Page 51 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower

Dyris’s quarters were supposed to be off-limits to everyone but disaster response.

That made sense, given the quarter-megaton of containment wards woven into the frame, the micro-singularity that hovered in the sub-basement, and the fact that last time I broke in, the door spent a week apologizing to the rest of the building.

But this time, I didn’t even have to try.

I stepped through the seal like light through old glass.

The security arch barely bothered to flicker, just shuddered, then reset behind me, the air in the gap re-welding itself with a magnetic snarl I felt in my teeth.

Not a click or a slam, but something more permanent.

Like the room wanted me in and didn’t plan to let me out.

Dyris stood at the far end of the chamber, silhouetted against an arching window. Her war silk hung open, the folds shifting as she moved, if she moved. Hair still damp from whatever cleansing ritual she’d practiced after the last diplomatic bloodletting. She didn’t turn. She never needed to.

The rest of the suite was empty of witnesses, though the air was thick with the kind of hush that made even the furniture think twice before creaking.

The walls were mythstone, black, threaded with platinum, and curved up and in, funneling every stray photon toward the window where Dyris held the city at bay.

I let my boots tap a little too loud on the way in, just to prove I hadn’t died overnight.

Each step pulled the room’s gravity a fraction sideways.

The floor sloped under me, subtle but definite, like it wanted to pour me forward and keep Dyris grounded where she was.

I rolled my foot, found the balance, then lost it again because the only way to stay upright here was to let the place own you.

I didn’t speak. Words would have been an insult, or worse, a stall tactic.

Dyris spoke anyway. Her voice was so low I felt it before I heard it, a vibration that started in my ribs and worked up.

“Do I have to beg for a goodbye this time?” She didn’t move. “Or do you only steal exits when no one’s watching?”

If she’d stabbed me, it would have been easier. She was always like this, sharp as a law and twice as binding.

I could have played coy. Could have deflected, made a joke, blamed the Accord or the Astrum or even Alyx.

Instead, I let the silence stretch. I could feel her sense it, taste the way my mythic signature threatened to blow out the dampeners.

The walls fuzzed at the edges of my vision; little arcs of static ran along the mirror frames, spidering out like veins.

“I’m not here to leave,” I said, finally. My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded like the room’s. “Not tonight. Not you. Not ever.”

She exhaled, and that was all the invitation I needed.

I came closer. The gravity bunched under my heels, threatening to flip, but I let it.

My body hummed, not with violence, not with the old hunger, but something else.

Something newer, stranger. I wanted to break the place open, but not in the way I used to.

This was not entropy. This was… maybe the opposite. Did that make it creation?

My hands flexed at my sides. I watched my fingers: the glow there was not starlight, not the blue-white I’d bled into half a dozen mythscapes. This was darker, denser. The kind of light you only got when you squeezed photons until they begged for release.

Dyris didn’t turn, but she tensed, just a fraction. I felt the change in her posture, the way her hands went from relaxed to ready. She could have killed me if she’d wanted to. She could have triggered some fail-safe and ended the room, or even the tower, with a word. But she didn’t. She waited.

“You’re losing restraint,” she said. It was a warning, and a dare.

I clenched my jaw, then relaxed it. “If you wanted restraint, you’d have married an accountant.”

She snorted, but it was almost a laugh. The air in the chamber thickened, curdling with tension.

It didn’t help that my coat was already unraveling behind me.

Threads tugged free, rising in slow spirals that reversed gravity, then time.

Each filament glowed, then faded, then rebuilt itself, only to dissolve again.

I couldn’t make it stop, so I just let it happen.

Dyris watched it in the glass. She always had a thing for peripheral vision.

“You’re making a mess,” she murmured.

“I was born for it.”

She let her head tilt, a single bead of water trailing from her temple down her cheek. I wanted to catch it with my tongue, wanted to draw the line with my teeth, but the room was already on the brink, and I wasn’t sure the window would survive the pressure.

She turned, at last.

Her face was raw and perfect and impossible, lit from behind so her eyes flashed silver, her lips that impossible myth-red.

“If you’re not here to leave,” she said, “then what?”

I bit the inside of my cheek, hard enough to taste blood. “To stay. Maybe to see if I can.”

She nodded, then stepped forward. Barefoot, as always. Her feet didn’t make a sound, but every move was loaded, deliberate. When she stopped, we were only a breath apart.

“I’m not prey,” she said, voice so soft it made my skin crawl. “If you eat me, I’ll eat you back.”

My hands shook. Not with fear. Not even with want. Just with the need to make something—anything—out of all this ache.

“That’s not what I came for,” I said.

She reached out and touched the back of my hand. Her fingers were colder than mine, but only because she’d learned how to bleed off heat into the world, not because she lacked it.

She ran her thumb along the bone of my wrist, slow.

“Then show me,” she said. “Show me what else you’re good for.”

I exhaled, my body shuddering with the force of the containment. The gravity in the room popped, then reset.

I wanted to break her, but only so I could see if she’d pull herself back together, or if I’d have to do it for her.

“I’ll show you,” I promised.

The resonance in my spine threatened to split me.

Dyris held my gaze, unblinking.

“You always do.”

The unraveling threads of my coat whipped around us, framing her face in a vortex of reverse entropy.

She smiled, the barest curve at the corner of her mouth, and I let myself fall.

Into her. Into the room. Into the singular, perfect disaster we’d both been waiting for.

The gravity dampeners screamed, then died.

The next breath was only hers.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith Axis Alignment: South Tower

I moved first.

I crossed the gap barefoot, the floor nothing but suggestion by now, and slapped Fern across the face—not to hurt her, not to humiliate, but because it was the only language the air would let through.

The slap landed, sharp and bright, but I didn’t let her recoil.

I caught her jaw with my palm and pulled her in, the ache of all those half-finished touchpoints finally closing into a circuit.

She made a sound, half laugh, half snarl, and when she reached for me, the whole room spun.

Gravity didn’t fail. It forgot which way to point.

We toppled together into the center of the suite, tumbling through the low-drift bedding field I’d spent years engineering to be myth-resistant, which was hilarious, because it gave up the fight as soon as Fern’s mass hit it.

We bounced, hovered, lost all orientation but each other. She was heavier than she looked, or maybe I was just lighter than the history that bound us. Either way, it was a relief to let the air have us.

Clothes don’t mean much at our level of contact.

You can’t undress a mythic without peeling the skin, too.

But Fern’s shirt and mine both went up in a puff of static, seams unzipping themselves as our torsos collided.

My war silk fused to her chest, burned away by a pressure differential I could taste in my teeth.

Her hands tore at my back, but not to possess, just to find leverage, to keep from flying apart.

She kissed like a girl who didn’t trust her mouth, as if she opened too wide, something in her would slip out and never come back.

I let her lead. She needed to. When her lips broke from mine, she didn’t hesitate.

She bit hard enough to draw blood, and then tongued the wound closed in a single, perfect loop.

The pain wasn’t the point. The point was that she knew I’d take it. The point was that I needed to be marked.

Her hands landed on my hips, fingers splaying, the warmth of her palms outpacing the mythic energy still radiating off her skin. She pulled me in, then up, as if she wanted to fold me around her spine and wear me like a shroud. I let her. I always had.

Our legs tangled. I felt her knee slip between mine, and suddenly she was straddling my thigh, grinding with a need that didn’t belong to anyone else on the continent.

If I’d been human, I might have died from the contact, but I wasn’t.

I was Dyris fucking Vaelith, and I’d been peak human even before I became the Nullarch’s Sexretary.

She was trying so hard not to hurt me.

I wanted to hurt.

I leaned back, let the bedding field catch us, and pulled her down so her chest was flush to mine. Her breasts were smaller than you’d expect from the stories, but her heart was not. I felt it, pulse for pulse, right through the sweat and whatever remained of the shielded mesh.

She clawed at my sides. I laughed, and the vibration made her grind harder, frantic and wild. I arched, letting my ribs open up, offering the softest parts of me as a dare.

Her mouth found my throat. She sucked, then bit, and my vision dotted with black and white. I moaned, louder than I meant, but the suite was soundproof and the tower already on lockdown.