Page 19 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

I stood where the kitchen used to be, the floor under my bare feet cracked and buckled, but, for the moment, holding together.

Debris hovered in the air, spinning slowly, each chunk caught in its own little private orbit.

Some pieces, like globs of insulation, rebar filigree, and a complete set of family cutlery, cycled around me in perfect circles, as if the world was rehearsing Newtonian physics for a talent show and wanted to impress the judge. Which, apparently, was me.

I should’ve been scared. Or hurt. Or, at the very least, embarrassed by the number of ramen packets exposed by the blast. But I wasn’t.

I was humming. Not metaphorically, the blue-white light that pooled in my veins during the fall still flowed, brighter than ever.

Every cell in my body buzzed like it was hosting an afterparty for trauma.

I flexed my hands, watched the light spill from my palms, and then it fractured against the floating cutlery. I exhaled, and frost bloomed from my lips.

Dax was like all mythic event survivors: dilated pupils, manic grin, shaking hands. He rubbed at his head. His eyes found me and scanned for damage.

“You good?” he croaked, then spat dust.

I nodded. Words were hard. Too many variables were still updating.

He tried to stand, but the space above him bent, making every motion slower than it should’ve been. “You’re doing that, right?” he said, voice light, as if he acknowledged the impossible out loud, it would revert to normal.

I shrugged. “It’s new.”

He grinned. “Looks good on you.”

The joke didn’t land, but I appreciated the effort.

The rest of the block was unrecognizable.

What used to be forty meters of stacked habs and storefronts was now a bowl-shaped void, edged in layers of broken glass and twisted neon.

Fires burned in controlled patterns, never spreading, as if afraid of crossing some invisible perimeter.

Beyond the bowl, the city stretched away, unscarred and oblivious, its grid of lights carrying on like nothing had happened.

Above, Vireleth hovered.

If you’ve never seen a mythship, you’ll have to settle for metaphor: imagine the largest thing you can, then multiply it by the number of regrets you’ve ever had.

Then, multiply that by the square root of everything you wished you’d done differently.

Vireleth was that, but shaped like the promise of a new religion.

Her hull was a contradiction. From one angle, it looked like an obsidian cathedral, buttresses and all, flickering with heat and memory.

From another, it was a lattice of bones and light, both impossibly delicate and utterly unbreakable.

The mythship didn’t just reflect the city; she projected it, casting ghost images of Glimmer Zone in every direction, a hologram overlaid on the wreckage.

Every so often, Vireleth changed her mind about what she wanted to look like, and the sky bent to accommodate her mood.

She dwarfed all three of Pelago-9’s suns.

Not individually. All three.

Which felt excessive, but sure.

The human brain wasn’t made to perceive something that casts shadows across light itself, but mine gave it a shot anyway. I blinked, and every afterimage told a new story: the mythship as a vengeful god, as a guardian, as a monster. All of them were true. None of them were complete.

I felt a warmth in my chest, a pull toward the impossible geometry above. The ache behind my eyes was gone, replaced by a clarity that tasted like static and hope. Have you ever tasted with your eyeballs before? Yeah. Me neither.

I stumbled forward, drawn by the gravity that wasn’t gravity. The debris parted before me, every floating object shifting trajectory, each one as careful as a shy animal. They rotated around me, never touching, but never letting me out of their sight.

Dax watched, face open. “You sure you’re okay?”

I tried to answer, but the words stuck. Instead, I reached out and touched the air in front of me.

The city was silent. No alarms, no shouts, not even the signature Accord sirens. Just the hum of the mythship, and the soft, wet sound of a planet adjusting to the new center of its own orbit.

I turned my gaze upward, squinting at the mythship’s endless hull.

Vireleth wasn’t just present; she was looking back. I could feel it in the way the hairs on my arms rose, the way the light in my veins pulsed in time with the ship’s impossible heart.

For a moment, I wondered if anyone else could feel this. If, in some distant hab, a girl just like me was staring at the sky and knowing, deep in her bones, that everything had changed.

It didn’t matter.

I was here. I was whole. And for the first time, I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

I turned to Dax. He was picking through the wreckage, assembling a toolkit from the scattered remains of our life. His hands shook, but his smile was real.

“Your Mom’s going to be pissed when she sees this,” he said, holding up a singed photo of Velline in a feather boa and nothing else.

I laughed, and the sound was new. Lighter. Brighter.

The gravity under my feet adjusted, like the world wanted to make sure I wouldn’t fall again. In the moment of it all, I felt something shift. A strange sensation felt by organs I didn’t have a name for, but no less beautiful in their mystery.

I’d finally caught up to the story that had been hunting me since the day I was born.

I looked at the mythship one more time, felt the connection buzz, then fade to a low, comforting hum.

The city would rebuild. It always did. But I wasn’t the same, and neither was the world.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith Axis Modulation: Vaelith class Cruiser (ACV Abeyance) bridge

The view from orbit had always been the only real luxury the Accord allowed its officers, and Dyris made a point to use it as a way to not hate herself.

She could stand at the edge of the Abeyance’s bridge, glassy black and sharp as a discipline blade, and look down on the world like a god whose only superpower was the capacity to be disappointed.

Tonight, if you could call it night when the planet below was burning, it wasn’t disappointment she felt. It was envy, tinged with something she refused to name.

Pelago-9 rotated beneath, its battered surface webbed in seared scars and the faint, impossible blue of mythic discharge.

The city of Glimmer Zone was still visible, a pit in the surface, the blast radius defined by a ring of what the Accord’s best sensors had already classified as “active event horizon.” It was, as far as anyone could tell, the first time a Class-0 mythic incident had not ended a world.

She sipped her tea. It was cold, but she preferred it that way.

Around her, the bridge was chaos. The comms officers had given up pretending they were in control, and now just traded rumors about who was already dead and what could possibly survive in the “containment zone.” There were no higher-ups on this deck, not anymore; the ones who mattered had been called into emergency conference two hours ago and never returned.

She relished the silence, even as it bent under the weight of planetary disaster.

The Abeyance had not been designed for war, not even the mythic kind, but Dyris’s family had always been good at making do. She watched as the feed from the city flickered, then cut to black, then flickered again.

“New data,” one of the surviving sensor techs croaked, fingers flying across the console. “It’s… it’s a mythship. We think it’s Vireleth. Manifested in orbit, but not, uh—” He swallowed. “Not the normal way.”

Dyris smiled, just enough to keep her teeth warm. “It never is.”

The tech looked at her, eyes wide. “Ma’am?”

She shook her head. “Ignore me. What’s the projection?”

He swallowed, then checked the numbers. “If it fires, the whole system is gone. But it’s not charging anything. It’s just… hovering.”

Dyris set her tea down and leaned in, letting the glow of the screens wash over her.

The image resolved. There was the city, or what was left of it.

And above, impossibly vast, the mythship Vireleth.

The hull was wrong, shifting, bleeding energy, fractal at every scale, but it was hers, all the same.

The bridge dissolved into whispering, fear, the muffled cries of people who’d seen their own deaths in every simulation. Dyris listened, the sound soothing, and then returned her attention to the planet.

“Ma’am, we’re picking up a new signal. It’s…” The tech hesitated. “It’s a Trivane signature.”

Dyris closed her eyes, just for a second. “Patch it through.”

The screens cut, then flickered back, this time to a projection so sharp it made the world outside look like a child’s drawing.

Lioren.

He was shirtless, of course. He was always shirtless, even in the most official Accord record.

He lounged in a ridiculous chair, legs draped over one arm, the other hand holding a mythglass half-full of something that looked like liquid morning.

His hair was wild, Trivane black with frosted tips, and his eyes were the same impossible blue as the event horizon eating the city below.

He grinned, then lifted the glass in a salute.

“If you’re seeing this, congratulations,” he said, voice carrying over the comms with a warmth that could sterilize a city. “It means someone tried to kill my recursion. Bold. Stupid. Predictable. But I respect the effort.”

The bridge went silent. Even the techs stopped breathing.

Lioren leaned forward. “By now, you’re panicking. The Accord always does. You’re wondering: Is the Closure Protocol active? Will the mythship fire? Am I going to get sucked into a planetary toilet? The answer to all three is: Probably.”

He sipped the drink. “But don’t worry. I’m not here to end the world. I’m here to wake it up.”

A second image appeared, this one of Fern, standing at the center of the blast, wild-eyed and alive. The words flashed in dead-white text beneath: “Nullarch Confirmed. Trivane Awakens.”

Lioren’s projection winked out.

Static danced across the bridge, the echo of a laugh too big for the bandwidth.

Just as the bridge noise started creeping back, another alert flickered onto the main interface. Not a comms request. Not sensor telemetry. Just a single-line system directive, stamped with Vault-level authority no one on this ship could override:

“Mythic Bandwidth Saturation: No Further Actions Permitted.”

Dyris read it twice. Then a third time.

Someone behind her swore. Someone else started crying.

Another alert popped, this one flagged for public distribution across Accord channels. Dyris barely glanced at it, but the headline burned bright:

“Incident Responsibility Determined: Unauthorized Action by Field Commander Halvec Strain (House Grel). Immediate Recall Pending Tribunal.”

Dyris smiled without humor. Of course. Someone had to bleed before the Vaults started noticing.

She didn’t flinch. Just lifted her tea, aimed it toward Lioren’s last transmission, and said, quiet and resigned: “Yeah. That tracks.”

She remembered the archive. The locked room, the old, suppressed feed. The legend: Zevelune, before she broke with the Accord, standing in the council chamber, her arms bare, her voice a hammer.

“If Lioren ever dies properly,” she’d said, “he’ll trigger something catastrophic. Probably smug. Possibly shirtless.”

Dyris had never understood why it made her want to smile, even in the moment of existential terror.

She watched as the city below started to come alive again, survivors picking their way through the debris, new myth weaving itself into every step.

The sensor tech spoke, voice barely a whisper. “What do we do, ma’am?”

Dyris considered, then shrugged. “We watch. And hope there’s something left to report when it’s over.”

The comms station flickered, then resolved. The image: Fern, hair wild, eyes glowing, looking up at the mythship with a calm Dyris recognized immediately.

She’d seen that look before, in the mirror, after a job well done.

On the planet, Fern turned and looked straight at the camera. She mouthed a word, and Dyris, even without sound, could read it.

“Lioren.”

Dyris shook her head, laughed softly, and leaned back into her chair.

Across a burning planet, beneath three stunned suns, the two of them said it in perfect, inevitable unison:

“Fucking Lioren.”

Destiny was always going to be a group project.