Page 35 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Aboard Vireleth the Closure
I watched my own cartoon mouth eat stars on infinite repeat.
My hair was too perfect in the edit, my jaw too sharp, the filter-logic making my eyes strobe blue-white as I chomped through the spiral arm.
The caption read: NULLARCH’S LUNCH brEAK.
The comments were split fifty-fifty between worship, thirst, and requests for franchise rights.
I slurped the last of my drink, snapped the glass back onto the bar’s auto-wash, and let my body melt sideways on the sofa.
Vireleth had started routing more and more of its diagnostics through my personal HUD, even though I kept telling it to stop.
Every ten minutes, a new alert. Every hour, a system query for “Emotional Baseline Update.” If I’d had a real therapist, I’d have brained them with the interface pad.
The only thing not pulsing was my wrist comm, which meant Dyris was either deep in Accord paperwork or, more likely, doing pushups to burn off her daily quotient of self-loathing.
The ship’s AI had tried to track her, but I’d set a filter so tight that even my name triggered a security lockdown.
I was, for the first time in three days, deliciously unobserved.
Then the notification hit.
Not a polite ping. Not the subtle shimmer of a HoloNet request. No, this one brute-forced itself into my vision, hijacked the overlays, and splashed a red band across every input channel with the subtlety of a nuclear alarm.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: IDENTITY SYNC COMPLETE.]
[Accord Register Updated.]
[Legal Designation: FERN TRIVANE.]
[Titles: Nullarch. Sovereign Heir of House Trivane. Accord Myth-Class Entity.]
[All previous identifiers archived.]
It took a second for the words to mean anything. They hung there in midair, burning into my retinas, and then my stomach caught up. I froze, body gone heavy, all the fizz and hunger from a minute ago gone to battery acid. The room wobbled, gravity not quite right.
It was the “all previous identifiers archived” that did it. The erasure.
I stared. The letters stayed, crisp and pitiless, in the center of my HUD. There was no “accept” or “dismiss” option. This wasn’t a notification. It was an edict.
My hands shook. I tried to clear the alert; it replicated, every command fizzling out into a cruel little animation of a lock snapping shut.
I tried again, harder. It multiplied, the words stacking atop themselves until the whole view was nothing but my name, my name, my name, until I couldn’t breathe through it.
Then I screamed. Not a rage scream, a terror one, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than the lungs.
I grabbed the nearest glass, hurled it at the wall, watched it shatter into nothing and then auto-heal, watched the bar’s surface flicker as the system rerouted power to “User De-Escalation Protocol.” Even in my breakdown, the ship wouldn’t let me have a single mess.
“What the ever-loving fuck, Vireleth!” I spat, and every syllable pulsed in the system log, echoing in the walls.
The AI’s voice, saccharine, bored, replied from the speakers: “Protocol update complete. Congratulations, Nullarch.”
I kicked the sofa so hard it slid a meter across the deck. “You can’t just rewrite me. That’s not how it works. I’m—” I bit down on the old name, the one the system had just archived, and nearly gagged. There was nothing left to say but the new one.
I collapsed backward, head cradled in my arms, and stared at the endless recursion of my new identity on the glass. There was no pride in it. Not even fear. Just the sick, hollow certainty that I’d lost something I hadn’t realized was still mine.
The doors hissed, and Dyris strode in.
She wore the formal black, hair twisted back so tight you could’ve used it to saw bone, and carried an expression so composed it belonged in a postmortem.
She took in the scene: the shattered glass, the displaced furniture, the wall of system notices, and then me, sprawled on the sofa, knees tucked up to my chest and hands white-knuckled.
Dyris stopped a few meters away. “You’re trending,” she said, voice softer than I expected.
“Fuck off,” I answered, not looking at her. The words were weaker than I wanted. They trembled.
She took a step closer, cautious, like I was a cornered animal instead of a newly minted galactic sovereign. “Vireleth’s diagnostics flagged a biohazard. Are you—”
“Do I look okay to you?” I cut in. “They deleted my whole life and replaced it with a press release.”
She knelt, slow and careful, and put a hand on the edge of the sofa. Her knuckles brushed my ankle, and the touch was so gentle it made my eyes sting. “It was always going to happen,” she said.
I jerked my leg away. “Not like this. Not without—” I didn’t finish the sentence. There was no “me” left to finish with.
Dyris let her hand rest on the upholstery, fingers curled like she was holding the whole galaxy together with that single point of contact. She didn’t argue. She just let the silence fill the room until I couldn’t bear it.
I bolted upright, feet hitting the deck with a slap. “You knew they’d do it, didn’t you? You just stood there and let them rewrite me. I’m not even a real person anymore. I’m a myth in a fucking pantsuit.”
Dyris’s mouth twitched, but not in cruelty, more like she wanted to say something sharp and decided against it.
“You devoured a star,” she said at last. “You made tacos from it. You crashed the HoloNet and sparked three cults before you even got off your moon. You earned the name. This isn’t inheritance. It’s conquest.”
That cut deep, but it wasn’t the insult I wanted. “So, I’m a monster now,” I said.
Dyris shook her head. “Not a monster. A precedent.”
I snorted, wiped my nose with the back of my wrist, and stalked to the wall console.
I hammered at the controls, pulling up system admin, user protocols, identity overlays, anything that might give me a backdoor.
Every menu led back to the same cold summary: LEGAL DESIGNATION: FERN TRIVANE.
No option to revert, no rollback, no trace of the old me except as a footnote in the system logs.
I tried to crash the system with a forced override. The console locked me out. I tried yelling at the AI. It let me vent, then piped in, “This designation was not imposed. It is the only identity capable of carrying your resonance without collapse.”
I slammed my fist into the wall, felt the old pain shoot up my arm, the familiar ache of childhood accidents and unpaid bills. It was a real hurt, at least.
Dyris watched, eyes steady, arms folded. “You can break the interface all you want. It won’t change what you’ve already become.”
That was the worst part. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even disappointed. She looked at me like I was a storm she’d seen on every planet: expected, inevitable, beautiful only from a distance.
I sagged, my body going soft, all the anger draining out as fast as it had flared. I let my forehead rest on the glass, the cold shock of it grounding me. My reflection, now officially Fern Trivane, forever, stared back, hollow-eyed.
“I didn’t want a new name,” I said, voice so small I hated it. “I just didn’t want to be forgotten in the old one.”
Dyris stepped forward. Her hand touched my shoulder, warm and real through the fabric of my myth-stitched suit. “Then don’t be,” she said, barely a whisper. “Be remembered as Fern Trivane, who made it mean something again.”
I let the words settle. For a minute, they hurt more than the erasure. Then, gradually, they didn’t.
Vireleth chimed: “Docking sequence complete. Academy protocol requests immediate transfer.”
I rolled my eyes, but the old anger was gone. What remained was a kind of cold, clear focus. I straightened, squared my shoulders, and turned to Dyris. “We’re not using the fucking shuttles,” I said.
She smirked. “You want to make an entrance.”
I grinned back, teeth bared. “I want them to see what happens when you try to kill an idea and it refuses to die.”
Dyris reached for my hand. I let her take it.
“Ready?” she asked.
“No,” I said, and then snapped us out of existence.
The command lounge vanished, the glass, the view, even the taste of melon-mint on my tongue. All that was left was the burn of her palm against mine, and the certainty that when we reappeared, the universe would have to learn my name all over again.
Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Alignment: Eventinde Athenaeum Reception Hall
I picked my spot three columns from the back, shoulder wedged into the cold marble just far enough from the neural dampeners to keep my head clear.
The Aethenaeum Reception Hall could have passed for a luxury detention facility—vaulted ceilings, mythstone ribbing, more glass than actual wall, and enough security presence to make an assassination attempt look like a scheduling error.
They’d crammed the entire student cohort onto the floor in concentric tiers, scholarship rats and baseline nobodies orbiting the outermost ring, nobles and myth-adjacent prodigies monopolizing every row up front.
I counted nine microdrones in the upper truss, each with its own paranoia algorithm; two failed to mask their grav pulses, their positional jitter off by less than a micron, but enough to make my nerves itch every time they passed overhead.
I stood with arms folded, ankles crossed, my jacket hung half-off my shoulder—noncompliant, but not so far gone the faculty could write me up for insubordination.
You learned fast in places like this: attention was a currency, and the only way not to drown in it was to act like you’d never heard of water.