Page 41 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower
It was not my best morning.
The problem with being the living containment field for an interstellar myth is that, apparently, you never get a day off. Not even on the first morning of “school.”
I staggered to the glass, still towel-wrapped from the bath, and flicked the drone’s visor.
It bleeped, rerouted its lens, and started the feed over from the beginning.
I caught a glimpse of my own expression—hair in chaos, eye bags trending on two planets, one shoulder still sparkling from Dyris’s idea of “bedtime moisturizer.” They’d looped the last ten seconds of me staring at the bath’s ceiling, stitched my voice into the soundtrack (“only in ambiance”), then set it to music usually reserved for product launches or suicide cult recruitment.
The HoloNet had no shame.
Behind me, my room buzzed to life. Every surface lit up: the smart mirror, the autodresser, the myth-fridge (which had decided my breakfast would be “taco salad in a cup,” a punishment for crimes I hadn’t committed yet), and the wall-sized news crawl, which immediately slammed me with the headline:
NULLARCH: REINCARNATION OR REGURGITATION? WAS LIOREN EVER REAL?
Below that, two warring docuseries promos fought for bandwidth.
The first, “Lioren: Ghost in the Shellcode,” was narrated by an influencer with hair the color of overripe corn and a voice so breathless it sounded like she’d been tased.
The preview cut between ancient, heavily-redacted footage of the Trivane wars (all fire and weeping and someone’s foot in a wine glass) and modern shots of me, usually eating, always in the worst possible lighting.
The second promo, from “TruthBehind,” featured a rogue mythographer pacing a stage made of literal old books, arms covered in illegal tattoos, arguing that I was both Lioren and a “forgotten cosmic hunger deity” spliced together by some Accord mythopolitician as a last-ditch entropy buffer. The bit they chose for the trailer was:
“Observe the appetite, the anomalous affect, the impossible eyes. This is not a child. This is a disaster wearing lipstick and trauma as a shell.”
They played it three times, each cut zooming closer, until it was just a hyper-grainy video of me staring back at the audience, bite of pizza halfway to my mouth, looking—honestly—like the last living animal on a doomed world.
I snorted so hard I inhaled pico-glitter. The drone loved it.
In a little inset in the upper left, the “official” Accord report tried to refute the madness.
Instead, it just made it worse. “We have no evidence that the Nullarch is a synthetic being,” said the Accord’s Science Officer, a pale woman who looked like her last organic meal was “before the fall.” “Her genetic material is unremarkable.”
Which immediately triggered a planetary trending conspiracy: Nullarch was a Deep Black AI project. The proof? “Look at her cheekbones. Nothing in nature is that symmetrical except a weapon.”
I checked the mirror, turned my head left, then right. They had a point. I’d been called “weaponized” before, but never by someone who was definitely a bored wagebot looking for a raise.
Another feed scrolled in, this one with actual schoolchildren lined up on a classroom stage, chanting “NULLARCH NULLARCH NULLARCH” while a teacher—smiling, obviously dead inside—presented a taco to a cardboard effigy of me.
The caption: “New curriculum approved. She saved us all from Flavor Collapse. We thank Her for the Return.”
They had adopted my taco moment as the “Founding Miracle of the Flavor Cycle.” Textbook publishers had already formatted a new section in the galaxy’s history syllabus. “The Nullarch eats, and thus we eat. Blessed be the Carnitas.”
The entire segment lasted thirty seconds before the drone segued to the next viral, which was just Alyx’s voice, trembling, from that pizza night: “she licked her lips,” looped so it became almost a prayer.
Then they deepfaked the clip with a pulsing pink laser heart every time the words played.
I watched it twelve times before I started to hallucinate a taste I couldn’t name.
A moment’s mercy, then the feed cut to an advert: “FROM MELDIN TO TRIVANE,” the new fashion line.
All asymmetrical spa gowns, heat-reactive tattoos, edible body glitter, and a kind of false modesty that exposed more than it covered.
They’d even digitized my actual bathrobe from the day before and were selling it as “Genuine Sovereign Replica: She Wore It, So Can You.”
The model in the spot looked better than me. I hated her with a passion usually reserved for elevator music or parental disappointment.
By now, my wall screen had given up and was just cycling headlines like it was shuffling a deck of disasters. “Eventide Shaken by Nullarch Memequake.” “Accord Parliament in Emergency Session After New Religion Hits Quorum.” “Can Our Children Survive the Next Flavor War?”
I turned away. The myth-fridge had sensed my mood and replaced the taco salad with a bottle of “synthetic tears, lightly salted.” I drained it in one go, then chucked the bottle at the drone. It caught the moment, replayed it in slow-motion, and then sent it to every person on the planet.
I’d lived my whole life in the corners. The places where you could watch the show, but never risk being the joke. Now, I was the joke. The meme, the religion, the trending topic with its own bootleg pop-up restaurant chain (“NULLARCHITOS: We’ll Make You Devour”).
I wanted to laugh, or scream, or both. But I just showered off the leftover spa glitter, threw on my least criminal set of pants, and let the autodresser pin a jacket to my frame that was almost—but not quite—impossible to wear.
The mirror tried to flatter me. I ignored it. The door opened, and the corridor beyond buzzed with the thousand-watt hum of everyone else’s morning.
The drone followed me all the way to the classroom.
#
The second day of Aethenaeum was not the parade of wonders they’d hyped on the recruitment feeds. It was worse.
The lecture hall was a mythic nightmare: three-tiered, marble seats arranged in a precise spiral, the ceiling painted with the “Four Tragedies of Accord” and lined with drones that pretended to be art installations.
Every seat had a biometric, which scanned your ass the second you sat down and uploaded your position to the public log.
The crowd was already there. Every single person knew me. Or thought they did. They tried not to stare, but it was like asking a toddler not to touch a flame: the urge to witness catastrophe always wins.
I took my seat, dead center, and let my eyes glaze over.
Next to me, someone hissed, “that’s her,” and then, as if on cue, every seat in a five-meter radius subtly shifted away. It was less an exodus and more a slow-motion parting, like they thought getting too close might erase their DNA.
I didn’t care.
The first instructor was already at the dais, a tall man with the look of someone who’d gone through three or four public failures and was ready for a fifth.
He wore his mythic collar half-unbuttoned, revealing a neck tattoo of the Trivane sigil, which he’d tried to laser off but had failed, leaving a pale blue ghost over his jugular.
“Welcome, scholars, to the Grand Recursion,” he intoned, ignoring the way the back row whispered “Nullarch” under their breath like it was a dare.
He started the presentation, a hologram spinning up behind him. It was a cube, then a spiral, then a collapsed neutron star with my face at the event horizon.
“For today’s first demonstration,” he said, “we will discuss singularity identity and the impossibility of mythic erasure.”
He looked directly at me. So did the hologram.
I rolled my eyes and pretended not to notice that the opening slide was just a freeze-frame of me, dripping wet from last night’s bath, staring at the camera with murder in my gaze.
Behind me, a new notification pinged. “Trending: She Hates It—Nullarch’s First Day At School (Live Reaction).”
It had already gone viral.
#
I tuned out the rest of the lecture. The only part I remembered was when the instructor called on me to “explain the flavor symmetry problem.” I said, “it’s only a problem if you can’t eat fast enough,” and the room went dead silent.
For the rest of the hour, nobody said my name again.
Which was fine.
Because as the feeds reminded me every four seconds, my name didn’t belong to me anymore.
It belonged to everyone.
And as much as I wanted to run, or scream, or just set the place on fire, I stayed.
Because that was the new rule.
Don’t run from the meme.
Make it chase you.
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Astrokinetic Theory, Hall D, Eventide.
The second class was Astrokinetic Theory, which is a fancy way of saying “How to Not Accidentally Collapse Your Own Skull.” The instructor was a nervous wreck from the jump.
He wore full body armor under his vestments and had at least three layers of active mythic field, but none of it could hide his terror at the front row: me, some princess with a Medusa haircut, and a feral-eyed boy who looked like he’d eaten his last four lab partners.
He started with the safety lecture, which was always the same: “Please refrain from localized spacetime manipulations. Always check your stabilization cuff. If you experience bleeding, nausea, or quantum déjà vu, alert the staff immediately.”
I tuned it out.
Alyx was three rows ahead, but her presence pulled at me like she had her own event horizon. She wasn’t looking my way. She didn’t have to. You could feel her in the room, a pressure behind the ribcage, a question you’d forgotten how to ask.