Page 34 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Six hours until Eventide drop, and I should have been prepping, studying, or at least pretending to be the future of mythic containment.

Instead, I was humming the theme to some ancient anime about cyborgs who fall in love with their own mecha, chewing on industrial-grade fried dough, and leaving a trail of powdered sugar and skin-oil smears across the mythship’s high-polish surfaces.

Every wall panel I passed blinked with a blue-white afterglow, my signature, now.

Nothing so subtle as a shadow; just cosmic-level vandalism.

At the first junction, I caught my reflection in a security glass.

It was an accident. The cameras always followed me, Vireleth had a sick sense of humor, and she loved to watch me fail at hygiene, but this time the image was so clear it stopped me.

I looked like I’d lost a bet with three gremlins and a discount rave.

My hair was full Medusa, static-curling around my face in knotted halos, and my eyes were so bright they looked backlit.

The skin under my nails was black with engine grime.

My shirt hung twisted, taco stains on the hem, and my sleep shorts had slipped far enough down one hip to expose the deep scar from the time I fell off an engine and landed on my own goddamned pride.

“Disaster goblin,” I said, grinning at myself. Then, quieter, “Fuck, I can’t go like this.”

For most of my life, that sentence would’ve ended with “so I won’t.

” I’d just show up as-is, own the mess, let people underestimate me until I ate their heart for breakfast. But now, suddenly, the way I looked wasn’t a joke anymore.

I had a meeting tomorrow. I had a name, again.

Worse, I had to stand next to Dyris, my perfect ice queen in a tailored uniform, bones like the blueprints for a better species, the kind of woman planets took seriously on sight.

And I? I looked like the sideshow she forgot to leash.

Worse still? She was mine, and I wasn’t about to let the galaxy think she’d claimed me out of pity, on a dare, or because she had to.

It wasn’t shame, exactly. More like the slow, rising horror that comes from realizing people are actually going to remember you. That you might be the story, not just the punchline.

So I did what I always did when the world got too sharp: I found my mother.

Velline’s quarters were at the edge of the main axis, in what had once been a VIP suite but was now less a room than a living moodboard.

She’d spent years terrorizing Accord cargo decks with her designs, and here she had finally achieved the singularity: fabric, color, chaos, and ego woven into a palace of self-expression that never, ever slept.

I didn’t knock. The door recognized my pulse and opened on the first try, spitting me into a vortex of activewear, partywear, and three different strands of what Velline called “revolutionary genderfuck.” The air was humid with the scent of something warm and floral, layered over the ozone tang of distant machinery.

I could taste last week’s lavender solvent and this morning’s rosewater primer in the back of my throat.

The wall racks rotated slowly, haunted by drifts of lace and sequins and the occasional coat made from what looked like actual feathers.

At the center of the storm, Velline stood in combat with herself and a dress that would have killed a weaker woman.

It was two-thirds ballgown, one-third exoskeleton: layers of silk threaded with carbon mesh, sleeves shot through with electric blue piping, bodice laced so tight it should have left a bruise on the wall.

She wore it like she wore everything, with the full conviction that if the galaxy didn’t like it, the galaxy could die mad about it.

She’d kicked off one shoe and balanced on her bare heel, hands elbow-deep in the dress’s undercarriage, face set in a frown that could have shamed the designers of hell. She didn’t notice me at first. Or, if she did, she made me wait.

“Mom,” I said, hoarse. “I have an emergency.”

No answer. She was orchestrating a fight between two rival fabrics, and it looked like violence was imminent.

I tried again. “I look like a paint rat that lost a custody battle with a glitter bomb. I have six hours to fix it, or everyone at Eventide is going to know what rock I crawled out from.”

Velline’s head snapped up, dark eyes focusing on me like twin lasers set to “shred.” For a full second, she just stared, lips pursed. Then, suddenly, she went soft around the edges, like a cake that had failed to set, but in a way you didn’t mind eating anyway.

“Oh, darling,” she said, breathless with delight, “you’ve committed at least three fashion crimes just getting to this door. Honestly? I’m impressed you made it this far.”

She flicked her fingers, and the fabric she’d been battling slithered back into place. The dress reformed itself, defaulting to “magnificent” out of spite.

I flopped onto her fainting couch. Velline kept three, for “aesthetics and emergencies,” and sprawled full-body, limbs splayed like I was the final casualty of a soft revolution. My churro, half-eaten, left a trail of cinnamon dust on the black velvet.

“Make me beautiful,” I mumbled, not looking up. “Or at least dangerous enough to fake it.”

She moved to the sideboard and poured herself a shot of something green, which she downed in a single, professional motion. Then she leaned against the counter, arms crossed.

“You never care,” she said, voice low and careful.

I shrugged, tried to chew, failed to swallow. “I care now.”

She waited, gaze pinning me to the upholstery.

I made a face. “Tomorrow I have to stand next to Dyris. There’s going to be Accord people, Vaelith people, maybe even some mythic. If I show up like this, they’ll think I’m just some cosmic accident that tripped into power. I want them to look at me and think… of course it’s her.”

That last bit hurt to say, so I said it fast, hoping she’d be too distracted to catch the crack in my voice.

She wasn’t.

For a minute, Velline didn’t move. Then she straightened, set her empty glass aside, and pointed at me like I’d just admitted to a major crime.

“Up,” she commanded. “On your feet. Arms out.”

I obeyed. Not because I was afraid of her, though I was, but because some part of me wanted to be saved. Or, at least, reconfigured.

The dressing room adjusted instantly. Racks rotated.

Spotlights dimmed, then reoriented to flatter my bone structure and hide the caffeine hives on my neck.

A drone emerged from the ceiling with a tray of hair clips and microinjectors.

The floor beneath me went cold, then warm, then leveled to absolute zero-G so I couldn’t escape if I wanted to.

Velline approached, her steps exact and deliberate, the way she always moved before a major reveal.

She circled me once, twice, the corners of her mouth twitching.

That wasn’t a critique on her face, but something dangerously close to delight.

For the first time, I realized that this wasn’t punishment.

It was a pleasure. She’d waited years for this, 19 of them, for her daughter to finally be willing to be seen.

“You’ve never been easy to dress,” she said. “Last time I tried, you burned off your eyebrows trying to ‘add drama.’”

I shrugged again, not trusting myself to speak.

She reached for my face, thumb gentle on my jaw. “Stay still. I have an idea.”

For the next half hour, I let her work. I let her brush and twist my hair, pin it into a crown of spikes and loose curls.

I let her scrub the grime off my nails and repaint them, each a different shade of galactic black.

I let her strip me down to skin and refit every inch with fabric she’d engineered for people with my metabolism, my moods.

She didn’t speak unless she had to, and when she did, it was all technical jargon—stitch counts, color temperatures, “cheekbone narrative.” Every touch was exact.

She was an artist, and I was her worst canvas.

At some point, the churro vanished. At some point, my old clothes did, too.

“Try this,” Velline said, her tone uncharacteristically gentle, as she swept a garment toward me with the gravity of someone handing over an heirloom sword.

It shimmered in her hands: not just blue, but midnight alive and hissing, a furious liquid neon that moved like it resented being woven into textile.

It felt, impossibly, predatory, as if putting it on would make my blood run faster or swap my bones out for knives.

She didn’t give me a chance to hesitate.

Within seconds she’d spun me around and yanked the suit up my body, the lining cool against my skin, then hot, then cool again, like it was arguing with itself about how best to fit me.

The fabric articulated at every joint and molded to my shape as if taking notes.

She zipped me in. An electric jolt ran down my spine as the collar sealed tight at my throat.

Not choking, but close enough that I could taste adrenaline.

Next: the belt. She cinched it at the waist so expertly that I felt every vertebra click into alignment.

“Hold still,” she ordered, threading the clasp through with unconscious violence, her hands more confident than any doctor or assassin I’d ever met.

I felt a pop of pressure at my ribs and gasped.

Velline only smiled, a razor-thin line of satisfaction, and patted the buckle once, like burping a baby.

“Shoes.” She said it like a summons and tossed a pair at my feet without looking: black, high-top, mythtech soles iridescent with weird tech that had never been legal anywhere I’d lived.

They stuck to the floor in a way that made you doubt your own mass.

The moment I kicked them on, they gripped my heels, fusing with the suit and then pulsing, just once, like they were taking my measure.

I gained two centimeters of height and reached a kind of equilibrium I’d never had before; every muscle felt both lighter and ready for mutiny.

Velline stepped back to take inventory. She cocked her head, one eyebrow arched high enough that it nearly merged with her hairline, a look she reserved for moments when she wanted you to know she’d played chess against herself and won in both directions.

She paced around me once. Twice. Her face was unreadable except for a glint in her eye that told me something significant was happening here, something I probably wouldn’t appreciate until much later.

“Turn,” she commanded.

I rotated awkwardly, already missing the protective slouch of my old clothes but also addicted to the new suit’s aggression. My reflection stared back from three mirrored panels: one head-on, two slightly behind each shoulder like future versions of myself judging every choice I was about to make.

I looked… not pretty, that had never been on the menu, but dangerous in a way that might trick people into thinking I was untouchable if they didn’t know better.

The suit gave me extra inches; beneath it, my frame looked deliberate rather than accidental, like every flaw had been designed for function or intimidation or both.

My hair, which Velline had sculpted into an asymmetrical crown of spikes softened by loose curls, caught the mirror’s light and refracted it back over both cheeks, tinting them with undertones of amethyst and ultraviolet rage.

The effect: messy apocalypse princess meets outlaw tech priestess meets “I will eat your soul for lunch if you get crumbs on this upholstery.” If that didn’t scream “I’m the fucking Nullarch”, then I’d clearly misunderstood the assignment.

(After all, I still didn’t actually know what a Nullarch was.)

A slow grin split across my face against my will.

But then, it hit me all at once, the horror behind the camouflage: What if this wasn’t armor?

What if everyone could see right through it?

The closer I got to gorgeous or powerful or even presentable, the more certain I became that someone would rip it away mid-sentence and expose me for what I actually was: panic on legs, fraud powered by stolen mythic current.

I flexed my fingers reflexively, their new polish catching moonlight from somewhere even in this windowless den, and said: “What if I can’t live up to this?”

It came out too honest; the question landed heavily between us.

Velline’s mouth softened at the edges. She didn’t move immediately; she let silence do its job first, filling up all available space so there’d be room for what mattered next.

Then she crossed behind me in two strides and set her hands on my shoulders, palms warm and solid through all the synthetic bravado of the suit. Her touch was grounding, a counterpoint to everything else staged for performance in this room.

She squeezed just enough to be sure I was listening. Then, she leaned forward so our eyes met in the mirror’s center panel, me staring back with fear disguised as defiance; her looking so proud it almost hurt.

“Darling,” she said quietly but with an intensity that made it impossible not to believe her, even when you knew better, “you already did.”

I swallowed, my throat thick.

She met my eyes in the mirror, then smirked. “Also, if anyone tries to dress-code you, just ask if their suit can double as a trauma patch. This will heal you if someone tries to bleed you on the way in. House Vaelith might be old, but I’m a Meldin.”

I laughed. A real one, loud and ugly and full of all the things I’d been too scared to say. It bounced off the walls and made the smart fabric in my suit ripple, like the sound could reach right into my bones and fix the fractures.

I wanted to say thank you, but my mouth couldn’t find the shape. So instead, I just stood there, letting the silence stretch, letting myself believe that maybe I was inevitable, for at least one hour.

Velline knelt to tie my shoes because she never believed in false pride. Then she looked up, winked, and said, “Go break the world, Fern. But do it beautifully.”

I walked out, the suit adjusting with every step, the lights behind me strobing in applause.

For the first time in forever, I wanted to be seen.

And, gods help the world, I was ready.