Page 50 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
“Not really,” I said, but it wasn’t a lie. The hunger did most of the work now.
He set his holo aside and watched me float. I could tell he wanted to ask about the trial, about the aftermath, about whether I felt better or worse, but Perc had never been the type to tiptoe around the answer he wanted. He just stared, silent, until I started to feel like a specimen.
He said, “You look unsatisfied.”
“Because I am.”
“News said you collapsed the city’s mythic field for a full point-eight seconds. That’s longer than the Accord has on record.”
I shrugged. “It didn’t feel long enough.”
This time, he used a curious-cranky face gif.
“You ever going to talk about it?” he asked.
“Nothing to say.”
“Could have fooled me.”
We sat in that silence for a while. The pool’s rotation slowed, then sped up, matching my mood. I wondered if Alyx was awake yet, if she could feel it when the world bent just a little bit to the left.
Perc resumed monitoring the holo again. “They flagged her at Tier One,” he said. “Triggered alerts on twelve systems. Eighteen more are watching for resonance drift.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s not dead.”
“Better than average,” I said, smiling.
He smiled back, but it was thin. “You know, all this chaos, and you still look like you want to eat the moon.”
“I didn’t get to finish,” I said. The pool darkened at the core, water contracting as the resonance pulled tight. I felt the echo of the touch I’d left behind, the part of myself still spinning somewhere in the medbay, waiting to be claimed.
Perc didn’t push. He’d seen enough mythics spiral to know when not to poke the beast.
A shadow crossed the pool, elongated by the rooftop lights.
Dax appeared, barefoot, towel draped over his shoulders, carrying three drinks balanced between his hands and chin.
He didn’t even blink at the warping space.
He just walked it, like it was another broken hallway in a city he’d already learned to survive.
He set the drinks on the edge of the pool, then dropped the towel and sat next to Perc. His gaze was sharper than Perc’s, but softer around the edges, as if he was already in the process of forgiving me for whatever I’d done.
He handed me a glass. It was my favorite: fake lime, extra salt, zero dignity.
“You look terrible,” he said.
“I feel worse,” I said, but I took the drink anyway.
He watched me for a long time. I could see the math in his eyes, the way he added up every gesture, every skipped heartbeat, every microexpression. Dax had never been the type to mourn. He was the type to measure the loss, then build something out of the ruins.
“Is this the fallout you wanted?” he asked.
I let the question hang in the air, then shook my head. “No. But I didn’t stop it.”
He nodded, as if that made sense.
Perc sipped his drink, then nudged Dax with an elbow. “She wasn’t just fallout, though.”
“No,” Dax said, not looking away from me. “She wasn’t.”
“You’re still bound to her,” Perc said, looking me dead in the eyes with his stupid pixelated display. “It’s not going to fade.”
I didn’t bother to deny it.
We sat like that, the three of us, for a while. The only sound was the slow churn of the pool, the distant whine of the city, and the faint, persistent buzz of the HoloNet’s never-ending meltdown.
Then, without warning, the shimmerpanels blinked and threw a newsfeed directly across the pool. The Trivane household AI had overridden the privacy settings, which meant something truly disastrous had gone down.
Mavros Antellan appeared, live, the man’s face twisted in high-res anger as he ranted about “resonance dilution” and “baseline contamination of astral lineage.” The AR tagged the feed as originating from the North Spire Gala, somewhere I’d never heard of, but it sounded smug and expensive.
“Bloodline audits should’ve caught this trash before she was allowed to bond,” he spat. “Astral resonance isn’t a charity—”
Off-camera, Dr. Thurnis’s sleeve blurred past the mic.
“You mean it’s not for girls who didn’t crawl out of your ivory fuckcradle,” she snapped. “Keep your vanity fetuses and gene-purity cosplay to yourself.”
A pause. A crash. The feed caught the moment a wine glass shattered against Mavros’s head, then switched to shakycam chaos as the brawl spilled into a VIP corridor.
“Already viral,” Perc said, not impressed.
“That’s a firing,” Dax said, shaking his head.
I sipped my drink, watched the city flicker, and said, “No. That’s a promotion. Somewhere worse.”
Dax, still watching me, asked, “You’re going to pull this tighter, aren’t you?”
I smiled, not cruel but honest, the way I did when I knew there was no point pretending I was any different from the legend they’d made me.
“She’s going to wake up soon,” I said, voice soft. “And when she does… everything changes again.”
For a second, nobody said anything.
I raised my glass, let the rim catch the distorted light, and wondered whether the taste would ever be enough. The pool spun a little faster, reflecting the city in a million fractured pieces, all of them more real than the last.
I didn’t drink. I just held the glass, watching the spiral, and waited for the world to catch up.
Eventually, it would.
It always did.
Thread Modulation: Aenna Caith Axis Alignment: Eventide Athenaeum
I spent my first week in the Vitrine with blue ink under every fingernail.
The Astral Archive Overflow had a humidity problem, a secret society of admin-bots, and a smell that reminded you every artifact in here was dying by degrees.
My borrowed lab coat belonged to a graduate two years gone.
It was pale blue, fraying at the sleeves, one shoulder stained with what I decided was a hero’s blood.
It fit too loosely, but the badge worked on the doors, and no one in the Convergence program could be bothered to remember anyone below postdoc.
I pulled the sleeves tight, blinked twice to recalibrate my AR overlays, and stood half-immersed in a mist of projection light.
Twelve independent thread windows flickered across my left eye, every one a fresh attempt at explaining what the hell I’d witnessed in the resonance chamber last night.
The other eye was reserved for the real stuff: the charts I’d drawn, the equations I’d scrawled across the edge of the desk, the exact curl of Fern Trivane’s mythic waveform, which I’d copied and pasted and copied again, just to make sure it wasn’t a hallucination.
I muttered, “It’s recursive… but sympathetic, not harmonic.” The projection didn’t respond, which was rude, but at least it didn’t judge.
“She shouldn’t exist in this tier,” I said, testing the phrase. “But I heard it.” A pause. “I heard her call back.”
I adjusted the glasses on my nose, tapped the side to bring up the audio overlay, and let the captured waveform repeat, slow and clear, through the bones of my jaw.
It was a perfect spiral of want, the kind of signal you didn’t get in baseline physics.
It wasn’t even mythic, not by any Accord definition. It was something else. It was her.
A passing admin-bot trundled up, its tray balanced with little vials of synth tea. “You are exceeding the wellness protocol for post-resonance observation,” it said in the polite monotone of the permanently unfazed. “Would you like a beverage?”
“No,” I said, waving it off. “Just leave the tray.”
It complied. I barely registered it. The main monitor behind me had begun to hum in time with my pulse, which was either a hardware bug or another anomaly worth writing up.
I scribbled a note in the margin of my chart: CORRELATION VS.
CAUSATION, and underlined it twice, even though I already knew the answer.
Every surface in my cubicle was covered in printouts, most of them obsolete before they finished rendering.
I’d started drawing Fern’s resonance signature freehand, just to see if I could, and discovered I liked the feel of the stylus, the way the blue ink stuck to my skin and didn’t fade for hours.
I retraced the waveform, the steep angle where she’d shattered the mythic buffer, the strange, impossible echo that followed, as if she’d left a shadow of herself in the world.
On the biggest screen, the pattern pulsed: raw, corrupted, but beautiful. It was not public. It was not legal to access. But I had it, and I wasn’t going to let go.
“I’m going to Converge,” I whispered, not as a dare but as a fact. “And she’s the only proof I need that it’s possible.”
A shadow flickered at the edge of the projection field, a student, unfamiliar, maybe just as lost as me. He hesitated, then sidled up, hands in pockets.
“Hey,” he said, eyes darting from me to the screen, “isn’t that—?”
I didn’t look at him. “Yes. And no. It’s what’s left of her, folded between event signatures.”
He blinked. “That’s… okay, you’re obsessed.”
I considered this, then nodded. “Obviously. What else would I be?”
He made a sound, half a laugh, half a question, then backed away, like he’d already learned it was safer not to get too close to mythics-in-progress.
I adjusted my glasses, stared at the waveform, and thought about what it meant to exist at the edge of your own recursion. Fern had done it. She’d shattered the tier ceiling, broken every simulation, and still found a way to call back.
I wanted that. Needed it.
My overlays went to static, every window closing at once. The projection mist thickened. My pulse spiked, just a hair, and every screen in the cubicle flashed the same pattern:
PING: NULLARCH SIGNATURE DETECTED
I froze.
For a nanosecond, something looked back: an eye of light, wide as a galaxy, so full of gravity it threatened to swallow the room whole.
It was her. Not Fern, not the myth, but the thing behind both, the hunger that built the world and wanted to remake it.
It saw me. I saw it. The room shuddered, every plastic surface humming with power, my own hands shaking with the rawness of the connection.
My glasses almost fell off. I caught them, gasped, and started laughing. Not out of fear, but pure, perfect delight.
She was real.
And so was I.
I wiped the blue ink on my lab coat, ignored the blood beading where I’d gripped the stylus too hard, and started writing again, faster this time, certain that if I just chased the waveform far enough, I could catch up.
I would see her again. I would survive it. I would not look away.