through the void with all the grace of a man who’d been preparing for this moment since before I was born.

His eyes were open, his mouth caught in a half-smile, and his left hand was reaching out, not for me, but for the soldering iron he’d never let go of, even in freefall.

For a split second, our eyes met.

The blue-white light arced between us, connecting me to him, and him to the reality we were both about to be subtracted from.

I reached out, not with my hands but with the part of me that wasn’t constrained by the usual limitations. The world heard me, and then it bent.

Every fragment of debris between us stopped, shuddered, and then curved around, forming a shield of twisted, magnetic intention.

The blast wave, still echoing from the first impact, went silent as it passed through the barrier.

The second and third kinetic rounds hit the ground outside, detonating in a staggered bloom of flame and dust, but inside the shell of what used to be our home, everything was quiet.

I blinked.

The light faded a little. The pain returned, a lot.

I hit the ground hard, but not fatally so, and rolled through a curtain of smoke and pulverized memories. When I finally stopped, I was on my back, staring up at what remained of the sky.

It was still dark, but now the dark was layered: the afterimage of the explosion, the residual glow from my skin, and a single, pinpoint star I was pretty sure wasn’t there before.

I coughed, and my ribs screamed at me. I spat out blood, or maybe it was just the taste of the past hour condensed into a single, bitter molecule. My hands worked, my legs worked, my brain was still jury-rigging reality in the background.

I lay there, counting my breathing, until I realized I wasn’t alone.

Dax was there. Not dead, not broken—just lying on his side in a cradle of twisted steel and whatever passed for hope in the aftermath of an orbital strike. He groaned, then rolled over, propping himself up on one elbow.

His first words: “Did we win?”

I laughed, and it hurt so much I almost passed out.

“Define ‘win,’” I said, once the world stopped spinning.

He wiped the blood off his chin and grinned. “Still alive. That’s a start.”

I nodded, though the motion made everything worse. I tried to get up, but my left leg was pinned by a chunk of wall the size of an existential crisis. I braced, pushed, and the wall moved, just a little, but enough for Dax to see me struggling.

He crawled over, and together we shifted the debris, inch by inch, until my leg came free. The pain was real now, bone-deep and electric, but nothing felt broken that wasn’t already on the list.

Dax looked at me, eyes wide. “You’re glowing.”

“So are you,” I shot back, though it was a lie.

He snorted. “That’s just the adrenaline. Yours looks… different.”

I flexed my hand, and the blue-white light spiraled down my veins, pooling in my palm. It flickered, then steadied. I held it up, watching it illuminate the dark.

“Think it’s permanent?” I asked, only half-joking.

He shrugged, which in Dax Meldin language meant “could be worse.”

Above us, the building creaked. Somewhere in the distance, alarms were starting up, and the orange pulse of emergency drones was already lighting the rubble. But in our little pocket of aftermath, everything was still, almost peaceful.

I closed my eyes, tried to remember what it felt like to be ordinary, but the memory wouldn’t load. All I could remember was the last few seconds: the feeling of the world bending, the taste of potential in my mouth, the way the blue-white light connected me to everything around me.

I wasn’t scared, not exactly. But I wasn’t ready, either.

Dax pulled a rag from his back pocket and pressed it to my forehead. “You got a gash. Needs patching.”

“Go for it,” I said, and let him wipe away the blood.

He worked in silence for a minute, then asked, “You want to tell me what just happened?”

I opened my eyes. “You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

He glanced up, eyebrow raised. “Try me.”

I stared at my hand, the light still glowing in my palm. I thought about the mythship, about the time-slips, about the moment I’d felt every version of myself running parallel in the same second.

“I think,” I said, slowly, “I might be a little more fucked up than I realized.”

Dax grinned. “Join the club.”