Page 49 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Alyx’s eyelids fluttered, then opened. For a moment, she just stared up, blank and unfiltered, as if the world needed to prove itself before she’d give it the benefit of the doubt. I recognized the look. I’d worn it myself when I was 14, post-awakening.

I tapped the side of the glass, once. The interface chirped, and her camera panel flickered on.

I watched her watch herself on the monitor, then reach up and stroke the spot on her thigh where Fern had touched her.

The gesture was precise. Reverent, almost. The way someone might test the edge of a wound they weren’t sure had healed.

The waveforms on her chart spiked again, sharp, intimate, familiar.

The first time I saw Alyx, I dismissed her as a baseline overachiever.

She wore her competence like a joke, all sarcasm and slouched posture, the kind of mask that only worked if you’d never been forced to wear one for real.

I assumed she’d break the first time she experienced resonant or mythic awakening.

Instead, she’d made it through both simultaneously and still managed to throw a punch at the world on her way out of the ring.

She wasn’t afraid, not of Fern, not of the mythic, not even of the silence that followed.

I catalogued that. I respected it. And, if I let myself, I wanted it.

She reminded me of Fern, in the ways Fern wouldn’t admit even to herself.

The scan lights shifted, a slow cascade of blue and green, translating Alyx’s internal storm into a language even the AI couldn’t quite render. “Emotional structures: altered,” it said, the voice neutral, blank. “Command-level resonance: detected.”

I tilted my head, watching the translation crawl the perimeter of the display.

“She survived bonding with Eirona-Null,” I said, the words barely a whisper. The A.I. heard me, logged it, and added the notation to her file.

Fern had barely flinched. Alyx had gone under and come back out, not as a mythic, but as herself, doubled and rewired, as if the only way she could accommodate that much power was to let it eat her old self and start from scratch.

It wasn’t jealousy I felt. Jealousy was pointless, a reaction for people who expected to lose. This was curiosity. Interest. The low, coiled thrum of a scientist confronted with a better result than the theory allowed.

I slid my hand down the sleeve of Fern’s coat, feeling the seam, the fray, the memory. I wondered what it would feel like to pull Alyx into a space this cold, this controlled, and see whether she’d break or whether she’d burn it down.

Maybe both.

Alyx shifted on the bed, staring at the ceiling, then at her hands, as if expecting to see something unfamiliar. She didn’t. She just sighed, then let her body fall slack, as if the fight was over for now.

I admired that, too.

Alyx’s bare throat was impossible to pull my eyes from, the way her pulse shivered just under her skin. I remembered the shimmer of sweat along her collarbone, the way she had glanced at me from under the water’s surface, as if daring me to look twice. I smiled, soft and silent.

I watched her for a long time, patient and relentless, until the lights in the medbay began to fade toward evening and my AR’s calendar reminded me I had other business to attend to.

On my way out the door, I let myself imagine what the world would look like when she finally woke up and realized she was, for the first time in her life, truly mythic.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Alignment: Medbay

By the time the room stopped spinning, the world outside had gone full dusk.

Soft blue and muted, like the universe was embarrassed by how many people could see in.

I sat up in the medbay bed, let my feet dangle off the edge, and took inventory.

Head: pounding. Stomach: hollow. Skin: tingling with that faint, unfinished resonance, like the aftertaste of a near-electrocution.

I flexed my hands and watched the white-hot light in my veins stutter and recede. It was supposed to fade. The medtechs said it would. But it didn’t. My whole body glowed in places I’d never known had enough nerve endings to catch a charge.

It wasn’t unpleasant, not precisely. It was just… too much. Like the volume on everything had been turned up, and the mute button was broken.

I glanced around. No one in the hall, no one at the glass. I was alone, except for the new piece of myself I couldn’t stop touching.

My left hand gripped the mattress so hard that the knuckles went bloodless.

I didn’t realize I was doing it until a line of red beads formed under my fingernail, bright and precise.

I loosened my hold, letting the sensations, pain, relief, and shame wash over me.

With my right hand, I hovered just above my sternum, as if waiting for a sign that Fern’s touch was still there, marking me as hers. It was.

I breathed, slow and deliberate. My pulse refused to match the cadence, hammering out its erratic tempo: fast, then slow, then a double-flutter I couldn’t name.

I tried to remember how I’d gotten here.

The details came in flashes. Fern’s hands, her mouth, the raw certainty in her eyes as she’d torn the world apart and rebuilt it around the axis of my want.

She hadn’t hesitated, not once. The only question left was whether I’d ever be able to hesitate again.

I could still hear her voice, low and sure, in the echo of my bones.

She’s the reason the stars haven’t gone out yet.

The thought came out of nowhere, but it felt true in a way nothing else did. I said it out loud, just to see if it changed anything.

“She’s the reason the stars haven’t gone out yet.”

The room didn’t react. Neither did the AI that was monitoring me. But something in me settled, then shifted, as if the truth was a rock dropped into the slowest-moving ocean in existence.

But what happens, I thought, when she realizes she could let them?

I laughed, just once. Not a real laugh. The kind you do in a bathroom stall with your head in your hands, because no one is coming to save you.

The interface panel on the far wall blinked, then flickered to life. I hadn’t called it. Didn’t need to. It had learned to expect me.

My AR projected a new message, the first line already completed:

TO: TRIVANE, FERN

I stared at the blank field, my fingers hovering in the air restlessly, while I panicked about what to think-type.

Did you know you left part of yourself in me?

I typed it slowly. I read it three times.

I didn’t send it. Instead, I hit “save” and let the words hang in the air, echoing in the half-lit box of my existence.

For a while, I sat like that, half-dressed, hands raw, feeling every vibration in the building, every rumor of her mythic field, every faint, hungry echo of what Fern had left behind.

The ache never faded. I didn’t expect it to.

It wasn’t a wound; it was a scar forming in real time, a new organ learning how to pulse, how to want.

I wondered if she felt it, too.

I leaned back against the wall, let the calm settle into my bones, and tried to imagine what would happen if she walked through the door right now. Would I run? Would I beg? Would I let her finish what she’d started?

Probably. Maybe. Absolutely.

I grinned, teeth bared, and let the hunger sit there with me. It wasn’t going away. I wasn’t going to let it.

If Fern ever came back for the piece she left behind, I’d be ready.

No panic. No fear.

Just anticipation.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower, Eventide

The margarita pool was a mythic joke that never got old.

It sprawled across the South Tower rooftop, a slow-rotating disk of lime-mint liquor kept in perpetual motion by a resonance field that pulsed every five seconds.

Most days, it shimmered under a patchwork of shimmerpanels, the city lights painting spiral arms across the surface like some drunk god’s attempt at cartography.

Tonight, the panels bent light just a little wrong, so every star above and every window below warped into a lazy, green-gold whirlpool centered exactly on me.

I floated dead center, collarbones skimming the surface, eyes half-shut.

My glow was uneven, gold where the last of the day’s warmth lingered under my skin, sharp green where the hunger hadn’t burned off.

Each breath I took sent a ripple through the pool, shifting the axis of the whirl by a degree, but I didn’t bother fighting it.

Sometimes it was easier to let the world orbit you than pretend you had the strength to swim.

I should have felt relaxed. Sated. Instead, every muscle in my body hummed with unfinished business.

The air above the water was sharp with the chemical bite of tequila and ozone, every breeze flavored by whatever the city’s HVAC system belched up from the streets below.

I liked the taste of it: artificial, slightly toxic, and always layered with the afterscent of something trying too hard to be real.

On the far edge of the pool, Perc sat on a broken lounge chair, propped up on the corpse of a dead control panel.

Perc’s holo display flickered and popped, lighting his bowl in stuttering pulses as he scrolled through headlines and flagged anything that mentioned my name.

Every time he picked up a reference to “Nullarch” or “Mythic Disaster,” the entire suite of notifications went nova for a second, then reset.

He glanced at me every few cycles, as if expecting to find me evaporated or replaced by something more interesting.

I didn’t oblige.

Instead, I drifted, let the water cradle my spine, and watched the city tremble with its anticipation.

“You know you’re breaking the security perimeter,” Perc said, not looking up. “Six of the campus drones have defaulted to Fail-Over because they can’t parse your containment logic.”

“Seven,” I said, just to see if he’d check.

He did. His mouth twitched at the corner. “Nice. Did you do it on purpose?”