Page 37 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
“Is meaningless to Zevelune.” Ania shrugged. “She doesn’t play the game, she writes the rulebook. And unless you’d like to explain to the galaxy why your Nullarch is running unsupervised, you’ll play along.”
I stared at the mythstone in my armrest, a swirl of blue-black catching the office lights. “Understood.”
She leaned back, satisfied. “You always were quick. That’s why I liked you.”
I glanced up, studied her for a moment, then said: “Anything else?”
Ania reached for her holo-pen, tapped the end of it on the desk like a gavel. “You wanted her alive, Dyris. This is what alive looks like.” She almost smiled. “Welcome to the future.”
I let the silence stretch, then answered: “And now the rest of the galaxy gets to suffer for it.”
Ania beamed. “That’s the spirit.” She dismissed half her overlays and keyed a private alert.
A chime sounded, gentle but insistent. “One more thing,” she said, spinning the console toward me.
“There’s a student already flagged for resonance instability and observational drift.
The AI flagged her as…’unusually attentive. ’”
The file popped up: Alyx Vieron. Face: young, guarded, jaw clenched like she expected the world to bite first.
Ania tapped the entry. “Keep an eye on her. Wouldn’t want a little curiosity to get the better of your containment protocols.”
I stared at the image, let my mind process the pattern of names and faces and what might break first.
“Then she’d better learn quickly,” I said.
Ania nodded, and for a moment, I caught the flicker of concern behind her bravado.
I left the office. The corridor outside pulsed with the world’s best insulation, every sound swallowed into mythic hush. I let my own feet carry me, mind already rewiring for what was next.
Alive. That’s what alive looked like.
I hoped the galaxy was ready for it.
Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Alignment: Lecutre Hall 7, Eventide
Professor Ipsum’s voice was so thoroughly weaponized against consciousness that, were he let loose on any other population, entire civilizations would have collapsed in a day from cumulative psychic boredom.
He stood at the prow of Lecture Hall 7, projection clicker trembling in one hand, the other lost somewhere in his robes—no one had ever confirmed if he even had a left hand or if it was some kind of vestigial department legend.
“The mythic body,” he intoned, “is not merely a vector for resonance, but a contested site for the performance of desire, violence, and… mimesis.” Ipsum’s gaze swept the amphitheater, half-daring anyone to contradict a sentence whose main crime was existing.
Most of the student body was already surfing REM cycles, heads bobbing like kelp forests in an invisible tide.
The only exceptions were the Vaelith delegation—never slouched, never caught off guard, their attention laser-scorched by genetic mandate—and a handful of other legacy house kids, all of whom would have rather died than be caught inattentive in front of an administrator with tenure.
I sat third row from the back, legs stretched so far into the aisle that the next person who tried to pass would either have to break my femur or make eye contact, and I could tell from experience which one they’d pick.
My compad was open, but not to the lecture stream—never to the lecture stream.
Instead I was updating my masterwork: a growing catalog of meme stencils, satirical heraldry, and a newly-launched series of stick-figure executions performed by personifications of the seven deadly data heuristics.
Most of them involved impalements by protractors.
One featured a death by “syllogistic immolation” that I’d been particularly proud of.
The assignment hit as predicted, exactly one quantum before the end of the session. Ipsum waited until just after the bell so nobody could leave, then conjured the prompt onto the projection wall with the dramatic flair of a priest lighting himself on fire for ratings.
“You will write three thousand words on the core of your resonance and what it reveals about your inner cosmology,” Ipsum announced, voice peaking at “threatening” before sliding back to terminal. “Due next cycle. Your silence is not a valid protest.”
The room groaned in unison, a choir of suffering, but I didn’t bother joining in.
Instead I scrawled “bless this mess” in a fat serif at the top of my page and surrounded it with jagged little stars.
Then I drew a miniature Ipsum being torn to shreds by a mob of angry thesis papers, each one labeled “Why?” or “Who is this for?”
By the time the crowd started shuffling out, I was already halfway down the side stairs, headphones in and tuned to a deepfake mashup of pre-Earth club hits spliced with screaming goats. I considered it my contribution to the war on nostalgia.
Outside, the air was crisper than usual, the mythship’s external system having decided today was a “scattered clouds and UV hazard 3.2” type of morning.
Across the quad, students milled in shifting clusters—some trading gossip, others locked in ceremonial hand-slap greetings that always ended in someone getting their fingers broken.
I ignored most of them, zeroing in on my favorite bench under the only remaining living tree on campus, a mutant hybrid that, according to rumor, once survived being set on fire, poisoned, and proposed to by an intoxicated legend studies major in the same afternoon.
I parked myself, propped my feet on the root bulge, and tried to sketch out the opening to my paper. Something suitably biting, but not so sarcastic that it’d get flagged by the censors as “meta-disrespect.”
I managed maybe two lines (“The core of my resonance is inertia, and so is my cosmology; everything begins as a tendency toward stillness, except where violently interrupted by grades”) before the shadow hit.
“Hey,” said a voice, too close, low enough that I nearly thought it was the tree itself talking.
I looked up, and Fern Meldin was standing over me.
She had the kind of presence that made you think of black holes before you thought of people—heavy, wrong, bending the air even when she was still.
Her hair, rumored to have been dyed with stolen blood and the tailings of collapsed stars, was tied in a loose, uneven knot at the nape.
It gave her a look like she’d just finished running from a disaster, or had started one and was about to finish.
She looked down at me for a second, weighing her next words like she didn’t want to waste them on someone who wouldn’t notice.
“Is the assignment real,” she asked, “or is he trolling us again?”
I shrugged. “Real enough that if you don’t turn it in, he’ll put you in a ‘self-knowledge’ study group. Last semester, they made everyone hug for an hour.”
Fern’s face did something at the mention of hugging, like she’d swallowed a wasp and the wasp was winning. “Thanks,” she said, voice soft but not fragile. Then she just… left.
I watched her walk across the quad, movements weirdly smooth for someone who looked like they never slept.
Every few meters, a ripple of attention followed her.
Even the Vaeliths, who had been bred for generations to never notice anyone not on their list of priorities, flicked their eyes her way.
I didn’t blame them. There was something about her that made you want to look away, but you didn’t.
I stared at my compad for another ten minutes, managed three more sarcastic sentences, then gave up and went to lunch.
The next cycle, every student with a pulse showed up to see if Fern would break the assignment or if she’d break Ipsum.
It was neither.
When her name was called, Fern didn’t hesitate—just walked straight to the front, clutching something bundled in blackout cloth. She yanked the drape off with zero fanfare and set the thing on the presentation altar.
It was supposed to be a diorama. What it actually was: a full-blown, mythic-tier sugar sculpture.
Edible nebulae drifted in zero-g suspension fields, layers of stardust swirling around a central white hole modeled from spun sugar and iridescent caramel.
At the base, tiny planets orbited on invisible wires.
Some of them trailed ribbons of molten syrup.
A few exploded gently if you watched long enough, releasing clouds of edible glitter that floated until sucked up by the room’s vent system.
Every person in the hall stopped breathing, even Ipsum, whose jaw had become unmoored from his skull.
Under the mythlights, the sculpture threw wild, shifting shadows across the marble floor.
For a second I thought I’d imagined it, but no: the shadows spelled something in warped, fractal script.
The words reassembled themselves as the model spun, never quite stable, but I caught them between flashes:
I don’t know who I am. But I know I’m hungry.
That’s when the cinnamon-sugar smoke started. It rolled off the diorama in little puffs, making everything in the room smell like a childhood you’d never had but always wanted.
No one spoke. Half the room looked ready to sob or riot.
I didn’t watch the diorama, not really. I watched Fern.
She leaned against the edge of the altar, hands in her pockets, body language so casual you’d think she hadn’t just detonated the emotional core of the entire class.
Her head tilted, chin tucked, eyes scanning the sculpture with a kind of distant satisfaction.
But then the sugar model flickered—just for an instant, the resonance field pulsed brighter than planned—and Fern flinched. Small, quick, and very real.
I marked it. Noted it the same way I noted which faculty feigned their smiles, or which nobles signed their threats with fake courtesy.