Page 31 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Inside Vireleth the Closure, Mid-Transit

I was in the mythship’s rec lounge, slouched on a mesh hammock with my feet propped on the emergency snack bar, when the first feed burst in.

It was a local station, probably pirated from a leftover cult terminal in Glimmer, but the anchor’s face was all real.

She wore a vintage Vaelith blazer, eyes fixed on some off-screen catastrophe, and you could see in her expression the moment everything in the universe failed to make sense.

“It’s true,” she whispered, voice shotgunned by static. “They’re… they’re real.”

The screen cut to shaky footage: a mob of people, not fighting, but queued—lined up like it was a black-market water sale on payday, only instead of buckets, every hand clutched a waxy paper tray.

The trays overflowed with tacos. Real, actual tacos.

Fat with shredded carnitas, dribbling sauce, with fresh limes and diced onions glowing like artifacts under rain-drenched mythlights.

The caption below the feed read: “The Nullarch Delivers. Carnitas Confirmed.”

Next to me, Perc the brewservant let out a low, impressed whistle. “Statistically, this is the most compelling event since the last mythic incident. But with better seasoning.”

I watched in a trance as the feed shifted to a viral split-screen.

On the left: the original carnitas taco, filmed seconds after I’d dropped them into existence.

On the right: a three-hundred-year-old Accord educational video demonstrating how to synthesize protein slabs into “taco-like foodstuffs.” The right side looked like someone had hollowed out a sadness and deep-fried it in confusion.

The left side was already gone, eaten by a woman who licked the grease off her hand and then burst into tears.

I bit my lip, not sure whether to be proud or just profoundly sorry for every alternate universe me who’d tried to pass off soy protein as actual joy.

Within twelve minutes, the tacos hit the moon.

Literally. HoloNet’s next package came from a commercial relay outpost on the far side of Pelago’s largest satellite, where a pair of maintenance techs—possibly still drunk from shift change—had rerouted a supply drone to make a “test run” at the surface.

The drone’s cargo hold opened mid-hover, and two hundred tacos rained down on the observatory’s landing pad.

The techs devoured them with the reverence of true believers, one biting her own hand in disbelief before sobbing “I never believed this day would come” into a backup towel.

By hour two, the memes were already art.

Someone with too much time and a physics engine had rendered the carnitas taco as the central force holding a miniature galaxy together, with lesser satellites, queso, cilantro, and diced radish, caught in orbit around it.

The caption: “THE TACO OF GRAVITY.” There was also a loop of my face, pulled from the aftermath at Glimmer, with the mouth edited to take a fresh bite every time the mythship’s hull lit up behind me.

Every channel, every node, every single slice of the net, all tacos, all the time.

Accord officials tried to launch a “don’t panic, it’s just a snack” campaign, but that only made the hysteria worse.

By dawn, half the world’s news channels had broken their protocol and gone live, just to replay the moment of cosmic snack liberation.

The highlight reel:

- At 03:47, a veteran anchor for Accord News Network started sobbing on-air, tried to wipe her eyes with a taco, and accidentally revived her ratings by 900%.

- At 04:02, a scholar from the Accord’s Cultural Conservation Office fainted mid-lecture after seeing the carnitas tacos flash on her monitor. The teaching feed cut out, but the last thing she said, “we thought the taste was extinct,” became the top meme slogan within seventeen minutes.

- By 04:18, a self-proclaimed “Earth culinary historian” named Willex, broadcasting from the New London archipelago of Pelago-3, witnessed the first shipment of tacos arrive via black market courier.

He took one bite and exploded. Not figuratively.

Biologically, right there on camera. His co-host swept up the remains and tried to sell them as “relics of true flavor.”

They were calling it The Feast of Return.

Within a day, the religion started.

It began as a joke. Accord youth in the lower quadrants staged impromptu “Taco Vigils,” dressing in blue-and-white, lighting citronella candles, and reciting lines from the original taco transmission.

But the memes outpaced the skepticism. Someone turned my face into a vectorized icon, slapped it onto a halo of tortilla, and called it “The Nullarch of Nachos.” In less than a week, there were ten thousand shrines, and a minor planetary governor in the Deep Fringe had already submitted a formal prayer request to the mythship for “eternal salsa.”

The art came next.

First, holo-graffiti in the streets: my likeness, dripping with grease and starlight, tacos spinning in the background like sacred geometry.

Then, the viral installations: a self-replicating vending machine that dispensed random taco flavors every time someone said “thank you,” and a monument built on the shell of an old war memorial, now rededicated to “the shared myth of honest hunger.”

What got me was the auction.

Nobles, actual, Accord-certified nobles, offered asteroid rights, rare minerals, even entire gene lineages in exchange for a single, authenticated taco.

The prices climbed so fast that even the net’s auto-mods couldn’t keep up.

At least one mid-tier baron threatened to invade a neighbor’s moon if he couldn’t have a taco by the end of the week.

I watched all of this from the mythship’s lounge, still numb from the journey, barely able to process the idea that the galaxy was literally tearing itself apart for a food I hadn’t even tasted myself.

I’d spent my whole life eating the offcuts, the ration paste, the things so bland they erased your memory of ever wanting better.

I’d never even seen real carnitas until I’d conjured them out of myth and trauma.

Across the lounge, Velline sat with her feet propped on the rail, eyes on the HoloNet, smirking.

“So, let me get this straight,” she said, gesturing at the screen, “You destabilized five economies, started two new religions, and permanently destroyed the Accord’s ‘synthetic food pride’ initiative because you—” she checked her notes, “—were craving a taco?”

I shrugged, cheeks hot. “It wasn’t on purpose.”

Velline’s grin was sharp enough to cut me. “Sweetie, that’s taste-based class warfare in reverse. You brought flavor to the masses.”

On screen, the viral feed now showed a crowd of children, real, dirty-faced kids, sitting in a circle and passing tacos around like they were sharing air.

They laughed so hard they almost choked.

Their parents stood back, not trying to intervene, just watching and smiling like the world might be okay, if only for the time it took to finish a meal.

I glanced at the snack bar on the counter. The mythship had restocked it, and there, front and center, were six perfect carnitas tacos. Not glowing, not floating, just there.

I hadn’t touched them. I didn’t even reach.

Velline caught me staring, then leaned over and poked my shoulder. “You gonna eat one, or are you waiting for a miracle?”

I looked at her, then at the tacos, then at my own hand. I didn’t know how to answer.

On the HoloNet, the anchor was still crying, her mascara running down her cheeks in blue rivers.

Velline let the silence stretch, then said, “You ever gonna get used to being the disaster everyone wanted?”

I snorted, wiped my nose. “Not a chance.”

Velline grinned again. “Good. Wouldn’t want you to stop now.”

She slid a taco toward me. “For what it’s worth? You deserve it more than anyone.”

I took the taco, felt its weight. It was warm, and smelled like hope.

I raised it in a mock toast.

“To the Nullarch of Nachos,” Velline said, raising an imaginary glass.

“To taste-based revolution,” I replied, and took a bite.

It was everything the memes had promised.

And then, finally, I understood.

I hadn’t broken the universe.

I’d just made it hungry enough to want more.

Oops.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith Axis Alignment: Inside Vireleth the Closure, Real Space above Eventide.

If Eventide had a sense of drama, it waited until we were within atmospheric threshold before deciding to lose its collective shit.

The approach was supposed to be a non-event: standard orbital insertion, a single polite ping to the planetary port authority, and then six hours of security interviews while the Accord confirmed that none of us planned to deploy weapons, mythic or otherwise.

Instead, at 04:26 GST, Vireleth entered system space, and every comm relay in three light minutes started screaming at once.

It began with an error ping. Then a hailstorm of warning notifications.

By the time I reached the bridge, the display was buried under red overlays and contradictory instructions from at least five separate Accord protocols.

The mythship’s own AI had muted all non-priority signals, but the static bled through, a chorus of panic spliced into every available bandwidth.

I keyed into the ops deck, braced for catastrophe. The lights were dimmed, but every screen glowed urgent. Dax was at the helm, white-knuckling the navigation as the ship’s resonance tried to spin up a defensive geometry around us. He looked at me, jaw set, eyes wide.

“New arrivals,” he said, “and they’re not subtle.”