Page 42 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

The lesson began with a “simple” demonstration. The instructor placed three ball bearings on the projection table and asked for a volunteer to manipulate their paths in a controlled spiral. He didn’t call my name, but his eyes flicked to me, begging for a mercy kill.

I obliged, raising my hand with the lazy resignation of someone about to be bored to death.

He gestured, and I took the cue. Instead of levitating the balls in parallel arcs, I twisted the field just enough to send them into a triple-helix, then nested a secondary spiral inside the first, so every ball orbited two centers at once: the projection table and me.

The professor’s mouth made a perfect O. “Textbook demonstration,” he whispered, and his notes fell out of his hands, scattered like dead leaves.

The rest of the class just stared.

Except Alyx.

She was watching the ceiling, counting the gaps between the lights, jaw clenched like she was bracing for an impact nobody else could see.

I let the spiral collapse, caught the bearings as they fell, and palmed them back into place. The mythic field bled away, leaving the room tense and empty, like a birthday party that ended in arson.

The instructor clapped, but it sounded like the kind of applause you get at a funeral.

“Next,” he said, and didn’t even try to meet my eyes again.

#

Spiritual Mythodynamics was the one class I thought I might fail.

The professor was a ghost, literally, her body was a hologram projected from somewhere else in the galaxy, her voice coming through at a fractionally wrong lag, so every word landed just before you were ready to hear it.

She wore ancient Vellari robes and a crown of mythic lilies, which looked cool until you realized the flowers were extinct and she was the only one allowed to wear them.

Today’s lesson: the nature of recursive soul identity.

The room darkened, and a mythscape opened at the center dais.

The school AI, not trusting its own safety settings, dimmed the physical lights to near-zero, then overlayed the whole class in a projection of shifting constellations.

Every desk, every inch of marble, every trembling hand in the crowd—refracted by ghostly, stuttering stars.

The professor intoned, “Who will present the paradox of Infinite Mirror?”

Alyx stood.

I didn’t expect it. She was never first, not in this room, not in any room.

She stepped into the mythscape and let the System take her, every atom registering as stable, every heartbeat under ruthless control.

She cleared her throat, then began.

“Imagine,” she said, “that you are looking into a mirror. In that mirror, you see every version of yourself you ever were, every choice you never made. Some are dead. Some are monsters. Some are gods. But every single one is you, and every single one wants out.”

Her voice was steady, low, a line pulled taut across an abyss. The room’s air system shut down entirely, letting the silence eat at our ears.

“In the old worlds,” Alyx said, “they believed in reincarnation as escape. But here, now, it’s recursion. You don’t live again. You live backward, until the error corrects. Until the System finds the version of you that doesn’t break.”

She let that hang.

“For most, it’s a comfort. For some—” she looked at me, just for a second, “—it’s a warning.”

The room was not breathing.

She went on, words like a serrated blade.

“I have seen myself die in every way possible. I have watched my own hands choke the air from my own throat. But every time, I come back, and the loop tightens. The version that survives is the one that remembers every failure, every mistake, every hunger that was never satisfied.”

Alyx spread her hands, palms up, and in the mythscape the stars rippled. Two, then three, then a thousand versions of herself, each one refracted across the quantum split. Some were triumphant, some ruined, but all of them shimmered with the same gold-bright core.

“Is that divinity?” she asked. “Or just the mercy of a universe too lazy to let us stop?”

Nobody answered. The mythscape spun, slow and elegant, tracing the geometry of trauma and rebirth.

“In the end, you either break the mirror, or you make peace with the cracks.”

Her last words echoed, fractal and clear: “I am not afraid of being shattered. I am afraid of being exactly the same, forever.”

She let the mythscape collapse.

The AI, visibly disturbed, overcorrected: the lights returned too bright, the desks realigned with a clack, and every student’s heart rate spiked in unison.

Alyx stood there, breathing hard, sweat breaking out along her jawline.

The professor was the first to recover. “Thank you, Alyx. That was… illuminating.”

A shiver ran through the room.

From the back, someone whispered, “she’s glowing.”

From the front, another voice: “Is she Pre-Awakened?”

A third: “Not possible. She’d need a stabilizer.”

The first: “She is the stabilizer.”

I snorted, and the sound was the only thing that didn’t sound like prophecy.

#

After class, the corridor was a tangle of rumors and sideways glances. Nobody dared talk to Alyx directly, but everyone watched her as she packed up her bag, slow and precise, like she was wiring a bomb.

I found her by the window, eyes still glazed from the inside out.

“Nice aria,” I said.

She didn’t turn. “Didn’t think you’d listen.”

I shrugged. “Didn’t think you had it in you.”

She blinked, then looked at me, and in her face I saw the thousand versions she’d projected: some cruel, some kind, all cut from the same godawful diamond.

“It’s not for them,” she said. “It’s for me.”

She snapped her bag shut, and her hands trembled just a little.

“They think you’re going to Ascend,” I said. “They’re afraid of it.”

She snorted, bitter. “Then they should be.”

I laughed, because I had to.

“You’re going to burn,” I said. Not as a threat, just a fact. I’d seen it before.

Alyx grinned, sharp and hungry. “So will you.”

I reached out—because I wanted to, because I had to—and tapped her hand, just once.

For a second, the world spun.

Then we were back. Two idiots, standing in a hallway that was already rewriting its own history to make room for the disaster we were about to cause.

The world tried to warn us. The lights flickered, the air chilled, and a Monitor drone zipped overhead, broadcasting silent alarms in every direction.

But we didn’t move.

Not until Alyx, voice softer than myth could tolerate, said:

“You ready to break it?”

I didn’t answer.

But I smiled, wide and bright, and let the mirror crack all the way down.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Alignment: Classroom, Eventide.

If there was a Hall of Fame for unteachable students, Fern would have been its burning, tattooed patron saint.

The morning’s first session was supposed to be a gentle intro to “Fey Lineage and Accord Social Structures.” The instructor, a fails upward type with three PhDs and a receding hairline, ran through the House banners, the genealogies, the intricate little threads of blood and myth and backstabbing that held the Spiral’s power structure together.

Half the class paid attention. The other half watched Fern, who slouched in her seat with a violence reserved for apex predators and girls who’d never been told “no” in a way that stuck.

She looked bored. She looked dangerous bored, the kind of “bored” that either kills the time or makes it wish it had never been born.

I kept my head down and annotated the notes, but every line found its way back to her: the scuff of her boot against the chair ahead, the way she tipped her head back so far it looked like a dare to the ceiling.

The fact that every time the instructor made a point of mentioning House Trivane, her eyes flicked just a little too sharp, a little too blue, and then she let her gaze drift out of the room like she might never come back.

Today’s lesson was supposed to be about power. But it was really about avoidance.

At the halfway mark, the instructor pulled up a full-room projection of the Lioren Family Tree. The graphic bloomed into a corona of names and faces, so dazzling it shorted the ambient lights and made the air taste like static. At the center, in sharp white letters, floated the name:

LIOREN TRIVANE

I expected Fern to flinch. She didn’t. She just rolled her eyes so hard it could have destabilized the campus’s mythic field.

The instructor, either oblivious or addicted to pain, invited Fern to “comment on the intersection of House legacy and mythic resonance in contemporary praxis.”

She replied with a shrug that would have gotten most kids expelled. “You want a quote? Call my dad. He’s the one who cared about bloodlines.”

Which is when, with the punctuality of a curse, the wall screen behind her lit up with an incoming FaceStream: Dax Meldin, hair wild, still in oil-stained overalls. He was not on the syllabus.

He grinned, looked directly at Fern, and said, “You know, Lioren once said, A name is a mask that becomes your face—”

She cut the call without even turning around.

The instructor, groping for dignity, tried to move on, but Dyris, in the back of the room, deadpanned, “He would say that.” Which made half the class snort and the other half question whether Dyris was even listening.

She was. She always was. Today, she stood at the edge of the room, arms folded, eyes tracking every micro-expression Fern made and, just as often, the lack of them.

You could write dissertations about what Dyris Vaelith was thinking, and all of them would be wrong.

#