Page 44 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Alignment: Eventide
It was supposed to be a quiz day.
I had been prepping for three cycles, grinding through block diagrams and memetic overlays and the part of the curriculum known unofficially as “ways not to die when your resonance goes sentient.” My table was a shrine to preemptive anxiety: two compads, one spiral notebook (with actual paper, just to show off), and a caffeine dosage so criminal it gave the auto-dispenser second thoughts.
My hair was in defiance mode, half-braided, half in my face, and my hoodie had absorbed enough stress sweat to qualify as a crime scene. But I was ready.
The rest of the cohort filed in on autopilot, most of them still operating on less than three hours’ sleep and the breakfast equivalent of a hot glue gun to the veins.
Even the Vellari twins looked rough, their synchronized smirks dialed down to “mildly sarcastic.” Across the aisle, Fern Trivane slouched in her seat with a plastic carton of what was probably illegal noodles, eyes glazed, chin propped on her palm.
She looked like she’d been up all night punching holes in the moon and then decided to haunt the class for fun.
She caught me looking. Didn’t smile, just winked, then upended half the noodles into her mouth with an efficiency that made me want to throw my notes out the window and retire to a cave.
Professor Ipsum called for attention and got it in the way only someone who could weaponize silence could: he simply stopped moving. The man was an entropy sponge, and even the most battle-hardened students wilted in the psychic gravity of his glare.
“Today,” he intoned, “we begin the Alignment Trial.”
If there was an easier way to kill the vibe in a room, I hadn’t seen it.
Every eye twitched to the main board, where the computer had already queued the rules.
I felt the old dread spike in my chest. The Alignment Trial was infamous.
Most years, it was ceremonial: practice runs, token containment exercises, maybe a mild hallucination if someone miscalibrated their link.
But this cycle? This cycle, we had a Nullarch, two Vellari prodigies, and a rumor that the entire test was being piped out to the HoloNet as a “demonstration of the Accord’s commitment to mythic stability. ”
It wasn’t a class. It was a blood sport with homework.
I blinked, and the A.I.’s prompts locked me out of my compad. The words crawled over my notes in blue fire:
[TRIAL INITIATION: PAIRWISE ALIGNMENT. OPT OUT NOT PERMITTED.]
My jaw tightened. Even the professor looked like he’d rather eat glass than proctor this.
“Trial pairs will be determined by resonance vector,” he said, in a clinical voice. “We do not choose. The computer does.”
Which meant, in practical terms, that you got paired with your most incompatible nightmare and then had not to collapse reality together.
I shot a glance at Fern, who was already grinning at the chaos, mouth still full of noodles. She raised her eyebrows, like she was betting the algorithm would explode before we got to her name.
It was a good bet.
The computer spun through a hundred permutations per second, every screen in the room a strobe of names and partial data.
A few pairs locked in early: Vessa and some poor baseline kid from AgriDome; a Vaelith junior with a transfer student who looked like he’d never even kissed a mythic field, let alone survived one.
Each time a pair was locked, the student’s desk blinked gold, then a little bar in the upper right went from “SAFE” to “GOOD LUCK.”
When my name finally paused in the queue, I nearly missed it.
[ALIGNMENT CANDIDATE: VIERRON, ALYX.]
I gripped the edge of my desk, knuckles white.
The system hesitated. The next name should have materialized instantly.
Instead, the boards glitched. All the lighting in the room flickered, then blue-shifted, then cut out for a full three seconds.
In the darkness, someone made a noise, an honest-to-god whimper, and then the lights slammed back at double brightness.
The next name was not a surprise, but it was a problem:
[ALIGNMENT CANDIDATE: TRIVANE, FERN.]
I stared at the screen. My pulse went from resting to “run for your life” in a single heartbeat.
A click behind me. I whipped my head around. Every eye in the room was on us. Even the Vellari twins, whose default setting was “nothing in the universe can surprise me,” looked momentarily rattled.
Professor Ipsum’s voice failed for the first time I’d ever heard. “That’s… not—” He blinked, and a visible shiver passed over his whole body, like someone had iced his bloodstream. “That’s not an alignment. That’s a contradiction.”
Fern made a noise that might have been a laugh or a cough or both. She shoved her noodles aside, feet up on the desk, and just grinned, wide and wolfish. “Guess we’re the pilot episode,” she said, loud enough for the back row.
The algorithm, already in freefall, started sparking errors.
The holo over the mainboard jittered, stuttered, then resolved into a split screen: me on the left, Fern on the right.
Our faces ghosted in and out of the display, overlaid with fractal sigils and mythic math that looked like it wanted to eat the universe.
“Is this a joke?” hissed Vessa, voice razor-thin. “They can’t let them—"
“They shouldn’t let them,” muttered someone else, too low to catch the face.
The overhead lighting gave out completely, plunging the room into a wash of blue emergency LEDs. I felt every hair on my body go cold. Next to me, a support drone fizzed and fell from the ceiling, trailing a ribbon of ozone and regret.
“Are you seeing this?” I whispered, not sure if I was talking to Fern or the program or to god.
Fern stretched her arms overhead, then turned her entire body toward me, so close I could see the little veins of silver in her eyes. “Yeah,” she said, voice soft. “It’s like they built the whole place for this exact disaster.”
Another drone fell, harder this time, and shattered on the floor. The mythic bands on the walls snapped from blue to white to raw daylight. The temperature dropped ten degrees, then spiked, then normalized as the Athenaeum rerouted all power to the main alignment console and mythic dampeners.
[ALIGNMENT ACCEPTED.]
[TRIVANE—VIERRON VECTOR: 99.9% COMPATIBILITY.]
[INITIATE TRIAL.]
Somebody laughed, high and hysterical. I think it was me.
I couldn’t breathe.
The board pulsed once more, then blacked out. In the dark, Fern’s voice found me, steady and sharp as ever.
“Hey,” she said. “Don’t fuck this up. I want to see how far we can break it.”
I couldn’t even muster a comeback. The adrenaline was a physical thing, hot and wild in my blood.
This was how the world ended.
The last thing I saw before the room flickered out was Fern, already half out of her seat, hair in her eyes, face lit by the promise of pure chaos.
Then the lights died, the computer howled, and I was falling.
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Trial Realm
I hit the ground so hard that, for a second, I thought the trial had malfunctioned and killed me on entry. But the pain was real: a spike up my tailbone, a pop in my left shoulder, and then the numbing static of mythic overflow, which always felt like the aftertaste of electroshock and cinnamon.
I groaned, rolled onto my back, and stared at the sky.
It was not the sky.
Above me, two horizons warred for attention: on the left, a white hole so blinding it tore logic into fractals, on the right, a black hole that gnawed at light like it was born starving.
The interface between them wasn’t a line, but a swirl, a never-ending hunger spiral where event horizons overlapped and lied about their own radius. It was, in a word, hot.
I sat up. The world around me was a city.
No, not a city, a recursion of cities, every building nested inside its copy, each block repeating until the laws of geometry gave up and let the next one win.
Frost caked every surface, but nothing melted.
The air was sharp, flavored with the chemical snap of ozone and the metallic sweetness of old blood.
Every ten seconds, a train whined overhead, arcing through the void on a magrail that flickered in and out of existence, sometimes carrying passengers, sometimes just cargo, sometimes nothing at all.
I looked down. My hands were raw, scraped from the landing, but the pain faded instantly as the trial’s mythic buffer caught up.
The suit I wore was gone, replaced with something stitched from gold-thread mesh and polycarbonate plating, like the Athenaeum A.I.
had decided I needed to cosplay a mythic gladiator before I died.
I flexed my fingers and watched the light from the split sky crawl over my skin, turning the scars on my knuckles into tiny blue shadows.
Alyx landed three meters away, upright, knees bent, hands spread wide like she’d meant to stick the landing.
She wore the same getup as me, but hers fit better, hugged her frame like the universe was designed around her center of mass.
She stood there for a second, eyes closed, head tilted like she was listening to a broadcast only she could hear.
The world trembled. For real. Not metaphorical, not emotional. The city itself stuttered, the ground jumping a full centimeter, then returning to baseline. I felt my teeth clack together.
“This is not my dreamscape,” I said, but Alyx didn’t answer. She opened her eyes, and the color in them wasn’t brown anymore; it was gold, with an overlay of glitching zeros and ones, like her irises were little processors running debug mode.
She smiled, but it was a closed-lip, dangerous thing.
“I know this place,” she said, voice soft but clear. “I built this in a loop. When I was six.”
I whistled, low and impressed. “You did good. I’d kill to live here.”