Page 2 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
I stood, dragging the sweat-soaked sheets with me.
The gold-lit floor bent under my weight, softer than it looked.
The door to the hallway stood open now, but the world beyond it made no sense.
Corridors twisted at angles I couldn’t name.
Stairs looped up and down at the same time.
Gravity yanked sideways, up, everywhere except forward.
I ran anyway. My feet slapped the soft floor. The walls flexed as I passed, as if the ship was trying to hold me in or push me out, I couldn’t tell which. The voice kept pace, echoing off every surface, relentless.
“Let me out!” I screamed, fingers clawing at the first door I could reach. The handle wasn’t there, then it was, then it wasn’t again.
“You don’t belong out there,” said Vireleth, but this time it sounded almost afraid. “You’ll burn up. Or worse.”
“I don’t care!” I yelled, tearing the sheet into a makeshift robe and wrapping it around myself. “I want out! I want to go home!”
The ship groaned. The lights stuttered. The door in front of me bent at the middle, forming an archway that led into a tunnel of pure, searing white.
I stepped through. The next room was a cathedral, only there were no pews, no altar, just endless rows of ancient machines and ghost-lit icons.
The air here felt old. Old Earth old. Recycled so many times it remembered every set of lungs it’d ever invaded.
“Go home, then,” Vireleth said, so soft I almost missed it.
The floor fell away.
Air vanished.
And I plummeted, out of the cathedral, out of the ship, out of the myth that wasn’t supposed to be mine, in nothing but borrowed air, a blanket, and my own rising scream.
Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Just Outside Gravity’s Guilt Trip above Pelago-9
I didn’t die, which was proof that the universe had a sick sense of humor.
First, there was the airless, endless drop, a body’s worth of gravity yanking me through vacuum and flinging me headlong at the nearest habitable surface.
Then, at the last possible nanosecond, the geometry around me snapped into order, and I found myself wedged into the guts of an emergency reentry pod, limbs numb and vision streaked with pinwheels.
This wasn’t like any escape pod I’d ever seen.
The Accord called them “Dumb Coffins,” half-plastic shells with three hours of air and the ambiance of a used ashtray.
This one was mythtech: black carbon lined the interior like burial cloth, with gold filament twitching under the padding as if it were remembering how to bleed.
The harness wasn’t designed for humans, maybe not even for anything with bones, but the fit didn’t care.
Mythtech didn’t work through the details; it worked by being legendary.
The whole thing hummed with a low, subliminal promise: if you survive, it’s not an accident.
The pod was already screaming. Not with a voice, but with every light, every sensor, every piece of hardware that could get my attention.
The display in front of my face blinked through a thousand status messages per second: DECELERATE.
SHIELD COMPROMISED. ATMOSPHERIC ENTRY IMMINENT.
It took me three tries to focus my eyes, and when I did, the status bar at the top glowed a sickly green: INCIDENT LEVEL 7—CONTAINMENT brEACH.
I laughed, because the only other option was to piss myself.
My hair floated in null-G, a sweaty halo around my face. The pod drifted sideways, momentum fighting the guidance thrusters with every microsecond. A harness tried to cut me in half. I spat blood, mine, probably, and braced myself as the craft hit the atmosphere.
That’s when the voice came back.
“You are not designed for this velocity,” said Vireleth, and it sounded almost fond. “You may experience discomfort. Or liquefaction.”
“Fuck you,” I croaked. “You could have landed me. You could have—”
“You said you wanted out,” the voice replied, already fading. Why did Vireleth sound like a jilted lover with a flair for melodrama? I’d never dated a spaceship before, and certainly not one with trust issues.
I tried to catch my breath, but the pod’s air tasted of burning polymers and fear.
“Fuck, I hate space.”
The pod bucked and screamed as a shockwave tore past us. The hull temperature spiked, glowing orange then white, and the insulation did what insulation always did: it failed with dignity. Heat wrapped around me, pressure spiked, and my vision tunneled to a point of stuttering black and blue.
Somewhere behind the roar, a last echo of Vireleth came through, wet with static and something like regret: “You never hated space when it moaned back.”
…
Nope. I absolutely was not thinking about that. If I survived this, I was going to need (more) therapy.
Turns out, terminal velocity feels a lot like regret, and for a second, I blacked out.
When I came back, the display had gone red, cycling one message: brACE FOR IMPACT.
brACE FOR IMPACT. brACE FOR IMPACT. The only thing bracing was the certainty that I was about to become a meme, if there was anyone left alive on Pelago-9 to watch the feed.
I looked down, and the moon loomed huge and ugly, a rusted smear wrapped around a gas giant so obscene it made the whole horizon look diseased. Clouds roiled in permanent sunset. Below, the lights of the Glimmer Zone flickered like they were already mourning me.
The ground got close, fast.
I jammed my hands against the crash bars and screamed, “I hate space!” but the pod drowned me out with a banshee wail and a burst of liquid foam that sealed my mouth shut.
The final seconds stretched out. There’s a myth that time slows down before you die, and it’s true, but only if you’re not a coward. I was a coward, but not in the ways that mattered, so the seconds went like this:
One. The pod hit the first layer of the defense grid and shed half its mass in a spray of decoys. The Accord satellites woke up, tracked my descent, and sent up a storm of antiorbital flak, none of which landed because the pod was too agile for them.
Two. Every display in the pod’s tiny cockpit flashed “CONTAINMENT PRIORITY” and “DISSEMINATION FAILSAFE ARMED.”
Three. I remembered the girl I’d kissed, the scream, the black hole, and the promise I never meant to keep. I wondered if her ghost was watching. I wondered if she’d even remembered my name, and why I couldn’t recall hers? Her taste vanished from my lips the moment I thought about it.
Four. I hit the surface.
For a full minute, I didn’t know if I was alive, dead, or somewhere worse. My ears rang. My head throbbed. I hung upside-down, jammed into a foam cocoon that tasted like old socks. I tried to move and failed, then pushed harder, and the harness gave way with a snap.
I tumbled out of the pod into a world that was too bright, too loud, and entirely wrong.
The air tasted like recycled metal and burned ozone.
I blinked the glare away and saw a crater behind me, already half-full of emergency bots scratching at the pod like they were fighting over scraps.
The city I’d been aimed at squatted on the horizon, a maze of stacked prefab habs and repair yards, nothing like the gold-lit cathedral I’d just fallen from.
I staggered forward, legs wobbly, gravity still fighting to decide whose side it was on.
I spat foam, then bile, and cursed at the sky, only to choke on more foam.
But you know what? Fuck it. I had a blanket, at least. Some people wake up hungover.
I fall out of the fucking sky. We all have our coping mechanisms.
Somewhere high above, I felt a shiver not in my body, but in the world itself, like someone important had just woken up and turned their attention straight at me.
Maybe it was paranoia. Or it was just the way a mythic warship says “I miss you” from low orbit.
Dad always joked I was going to wreck the universe one of these days. With a ship like Vireleth, I could.
Either way, I started walking.
Thread Modulation: House Trivane AI Axis Alignment: Galactic Core, Milky Way Galaxy
A hundred thousand light-years away, in the locked core of the Aeternus Keep, something older than sleep woke up for the first time in centuries.
The Trivane Vault was not a place you entered.
It was a place you got exiled to when your entire culture decided the best way to save itself was to bury its myths and pray nothing ever dug them up.
The Vault’s AI, patched together from ancient code and newer, less stable modules, maintained the ultimate failsafe.
In the dark, the Vault’s sensors flickered to life. The first thing it did was run diagnostics. The second thing it did was try to scream. The third thing it did, which took the longest, was remember.
Inside the Vault, the ancient AI replayed the last recorded moment of its prime directive: the Nullarch designation had been reinitialized. Confirmation received. Attestation by Vireleth the Closure.
The AI paused, shivering in its digital bones. Nullarch. The name was legendary. The name was a promise. The name meant that nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever be the same again.
It reached out, contacting every system connected to the Trivane intranet, and the message spread:
The Nullarch has returned. Nullarch is coming home. Wake Up.
The rest of the Vault’s hierarchy went wild.
Emergency protocols cascaded down centuries of chain-of-command, waking up modules that hadn’t seen daylight since Lioren Trivane died to save the universe.
The AI began preparing the only welcome it had ever been allowed to give: absolute, unconditional loyalty.
Thread Modulation: Mal Axis Alignment: Glimmer Zone, Pelago-9.