Page 48 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Location: Medbay, Eventide Athenaeum

The first thing I noticed was the light.

Not the clinical glow of the medbay, or the nervous shimmer off the containment glass, but the way it invaded my body.

Every photon that hit my skin left an afterimage on the inside of my eyelids, crisp as a digitized burn.

I blinked, but the world didn’t snap into place.

Instead, it stretched, time and sense fanned out into a thin white noise that hummed all the way down my spine.

They’d stripped me down to the disposable gown—standard procedure, I guess, when you might be contagious with myth.

The fabric stuck to my chest, staticky and scratchy, and the IV in my arm pulsed along to a rhythm that had nothing to do with my heartbeat and everything to do with the subtle, electrical purr of the bed’s diagnostic grid.

I could feel it: the grid’s algorithm running microcurrents through my back, mapping me like a coastline.

Each pulse drew out a version of myself that was both more and less than human.

I lay there for a long time, pretending I didn’t know why the diagnostics kept stalling at 99%. Pretending I didn’t see the error flags looping in the periphery of my vision, projected just high enough in the HUD to make me dizzy if I looked directly at them.

The medbay was a box of obsidian glass and soft-walled silence.

Only the necessary equipment: isolation pod, three- point monitor, a single row of chemical suppressants lining the side tray like tiny glass grenades.

I counted them—nine, all full—and the act of counting steadied my hands enough to let me flex my fingers.

They felt swollen, too hot, like the air was thickened just for them.

I tested my voice. “System. Water.”

Nothing, at first. Then a slow, deliberate click as the room’s neural net debated whether I was fit for liquids. The dispenser unlatched, the sound a little too loud, a little too deliberate, and filled a plastic cup with exactly 225 milliliters of water. Not a drop more.

I drank, even though it tasted like memory. My own, or someone else’s.

For a long time, nothing happened. The world went on, indifferent to my existence. I watched the condensation bead on the cup, each droplet shining with the promise of entropy. I thought about letting one run down my arm, see if it would sizzle or dissolve or just stick like a badge of failure.

Eventually, the door hissed open. A medtech. She wore her nervousness like a second badge, the corners of her lips turned down just enough to suggest she was bracing for impact. She kept her gloves on as she checked the IV, even though protocol said direct skin was safe post-containment.

“Vitals are good,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “How’s your head?”

I ran a hand through my hair, then realized half of it had fused into a single, unbreakable wave. I shrugged. “Feels like someone poured a bowl of instant noodles into my cerebellum and then set it to max soak.”

She tried not to smile. It didn’t work. “That’s a common complaint.”

“Bet you get a lot of complaints in here.”

The medtech adjusted the drip, eyes still on the numbers. “You stabilized faster than anyone expected. The Headmistress is… impressed.”

I snorted. “That’s one word for it.”

She nodded, then hesitated, just a second too long. I caught it.

“You don’t have to be scared,” I said, rolling my shoulders. “I’m not going to explode.”

She looked up, and for a moment the professional mask cracked, showing the raw, scared kid underneath. “They said the last one talked a lot, too. Before she… before the walls started to go.”

I grinned. “If I go, you’ll be the first to know.”

The lights dimmed, just a hair. It was subtle, but I felt the air thicken, the dampeners kicking in as my heart rate crested the threshold. The medtech saw it, too, her eyes flicking to the readout, then to me.

“Are you in pain?” she asked.

I thought about it. My body felt stretched, like I’d been growing for hours, days, but the real ache was deeper. “Not pain. Just… noise.”

She fiddled with the drip again, then smoothed her gloves, lingering on the motion. “Would you like a sedative?”

I shook my head. “I want to feel it. Whatever it is.”

The lights brightened again, the system’s uncertainty mirroring her own. She cleared her throat. “The last thing you said, before you lost consciousness—”

“Yeah?”

“You said, ‘tell her I survived.’”

I almost laughed. “She won’t believe you.”

The medtech half-smiled, then punched a note into her pad. “Rest. If you need anything, page.”

She left. The door slid shut, and the absence she left behind filled the room like a second, denser air.

I laid back and let myself breathe, listening to the pulse of the building through the walls.

Under the artificial silence, I could hear the wiring, the conduits, the flex of thermal expansion and the minute oscillations of the dampening field.

My brain catalogued each one, mapped it, then filed it away for later.

I was aware of every atom in the room, and for the first time, the awareness wasn’t a burden. It was a map.

But under all that, another sound: a low, steady hum, familiar but not. The echo of someone else’s presence. A hunger.

I put my hand on my thigh, right where Fern’s hand had been.

I told myself I was just remembering. But the warmth lingered, impossible and permanent, like a brand.

I traced the spot, found it tender, not quite a bruise but close.

I pressed harder, testing whether it would fade.

It didn’t. If anything, it pulsed back, alive under my skin.

I closed my eyes and let myself replay the moment.

The way Fern had touched me—not rushed, not desperate, but with the kind of certainty that said she could have taken more if she wanted to.

The restraint in it, the promise. I tried to remember if I’d begged, or if I’d just surrendered.

The difference seemed important. I decided it didn’t matter.

I rolled over, face buried in the pillow, and let my body ache.

I waited for the System to suppress the feeling, to drown it in the chemical nothing they always prescribed for new mythics.

It didn’t. The System just let me hang there, vibrating on the edge, every sense tuned to a frequency I hadn’t known existed.

I was hungry. But not for food.

I grinned into the pillow, the memory of Fern’s mouth on my skin like the aftershock of a good decision.

Maybe it was a warning. Maybe it was a promise.

Either way, I wasn’t scared.

I was ready for more.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith Axis Alignment: Observation Chamber, Above Medbay

The observation chamber was built for judgment.

Every angle of it calculated for maximum detachment: glass that curved a full hundred and eighty degrees so that you could monitor every patient and visitor at once; floors that repelled dust and emotion alike; a climate system tuned to keep the room always two degrees colder than you wanted.

If you stood at the correct mark, you could watch the whole mythic ward without ever seeing your reflection.

The design was efficient, honest, and merciless. I appreciated that.

I stood at the centerline, arms folded, gaze on the bank of displays streaming Alyx’s vitals in real time.

The data was elegant, her resonance spike mapped as a symmetrical, looping waveform, then overlaid with a second, messier pattern: half echo, half interference.

The medical AI flagged it as “aberrant but stable.” The mythic panel tagged it “UNCLASSIFIED (pending recursion).” I could have lost myself in the math, but I didn’t care about the numbers. I cared about her.

From up here, she looked small. Human. Her chest rose and fell with the slow, deliberate pace of someone fighting every breath for control.

Even in sleep, she was in the process of becoming something more.

I remembered how she’d looked in the bath, a creature of warmth and motion and contradiction, skin reflecting the pool’s gold and blue like she’d been designed for that exact spectrum.

My hands twitched, the nerves in my left pinkie still recalibrating from the cold.

I pulled Fern’s coat tighter around my shoulders, not because I needed the warmth, but because it gave my body something to do while my mind ran in circles.

The coat shouldn’t have fit me as well as it did.

Fern was shorter, lighter, but the garment felt weighted, loaded with memory.

It smelled like her: ozone, the faint hint of engine grease, and under that, the sweet-sour trace of synthetic cherry.

I told myself I’d worn it up here because it was the nearest thing at hand, but my fingers kept finding the places where the seam had come loose, the patches she’d repaired with bite marks and sticker glue.

A little piece of entropy, stitched together with bad intentions.

If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine it smelled like Alyx, too.

A technician entered, arms full of printouts and a tablet blinking with notification after notification.

She set them down without a word, checked the calibration on the neural dampeners, and hurried out.

I could see the pulse in her throat, frantic, scared.

The staff all had that look now, ever since Fern’s trial. It amused me.

Alyx’s chart spiked, there, right there, in the transition from REM to waking.

Her body stiffened, then slackened, and a visible shiver ran from her toes up to her collarbones.

The mythic feed flashed red, then immediately corrected itself: a system built for disaster learning, for real-time forgiveness.

I leaned in, watching her hands clench, relax, then grip the bedding with a desperation so raw it almost felt like violence. She didn’t cry out. She just existed, furious and alive.