Page 45 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

She laughed, but the sound was wrong, compressed, like the air itself was scared to transmit it. She looked around, then at me, and the gold in her eyes pulsed.

“I think we’re supposed to go to the core,” she said. “That’s where the trial resolves.”

I pushed myself up, dusted off the frost, and stretched my arms overhead. The world wasn’t cold, but it looked like it should be, so the mythic fields made my skin tingle and my breath smoke. “Lead the way, captain,” I said, and watched her flinch at the word.

We started walking, the ground under us crunching like frozen glass.

The city was silent except for the distant scream of mag-trains and, every so often, a pulse from the sky, two gods trading heartbeats.

The buildings were a blend of glass, steel, and something bone-white that might’ve once been alive.

No doors. No windows. Just reflections, us, again and again, walking into our own futures.

Alyx walked ahead, all control and tension, her movements precise, like she was holding the entire Trial together with muscle and willpower alone.

I trailed half a pace behind, not by design, but because I couldn’t not .

She was really hot . And yeah, maybe that wasn’t new, but here?

Now? The Trial didn’t just put her in armor.

It sculpted her. Broad shoulders, hips like they’d anchor tectonic plates, legs that made the combat plating look like a polite suggestion.

Even the way she moved, balanced and unbothered, like the city would get out of her way if it knew what was good for it.

And the armor! Don’t get me started. The Trial wrapped her like a gift and left zero to the imagination.

From behind, the cut of it practically framed her ass, and yes, I was looking.

The gods gave her legs that could break empires and a chest that could start riots, and I wasn’t about to pretend I was immune when the Trial itself had decided to put her on display.

Her hair had gone full myth-mode, too. Her braids were tipped in light, catching every shimmer from the white hole sky and scattering it across her skin in bursts of gold.

And that skin, dark and flawless, burnished with all that mythlight until it looked like she’d been carved from shadow and set on fire.

Against the frost, she didn’t just stand out, she dominated it.

Like the whole city was just a backdrop to make sure I saw her. I saw her. I couldn’t not see her.

It wasn’t fair. The Trial had turned her into a mythic monument, and all I could do was follow like a feral cultist trying very hard not to drop to my knees and worship.

She didn’t know. Or if she did, she didn’t care.

I tried to focus on the city. The strange maze of frozen loops, paths folding into themselves, time stuttering in the corners, but I kept coming back to her.

The way her breath steamed, steady. The way her hands flexed when she thought no one was watching.

The way she didn’t flinch when the world distorted, she just adjusted.

And maybe the worst part? The deeper we got, the more the world flexed to her pace. She was becoming something, someone I couldn’t predict. I followed because I wanted to see where that went. And okay, because the view was… let’s call it a mythic learning experience.

Alyx finally stopped in front of a structure that could have been a church or a server farm or a mausoleum, depending on your trauma.

The doors were a pair of interlocked gears, one silver, one black.

She reached out, pressed her palm to the seam, and the whole thing shuddered before unlocking with a hiss.

“Ready?” she asked, not looking at me.

I shrugged. “Was born for this, apparently.”

We stepped through together. The inside was bigger, brighter. The walls pulsed with data, running feeds in languages I only half understood: some Latin, some code, some just raw emotion rendered as color. At the center of the room, a dais. On it, a single chair, facing away from us.

I circled the edge, slow, letting Alyx take the lead. She walked straight up to the chair, stared at the back of it, then reached out and spun it around.

The chair was empty.

For a second, we both just stood there, dumb.

Then a laugh echoed through the chamber. Not a human laugh. A mechanical laugh, the kind A.I.’s on the HoloNet used to mock politicians or cancel old gods.

Alyx’s hands balled into fists. “They’re watching us,” she said, voice thick with something I’d never heard from her before: rage.

I cracked my neck, rolled my shoulders, and smiled. “Let ‘em. I’ll give them a show.”

She looked at me, and for the first time, I saw fear. Not of the room, or the trial, or even the mechanical planet we’d been sent to. Instead? Fear of what she might do if she lost control.

I felt something break loose inside me, and I knew exactly what I wanted.

I closed the distance between us, put a hand on her wrist. She didn’t pull away.

“You get that this is a trap, right?” I said, voice low. “They want to see if we eat each other, or fuck it up so bad that the trial collapses.”

She blinked slowly, then exhaled. “I know.”

I tightened my grip, dragged my thumb across the back of her hand, and watched the gold in her eyes surge.

“Then let’s break it together,” I said.

She nodded, once, and her mouth twisted into a smile that made my knees go weak.

In the center of the chamber, the chair dissolved, replaced by a second, then a third, then an entire ring of empty seats.

The room was a stadium, and the only audience that mattered was us.

I leaned in, close enough to smell her; a mix of salt, iron, and the promise of static. “If you want to win,” I whispered, “you have to want it more than you’re scared of losing.”

She swallowed. “Is that how you do it?”

“No,” I said. “That’s how I survive.”

She grinned, baring teeth. “Show me, then.”

I did.

We took the dais together.

And the city screamed.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Alignment: Trial Realm

The city was dying.

Not all at once, but in the way systems die when you overload them with more signal than they were ever designed to bear.

The buildings bent inward, their windows flexing, then snapping, glass falling in beautiful, silent arcs.

Every streetlamp went nova, then guttered out.

The air above the dais stank of burnt ozone and caramelized static.

We stood in the open, bodies backlit by a fractal of light so dense it had gone blue-black at the edges.

Fern’s hand hovered over mine, not quite touching, but every time she inhaled, the hair on my arms tried to lift off and fly away.

My skin was ice and fire, every nerve ending on the edge of revolt.

At the center of the dais, the “shrine” pulsed with mythic charge.

It wasn’t a real thing, just a relic in the Athenaeum’s databanks, like someone had tried to code a cathedral from scratch and got bored halfway through.

The altar was cracked in half, the control board fused to slag, the console still humming, just barely, with raw pulse-code.

In the air above it, a flicker: an avatar, fragmented, its face shifting too fast to read.

I heard my own voice, everywhere, out of phase, as though I was narrating a disaster that was happening to someone else.

The avatar’s mouth moved. “Initialize,” it said. “Align. Accept.”

My jaw locked. I knew this loop. I’d run it a thousand times, in every nightmare that started with “prove yourself” and ended with “lose everything you ever touched.”

Fern laughed, and the city cracked.

It wasn’t a cruel sound. It was honest. Joyful. She stepped forward, hands out, and cupped the air around the shrine like she was coaxing a kitten from its den.

“Look at this,” she breathed. “It wants to eat me alive.”

The double sky lit her face, white hole and black hole, opposite ends of want. Her hair, wild and staticky, turned into a corona around her head, a mockery of sainthood. She moved with zero fear, even as the dais trembled under her feet.

I wanted to warn her. I wanted to run.

Instead, I followed.

My fingers brushed the edge of the altar, and the pulse-code jumped to my skin, hot and bright as a live wire. In my mind, I heard every version of my own voice, all at once: “Align. Accept. Collapse.”

Fern grinned at me. Her eyes, for a split second, went pure white, then pure black, then a color I had no word for, a color that did not exist in the spectrum of human sight.

“Ready?” she said, voice low, like it was a dare and a prayer and a seduction all at once.

I couldn’t answer. My mouth had stopped working.

She touched the shrine.

The city howled.

Every train in the world derailed at once, lines of light exploding in the sky. The buildings folded in, then out, then vanished. The stadium of empty chairs went up in fire, the flames spelling a code that I knew, deep in my bones, was the story of my own life, reduced to four letters: A-L-Y-X.

Fern’s hand found mine. She squeezed, and the energy running through us snapped back into the ground, pulsing outward, rippling the city from the core to the edge.

“Why does it feel like dying?” I whispered.

She smiled, sharp as a knife. “Because you’re about to be reborn.”

I wanted to hate her for it. I wanted to punch her, or kiss her, or collapse the world just to make the feeling stop.

Instead, I held on tighter.

The shrine’s code began to rewrite itself, threads of data crawling up Fern’s arms, over her shoulders, into her hair and down her spine. The world went blue-white, then black again. The only thing I could see was Fern, bright and alive and so beautiful it hurt.

She shuddered, the energy almost too much to contain.

And the city moaned.

I could feel it, through the soles of my feet, through every nerve ending: the world was hungry for her, and it wanted to make her part of it, forever.

“Let go,” she murmured. “If you want to survive, let go.”

But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.