Page 28 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith Axis Alignment: Blacklight Hall
Blacklight Hall was built to intimidate, but it only ever made me bored.
No, it wasn’t that I was riding a doll; it was just as boring when I was there in person.
The old Accord architects designed it as a war room for extinct gods: blackglass walls ten meters high, ceilings that flickered with orbital fire, a single table so reflective you could check the status of your own nervous breakdown in its surface.
Most visitors described it as “colder than a banshee’s audit,” but the real signature was the silence, the kind engineered by centuries of policy, the hush that said any scream would bounce forever.
Tonight, it was almost a full house.
At the long edge of the table, Accord Chief Consul Serevin, his suit so void-black it made the wall behind him look like a mistake, tapped his finger, once every second, on an AR display.
Each tap released a faint ripple of containment field: a gesture of power so petty it might as well have been a nervous tick.
To his right, the new Director of Mythic Oversight, a woman named Pril, had already deployed her first four minions and was on her third espresso.
The rest of the seating filled in with the predictable: Security, Spin, Legal, half a dozen disposable underlings, and stationed directly opposite me, the proxies of House Vaelith.
I counted five. Three wore flesh; two wore Mythprint, stamped with the fresh shimmer of emergency fabrication. I ranked them based on threat, boredom, and the likelihood of making eye contact with me intentionally.
Kaela Vaelith herself was not here, but her absence pressed into the room like an occupied grave.
Her proxies wore matching lipstick, identical silver rings on their left index fingers.
They never looked at each other. Vaelith code.
I could taste the House’s intent in the air, beneath the artificial chill: a faint sweet note, like ancient fruit candy left to rot in a crypt.
I took my seat last, as per protocol, though I allowed myself a microsecond of satisfaction as the entire table tensed at the sight of my uniform.
The new cut was controversial: I’d had the tailoring done in black-on-black, Accord insignia ghosted so subtly it was only visible to the paranoid.
It looked sharp, but it broadcast a single, unmistakable message: I was not here to negotiate. I was here to finish.
Pril started before the glass had even finished syncing. “Thank you, Former Director Vaelith, for deigning to attend. Your House’s proximity to the Nullarch Incident—”
I cut her off with a smile that said, “try again.” “The Incident had a name and a body,” I said. “Best to start there.”
A shuffle of discomfort around the table. Good. Every careerist in this room had already received Kaela’s last-minute briefing, but no one wanted to speak first.
Serevin obliged. He dropped the mythic containment ripple and let his hand hover. “Fine. Fern Meldin. Host to the most dangerous resonance the Accord has documented since—”
“Since Lioren.” I let my voice go glacial. “That’s what you meant to say.”
“It’s not a compliment,” Serevin said, the words as brittle as his hairline. “We have three planets still recovering from the original. That’s over fifteen hundred years of recovery, for those not keeping track.”
“History repeats,” I replied. “But it doesn’t always get the casting right.”
That drew a tight smile from the lead Vaelith proxy, a woman whose name I didn’t know but who’d trained on Kaela’s old feeds. Her gaze was perfect: flat, silver, depthless, reflecting nothing unless you counted the ghost of every career she’d ever ruined.
She said nothing.
Pril cleared her throat, signaling the shift to “documentation phase.” She had her AI ready and a swarm of sub-legalities queued for release the second anyone in the room suggested doing something that hadn’t already been reviewed and sanitized.
“We’re here because the Nullarch presents an unprecedented threat vector,” Pril recited. “Containment is unfeasible. Neutralization—”
“Is a euphemism,” I said. “Try again.”
She glared. “We’ve run seven models, all suggest catastrophic recursion within three cycles if the Nullarch is allowed to propagate uncontrolled. The meme event is already past threshold in nine jurisdictions. Accord response protocol mandates—”
“Kill it,” I said, relishing the silence that followed. “You want to kill it. Her.”
Pril took a measured breath. “With respect, Director, no one in this room wants to kill anyone. But precedent—”
“Precedent is obsolete,” I said. I let the words roll out, then leaned in just enough to catch the whole table’s reflection in the blackglass.
“Let’s not waste time. You’ve all read the Vaelith brief.
You’ve all seen the incident footage. She’s not a weapon.
She’s the canary in your containment mine.
And if you push her, she’ll break the shaft and bury you with it. ”
Serevin made a noise that was supposed to be a laugh but came out like a power fluctuation. “So you’re suggesting what, exactly? Release her? Let the recursion run until it wipes out the last of the posthuman genome?”
At the far end, Legal muttered something about “liability,” but no one cared.
I kept my eyes on Serevin. “I’m suggesting,” I said, “that if you make an enemy of her, you’ll get a war. If you make her an asset—”
“You think she can be managed,” Pril sneered.
“I know she can’t be erased,” I countered.
The room paused. In that pause, a thousand years of mythic bureaucracy tried to rewrite itself and failed. Someone, probably one of the underlings, shifted in their chair and set off a chain reaction of micro-fidgets.
I let the silence breathe. Let them stew. Then, just loud enough to cut through their manufactured calm, I added, “Clearly, none of you have ever stood in the shadow of Vireleth the Closure.”
It landed like an atomic bomb. The name alone made the lights dim, and the black table manifested, for a fraction of a moment, the observing eye of the mythship. It had heard me—and was listening.
Audible gulps echoed in the dark room.
“Vireleth does not tolerate amateurs, does not give second chances, and her loyalty to Fern Meldin is absolute. Make an enemy of Fern, and the Accord dies with a whimper.”
Serevin didn’t speak. He looked at me, really looked, and then gave the slightest nod. Not deference, not approval, just recognition. The kind of nod a man would give to the storm he can’t stop but just might survive, if he moves quickly enough.
He turned to the Vaelith proxy. “Your House created this mess. What does Kaela propose?”
The proxy smiled, slow and wide. “We trust the Former-Director’s judgment.”
Pril bristled. “So, you’re abdicating?”
“Delegating,” the proxy corrected, her voice so serene it could have doubled as a poison gas.
“The Nullarch will undergo supervised Resonance Attunement at the Eventide Athenaeum. Six months. Instructors of Accord’s choosing, but oversight by House Vaelith.
No remote weapons, no direct surveillance.
She learns to control herself, or you get your war. ”
Pril almost choked on her espresso. “That’s not protocol—”
“It’s precedent,” I said. “Trivane’s mythic charter.
Section Four, clause one-six. In cases where a mythic recursion exceeds three-sigma containment, protocol yields to House arbitration.
” I let the memory of every pain-in-the-ass brief I’d ever read fuel the following words. “Your admin signed it.”
Serevin checked with Legal. The lawyer nodded, pale and sweating.
For a minute, I could almost see the machinery of the Accord grinding to a halt, then reversing, then rerouting power.
No one had expected us to invoke mythic charter.
No one had ever needed to. But Kaela had left the loophole open, waiting, for centuries.
All I had to do was drive the conversation into it.
Serevin folded his hands. “If the Nullarch refuses?”
“She won’t,” I said.
“And if she does?” Pril asked, barely able to disguise the eagerness.
“Then you have your precedent for dissolution,” I replied. “But you’d better be ready to pay the premium.”
Silence again. The kind that buries things.
The Vaelith proxy broke it, with the precision of a surgeon’s suture.
“It is the opinion of House Vaelith that six months under the Eventide Athenaeum will allow the Nullarch to stabilize, or else demonstrate the futility of further effort. If she fails, we guarantee House intervention, up to and including final solution.”
Serevin, recognizing a win that didn’t cost him anything, nodded. “Done. Let the record show consensus.”
Pril scowled. She was already drafting her press release. “I want it clear that this is not an Accord operation.”
“That’s the point,” I said.
The underlings, released from duty, started packing up. Most avoided looking at me. A few, braver or more desperate, shot daggers in my direction as they left.
The Vaelith proxies lingered. The lead caught my gaze, held it. For a split second, I thought she might say something personal, but she just offered a micro-nod: not deference, not even respect, but an acknowledgement that the story wasn’t over. It would never be over.
At the edge of the room, a mythkeeper I hadn’t noticed before was watching.
She was old. Not in years, but in cycles—her bones radiated the kind of weary contempt that only comes from outliving five different versions of the same bureaucracy.
Her robes were raw, threadbare, the sigils burned half-off by some ancient conflict that no one remembered but everyone obeyed.
Her eyes, when they met mine, were full of cold awe.
I stared back, unflinching.
The mythkeeper didn’t bow. She didn’t need to.
She just stepped aside, clearing my way out, as if she’d always known I would walk through.