Page 18 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
We sat there, side by side, letting the adrenaline drain out. Above us, the first rays of sunrise crept through the dust, turning the smoke gold. The city was waking up, but not the way it used to. Nothing would ever be the way it used to.
I flexed my hand again, watched the light flicker and flare.
“I’m sorry about the apartment,” I said, after a while.
Dax shook his head. “You did well, kid. Real good.”
He stood, offered me a hand, and together we climbed out of the crater that used to be our home.
For about three seconds, I thought we’d survived the worst of it. Then the world, not content with regular old disaster, decided to try something different.
It started as a hum, no, more like a pressure.
An itch behind the eyes, the kind that lets you know you’re about to remember something you never wanted to forget.
Dax and I had just cleared the edge of the crater when the air thickened, every molecule vibrating with a hunger that had nothing to do with biology.
I grabbed his arm, hard. “Get down,” I said, but the words were a formality. Gravity already decided for us.
The impact zone, still smoldering with the afterbirth of three kinetic lances, pulsed.
Not out, but in, a contraction of space that dragged every photon, every wisp of dust, every memory of what just happened back into its source code.
The shadows on the rubble didn’t just lengthen; they recoiled, burning in reverse, the darkness getting darker and the light turning into something no color chart could handle.
Then, as quickly as it started, the city exhaled.
The sound was back, but it was wrong. Not just echoing, but layered, every voice, every alarm, every shriek from the aftermath playing at once, then all sliced off mid-scream.
The first to go were the Accord drones. One moment, three were orbiting the crash, their blue eyes judging every survivor for emotional instability.
The next, they were gone, not exploded, not even blinking out, but erased.
Like if reality had done a quick file sweep and decided they’d never belonged here in the first place.
Next: the kill team. Five Accord troopers in full shock armor, staged on the perimeter, their guns aimed and ready for “containment” as soon as the target surfaced.
I saw the one on point freeze, rifle up, visor glinting, and then blank.
Like a bad edit. The air where they’d been filled in with dust and light and the suggestion of regret.
The other four went the same way, one by one, some mid-step, one mid-laugh.
None of them made it to the end of their last motion.
None of them left a trace, except for the lingering sense that something in the world was lighter, or maybe just sadder, now that they weren’t there.
Even the memory of them felt like it had been scrubbed. I had to focus, really focus, to remember the shape of the armor, the color of their eyes. The harder I tried, the faster the details bled away. This was the girl Vireleth said I’d consumed all over again. Only this time, no regrets.
A voice broke through the city’s wet static, everywhere at once: a whisper across comms, screens, even the fucking vending machines.
“Nullarch confirmed.”
The words vibrated in the bones. Not just mine, everyone’s, if the sudden hush across the street was any indication.
Survivors in the wreckage, hunched under splintered awnings, looked up as one.
A woman in a blood-streaked supervisor’s vest just started to cry.
A kid, face smeared with dirt and awe, knelt in the rubble and prayed to whatever was loudest.
Another pulse. The air shimmered, and then, stitched into every shadow, a second announcement:
“Trivane awakens.”
Dax squeezed my shoulder, tight enough to bring me back to the body. “You hear that?” he whispered.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
There was no time to process, because the world was already shattering again.
It wasn’t like the first time, the city-destroying precision of a coordinated strike.
This was messier, more personal. The sky overhead split, not literally, but in the way that makes you wonder if you ever understood “sky” to begin with.
The three suns of Pelago, all gassed-out, overworked, and underloved, dipped in unison, their light folding back on itself.
In the new shadow, something else arrived.
Something vast enough to bend attention, hungry enough to make the air taste wrong.
Have you ever looked at a cathedral and felt a twinge of horror at how much of the building exists to make you feel small?
Vireleth was that, multiplied by every failed religious metaphor I’d ever read.
She didn’t descend, didn’t land, didn’t even seem to take up space so much as convince space to want her more than anything else.
Her hull, if you could call it that, was a shifting silhouette, sometimes all angles, bristling with weapons that couldn’t possibly fit in three dimensions, sometimes a smooth, organic spire that looked like it could worship itself without help.
To the people on the street, she must have looked like a god, or a threat, or both at once.
To me, she looked like the answer to a question I’d never dared to ask.
The mythship hovered over the city, not casting a shadow so much as erasing all others. The sensors in the drones, the targeting cameras on the city’s defense array, all turned to face her, but their data feeds just returned static and an error code: INSUFFICIENT MYTHIC BANDWIDTH.
Even the streetlights below started to flicker in patterns, some kind of organic Morse Code that made my teeth itch.
For a long minute, the world held its breath.
Then, with a silence so total it hurt, Vireleth spoke.
Not aloud. Not in any language that made sense. But in the marrow, in the pulse between each heartbeat.
“Nullarch Confirmed. Trivane Awakens.”
This time, it wasn’t an echo. It was a command.
I felt my knees give out, but Dax caught me before I went down. His eyes were wide, unblinking.
“Is that…” he started, but didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
Above us, Vireleth shuddered. The hull twisted, reshaping itself into a new configuration: a crown, a blade, a heart, and then back to something less literal but infinitely more menacing.
Her presence radiated out, covering the city, the moon, maybe the planet, in a blanket of resonance so thick you could taste it in the back of your mouth.
A flash. A single, blinding moment where every window in the city reflected her mythic silhouette, even ones that had been shattered in the blast. The light was cold, but it left a heat behind, a memory of warmth, maybe, or just a warning.
Somewhere in the ruins, a group of cultists started to chant.
The words were nonsense, just fragments of old Trivane slogans smashed together by time and trauma, but the rhythm was precise, almost militarized.
The air pulsed with it, every syllable syncing to the beat of a doctrine no one fully remembered but everyone still obeyed.
“Mercy through fire! Light through ruin! Order by dissolution!”
Their voices rose, overlapped, some out of tune, some hysterical. I caught more lines, each one more unhinged than the last:
“Ten mythships, ten lost gods, one perfect man!” “Build the myth, become the wound!” “Trivane saves! Trivane unbuilds! Trivane is the shape of the end!”
They weren’t even trying to make sense. Instead, they invoked the aesthetic of belief, drunk on the legend of a man who treated annihilation like a love language and thought shirtless diplomacy counted as governance.
Lioren’s entire doctrine, benevolent obliteration, had been a cosmic joke with a body count.
And still, they chanted. Not because they understood, but because the myth had made understanding irrelevant.
Across the moon, reality pulsed with them, as if trying to remember whether it had survived him. It decided that it had, but survival had forced an adaptation to the taste of collapse.
Vireleth didn’t react, but I did. My skin buzzed, the blue-white glow returning, stronger now.
The veins along my arms, my legs, even my collarbone, all lit up in sync.
I glanced at my reflection in a broken pane of glass, and there it was.
Her silhouette, the mythship’s, superimposed over my own like a second skin.
Like she was already inside me, waiting.
Dax still held me, steady as gravity. He didn’t seem scared; he seemed resigned.
“She’s not orbiting the planet,” I said, the realization slow and heavy.
He blinked. “What, then?”
“She’s orbiting me.”
It sounded insane, but it felt true.
I took a breath, and the air tasted like ozone and unfinished business.
I let go of Dax and stepped forward, out of the shadow of the ruins and into the center of the blast radius. The debris shifted underfoot, like the city was trying to reassemble itself around me. I felt the world stretching, trying to decide if it wanted to reject me or crown me.
Vireleth hung above, patient and predatory, and best of all? Mine.
I raised my left hand, watched the light crawl across my skin.
For a moment, I thought I saw her look back.
“Come and get me,” I said.
And the mythship smiled.
The city was silent, waiting for its new story to begin.
And I, for once, was ready to write it.
Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Apartment Ruins, Pelago-9
Gravity was supposed to be a constant, but no one told that to the ruins of Glimmer Zone.