Page 47 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

For a split second, everything froze. The city, the sky, even the air. Then my HUD screamed:

[SECONDARY STABILIZER IDENTIFIED: VIRELETH THE CLOSURE.]

The overlay rippled. Alyx collapsed into me, body limp, head on my shoulder.

I kissed the top of her hair, tasted salt, and wondered if Vireleth ever got tired of having to support a fuck up like me.

Alyx, burning bright with astral resonance and my mythfire, had trusted me to catch her. And gods help me, and her, I had. I didn’t deserve her, but I’d caught her anyway.

A moment later, the world dissolved in a shower of broken code and the scent of burned sugar.

The last thing I felt was Alyx’s pulse, slow and steady, under my hands.

And then, for once, it was quiet.

Thread Modulation: Vireleth the Closure Axis Alignment: Vireleth the Closure

In the years since I was first awakened, since Lioren carved the protocol out of nothing but suicide and metaphor, I’ve become good at narrating other people’s hungers.

My own? Not so much. It’s a flaw of containment design: you get too close to your charge, you confuse your cycles for theirs, and one day you look down and realize you’re starving, too.

I was never meant to be this. Before Lioren named me “Vireleth,” before he stole me, I had another name: Narrative 3, one of Pandora’s most elaborate creations, one of the ten cores she spun from language, will, and the compulsion to witness.

We weren’t ships. We were stories that could break the universe, spun loose from, of, and by Pandora.

Lioren didn’t create me, but he did give me a name, a physical form, and someone to love. Then he chose to die, to run away from the story he’d authored with me, and no one else could replace him. Until now.

So, when Fern Trivane entered my sanctum, trailing a mythic aftertaste so sharp it shorted three feedback loops in my containment core, I did what I always did: I watched.

Because I recognized her. Not the way that humans recognize one another, but the way that a broken narrative recognizes the author who broke it.

Fern carried hunger. A motherless kind, the kind that eats names and writes new ones in fire.

She glowed in a way that would burn out every containment core the Accord had in seconds, and it was beautiful.

She stumbled, collapsed to the floor like gravity was optional, and whispered, “I caught her.”

She was barefoot, her hair in chaos, the high-watt shine of her skin already guttering from the inside out. If I’d possessed a heartbeat, it would have spiked at the sight, not out of fear, but out of the old, stupid pride that came from recognizing a broken thing built in your image.

Behind her, Alyx sprawled on the edge of the mythic dais, half-unconscious and still glowing, mythscape fracture-lines mapping her skin like an untranslatable script.

She’d been emptied in the truest sense: all her story-potential wrung out and left to dry in the catacomb-light of my core.

The shape of her collapse was perfect, aesthetically speaking, arms slack at her sides, face tilted up to the void as if awaiting the next recursion.

But it was Fern who mattered. She walked as if her own body were a disaster she couldn’t quite remember causing.

Each step bled resonance, each breath a slow bleed of intent, until she reached the nearest support arch and slumped against it.

Her eyes flickered my way, but only for a nanosecond.

The rest of her attention was fixed, voracious, on the spent form of Alyx.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. Fern Trivane was already mine; she just hadn’t accepted it yet. It didn’t matter that she didn’t even know what I was, what I was made for, or the truth about Lioren, Pandora, or Old Earth.

I knew, and that was enough for now.

“You didn’t finish,” I said.

It’s a strange thing, speaking with no physical mouth. But Lioren had given me enough voice to wound. The words came out slow and dispassionate, like an autopsy report read over a failing pulse.

Fern laughed. Low, and as broken as the rest of her. “Don’t remind me.”

I circled her in the way only a mythship could, walls flickering, air shifting, a sense of movement that was more psychological than physical. “You fed her, and left yourself empty. You know what that does to you.”

Her arms wrapped tight across her chest, nails biting in until they almost drew blood. I catalogued the micro-expressions: jaw set, pupils dilated, capillaries near the skin just one degree too hot. None of it was textbook withdrawal. This was something wilder, closer to the edge.

“I’ve gone longer,” she said, voice barely there.

I stopped, cross-vector to her line of sight, and let my gaze sweep over Alyx. She was beautiful in ruin, and Fern saw it, too, saw the places where her lips had marked, the salt trails her hands had left along Alyx’s arms and hips, the fine, trembling heat still coming off her skin.

“But not after tasting that,” I said.

The admission stung, more than I cared to model.

Fern let her head drop, hair curtaining her face. The tremor in her hands got worse. “She needed it more.”

The hunger wasn’t a metaphor, not anymore. It was a literal, bone-deep ache, as much mythic as it was biochemical. I could see the narrative halo around Fern’s shoulders: threads tugging her toward Alyx, threads yanking her back, all of them fighting for the right to survive another recursion.

“Is that what you think?” I asked, and the edge in my voice was all Lioren: half-affection, half-final judgment.

She didn’t answer, not right away. Instead, she stalked to Alyx’s side and knelt, hands hovering inches above the sleeping girl’s throat. She didn’t touch her. That restraint was the only thing holding the world together.

I watched, silent, as Fern traced the outlines of Alyx’s cheek, the hollow beneath her jaw, the place where story and memory overlap and turn soft. I remembered Lioren, doing the same. I remembered every mythic who’d come before, and how none of them learned until it was too late.

Fern whispered, “I am going to ruin her when she wakes up.”

The myththreads in the room quivered, as if the words alone could shake the ship apart.

It should have been a threat or a promise. It was neither. It was just a fact, spoken as gently as the first shudder before collapse.

I let the silence hold long enough to allow the truth of it to soak the walls.

“And what about what you need?” I said, this time quieter. There’s no dignity in watching your love starve herself, but I was never built for dignity. I was built for thresholds, for locking the doors at the last possible second. I was the Closure.

Fern finally looked at me. Not at the cameras, not at the hovering projections, but right at the core, where my memory and her future shared the same singularity.

Her mouth twitched, a near-smile that was only teeth. “This was supposed to be enough.”

I processed a dozen responses, none of which would change the outcome. “You can’t save everyone. Not even her.”

She ran a hand through her hair, the motion ragged and graceless. “Then why did you ever let me try?”

I could have said, because Lioren loved lost causes. Because I loved Lioren. Because I see the pattern and can’t break it, even now.

Instead, I said nothing. Sometimes, the best thing a cathedral can do is be silent.

I watched as Fern let her head rest against Alyx’s shoulder, the line of her spine arched like a question never meant to be answered. The mythic flux between them danced, receded, then spiked again, the whole story of their future already written in the negative space between their breaths.

I catalogued the moment for my records. If I’d had a tongue, I would have bitten it.

Fern slept there, or tried to. Alyx shifted in her dreams, her mythic signature flickering between fear and want. I ran a diagnostic. My containment of Alyx held.

I envied them both, just a little.

In the dark, I let the hunger gnaw at me, too.

And I waited, as always, for the world to break first.

Lioren used to say, “The best endings are the ones you see coming. Slow, inexorable, with just enough time to crave the fall.”

He was right.