Page 25 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

“I never bet against inevitability,” Kaela said softly.

“I simply pre-register outcomes and invoice accordingly.” She toyed with her glass again, perfectly still otherwise, and let her tongue flick against one canine as if savoring future profits from my statistical demise.

“Vireleth answers your call directly these days? That’s new.

” A faint note of admiration crept into her monotone; only someone as old as Kaela Vaelith could recognize mythic escalation for what it truly was: inevitability wearing new clothes.

I nodded once: yes, Vireleth showed up uninvited now; yes, I heard Lioren’s echo when nobody else did; yes, I’d made Dyris scream so loud last night that even ghosts outside this spacetime probably filed complaints with Management.

Of course, Kaela Vaelith didn’t fear me. She feared what would come after me. My ship. My echo. The singularity that followed in my wake. But most of all, the fact that a new myth always replaced an old myth. Sometimes, they ate it alive.

“You want an alliance,” I guessed aloud because guessing wrong with House Vaelith wasn’t an option unless you really liked being disassembled into constituent atoms for research purposes.

Kaela didn’t blink.

“If you destabilize,” she said matter-of-factly, “the whole Core could fall.” She might as well have been discussing galactic hydrology or fiscal policy. “I have no desire to be trapped on the wrong side of a singularity event.” A pause. Then: “Literal or otherwise.”

The sincerity in her boredom was its own threat: this was nothing personal; this was self-preservation scaled up until entire polities became footnotes in someone else’s survival plan.

I looked at her carefully now, the way someone might study an ancient mosaic before deciding which piece to pry loose first. Kaela wore actual pearls at her throat, a minor flex given how few real oysters survived atmospheric collapse, but it wasn’t vanity; it was symbolism.

Pearls formed by infection. By irritation.

By centuries of turning discomfort into beauty and meaning, until nobody remembered how sharp pain felt anymore.

Her eyeliner shimmered subtly even through holo artifacting, a synthetic blend formulated for zero-g environments so tears couldn’t ruin your look during diplomatic breakdowns or attempted coups.

Everything about Kaela screamed preparedness but never contentment; predators older than civilization didn’t know satisfaction, they only knew endurance.

This woman had fucked, killed, and out-negotiated every living myth in two empires and still woke up every morning hungry for whatever hadn’t already been conquered or consumed by House Vaelith itself.

And here I was, wrapped like fresh meat in nothing but static and last night’s sweat, pretending dignity while dripping mythic radiation across enemy lines just by breathing too loud on conference call audio.

What did I actually want?

It felt like a trick question, the kind you get on diagnostic intake forms or at the end of a hellish first interview, when you’re supposed to answer with something aspirational but still pathetic enough to prove you haven’t outgrown your leash.

Except Kaela Vaelith wasn’t HR. She was HR’s evolutionary endpoint: the apex predator of sentimentality, trained since conception to weaponize everything you loved against everything you feared.

But I was so tired of being clever, I could’ve screamed.

So, I let the question eat me alive, just for a second. I let myself be honest. No caveats, no irony shields, nothing left to lawyer after the fact. And then I said it aloud:

“I only want one thing,” I said softly.

Kaela cocked an eyebrow, so sharply, so precisely, it must have been blueprinted in her genome and then hand-sculpted by five generations of etiquette tutors.

The micro-expression that followed was not predatory in the usual animal sense; more like an archaeologist’s delight as they discover a fossilized heart where there should have only been blood and teeth.

“Dyris?” she guessed.

My pulse hammered hard enough to crack the cylinders in my throat.

Maybe Kaela saw it, the way my skin betrayed me, or maybe she just recognized her target’s favorite wound from centuries of vivisection.

Either way, she didn’t blink. Didn’t even smile.

Just let the hypothesis hang there, like a planet too close to its sun.

“She’s part of it,” I conceded, but each word had to be dragged up from the part of my soul that had never seen sunlight or good intentions. “But that’s not all.”

Kaela tilted her head, waiting for the rest with a patience that vibrated at quantum zero; perfectly still, but on the verge of something catastrophic if even one atom shifted.

I tried to find a way around the truth, but all the escape routes were marked with hazard tape and tripwires left by girls smarter than I was. So instead, I told her exactly what she’d use against me later:

“I already have her.” It was stupid, arrogant, and true.

There, now, Kaela had leverage she didn’t even have to steal. She let herself lean forward by another micron (three centimeters would’ve been vulgar) and sipped from her glass again as if every molecule was logging data for later consumption.

A silence unfolded between us that lasted longer than most wars.

On my end, it stretched out slow and thin, like old honey or burnt sugar, from bedrail to ceiling and back again, looping through my brainstem until I could practically hear Dyris’s voice calling me an idiot for giving away key strategic assets this early in negotiations.

On Kaela’s side, nothing moved except maybe the invisible hands stacking every word into a razor-wire snare for later retrieval. She watched me with professional detachment and personal delight; both emotions equally hazardous to anything resembling hope on my part.

But what neither of us said, what never made it across the light-years between us, was that we both knew how myth worked. You couldn’t hide your longing without feeding it energy; you couldn’t kill hunger without giving it a name.

So, we just stared at each other across that digital chasm and let our secrets expand in the vacuum until even light would need centuries to bridge them.

Finally: “I want her to stay,” I said.

The line crackled in my own ears, half confession, half curse, and there was nothing mythic about it except how violently ordinary it sounded after all those centuries of people making wishes that ended civilizations.

Kaela’s eyes narrowed again, not in suspicion or contempt but with a sudden focus so sharp it could have bisected electrons for sport. “That’s it? You could be a god,” she said, and somehow made godhood sound like an entry-level position nobody wanted anymore, “and you only want Dyris?”

If she expected me to flinch or backpedal or start monologuing about power fantasies (which was statistically likely given my entire idiom), she did not show disappointment when I simply said: “I don’t need anyone’s help to become a god.”

True as gravity and twice as heavy coming out of my mouth.

Kaela threw her head back and laughed outright, a sound equal parts opera and open grave, and every echo bounced off the smart-glass walls like an accusation with its own cometary tail.

The laugh wasn’t cruel so much as cosmically amused: here we were at the center of three dying mythologies, and all I wanted was for one nightmare girl to keep holding my hand when shit got weird again.

“You know,” Kaela said when her breath returned from whatever hell dimension she stored it in between disasters, “there’s something almost quaint about your kind of ambition.” She swirled her glass once before adding: “Lioren would have hated you.”

“He can eat me,” I replied before thinking much about phrasing regarding my past incarnation, but either way, it was true.

Kaela paused mid-sip, gaze going hard diamond-edged for one lethal heartbeat. “I believe that’s already been arranged.”

Both our faces held steady, hers icy and unyielding; mine presumably broadcasting every shade of embarrassment known to posthuman physiology, but there was a tempo adjustment neither missed: now we were negotiating terms instead of threats.

I watched her watching me, counting down the beats until someone blinked first or until Vireleth crashed the call with another extinction-level protocol. But nothing happened except a kind of mutual acknowledgment settling over us like dust on relics nobody dared move anymore.

At last Kaela nodded once, a gesture so final and deliberate that whole star systems might have pivoted on its axis somewhere far away from here, and said:

“Done. House Vaelith will support your claim, or at least refrain from sabotaging it further.” She allowed herself another smile (fractional this time; more flavor than substance). “Dyris is yours for as long as you can keep her.” Then: “Consider it a dowry.”

I sat up straight enough for my towel to slide dangerously close to public indecency, but didn’t care because right now, dignity was secondary to victory and also because I wanted Kaela Vaelith to remember precisely what she’d just signed off on forever:

“My very own Sexretary,” I murmured experimentally into the holo-pickup, tasting each syllable like forbidden fruit or stolen oxygen after blackout sex behind enemy lines.

Kaela’s lips parted, a hairline fracture, and maybe this time it wasn’t performance at all but genuine shock that someone less than three hundred years old could still surprise her after everything else she’d seen devoured by time.

“Is that a formal title?”

“Depends if you want the job next.”

For the first time, she looked genuinely rattled.

Then she straightened, composed herself, and said, “If you survive, Fern Meldin, you may just outlive the Accord itself.”

I grinned. “Plan to.”

She closed the call, but her afterimage lingered on the glass, refusing to die out.