Page 53 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

She worked her way down, tracing the curve of my ribs with her teeth, licking the sweat from my belly, nuzzling my hips until I was shaking again. I opened for her, wanting nothing but to be filled, and when she slid her fingers into me again, I nearly screamed.

Her touch was ruthless. She curled her fingers, pressed her thumb to my clit, and moved with the confidence of a surgeon and the cruelty of a lover who’d already broken you and was just putting you back together for the fun of it.

Her other hand pinched my left nipple so hard I saw blistering stars across my vision, a whole spiral arm of the Milky Way.

I came instantly. The pressure in my gut exploded out, all that white hole energy blasting through my body, out my mouth, out my skin, out into the mythic grid that bound the Accord together. I came so hard I couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even remember my name.

The sparkling lights in my vision spelled a name, and that name was my whole existence.

I sobbed it into her hand as I came: “Dyris. Please. Dyris.”

She bit my thigh, right at the soft inside edge, and I felt myself go again, a wave so deep it shook the bedding field and knocked us both into freefall.

She pulled me to her, cradling my head to her chest, rocking me until my pulse slowed and I remembered the shape of my bones. She kissed my forehead, then my eyelids, then the ruined edge of my mouth.

When I looked up at her, she was glowing, literally: her skin sheened with sweat and light, her eyes shot through with silver threads, her face the face of someone who had found the reason the world was worth saving.

I saw an asteroid shower in her eyes. I felt an asteroid shower form above Eventide. We’d created a celestial phenomenon by fucking. No, Dyris had made a cosmic phenomenon, I’d lain there and gotten fucked with a ferocity that wasn’t punishment, but rescue in its most violent, honest form.

I shivered all over.

“You’re impossible,” I said, voice hoarse.

She smiled, then leaned down, whispering so softly I almost missed it.

“So are you.”

The South Tower drifted back down, settling into its old footprint with barely a jolt. The world outside spun on, none the wiser, except for the women waking wet and the weather systems still hunting for their storm.

We lay there, tangled, neither willing to let go.

If I’d died in that moment, I wouldn’t have noticed.

I’d already become something new.

The only thing I was hungry for now was her.

And maybe—if the world was stupid enough to let us—another seven minutes of peace before it tried to kill us again.

I pulled her down, lips to mine, and let the fusion take us both.

It was the first time in my life I’d ever wanted to stay.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith Axis Alignment: South Tower

At this altitude, the world never really moved. It only shimmered, suspended on a hinge between disaster and desire, the sky stretched so thin even the stars looked like they were straining to see what we’d do next.

We hovered, the Tower, I, and Fern. No alarms, no intervention, not even the usual clatter of drones outside the mythglass, just the slow, sublime hush of two bodies curled around a secret that had outlived a thousand generations.

From the window, the city’s lights blurred into a river, and the river into a seam of blue-black, and that seam into a void that, for once, didn’t seem hungry enough to swallow us whole.

Fern lay on the bedding field, motionless except for the tick of her pulse and the drift of her breath.

She glowed in the half-light, skin glossed with sweat and the delicate shimmer that only true mythics ever managed to keep after climax.

Her hair fanned around her head like she was the center of her godless solar system, which, in fairness, she was.

The war silk underneath her had melted into the sheets, scorched here and there by the mythic heat of our bodies, evidence of collision in every tangled fiber.

She looked up at me, lips parted, hands still twitching, as if she was waiting for permission to be real again. I gave it.

I dropped to my knees beside her and pressed my cheek to her chest, feeling the wild stutter of her heart. For a while, I did nothing else, just listened, mapped her new rhythm, let my own body slow and sync to the beat she’d set. There was no cruelty left in me, not now. Only devotion.

“You broke me open,” I said, voice barely a murmur. I kissed her sternum, soft. “Now let me show you how the pieces burn back together.”

Her laugh was a wreck, shattered glass and old music. “Don’t,” she tried to warn, but I wasn’t taking requests.

I traced the line of her collarbone with my tongue, then down, across the pale slope of her breast. I took her nipple in my mouth, sucked until it pebbled, and then bit, light, just to remind her I was still the one writing this scene.

She arched, not in protest but in renewed hunger, her hands finding the back of my neck and pulling me closer.

I worked lower, slow, savoring every inch. I licked the sweat from her ribs, bit the soft skin above her hip, pressed kisses to the places where her old scars still lived. Each kiss a vow, each breath a prayer, each moan from her a verse I wanted to memorize for when the world went cold again.

When I reached her pussy, I didn’t hesitate.

I nuzzled between her thighs, breathing deep the scent of us, the memory of everything we’d just survived.

She was wet, impossibly so, slick with the runoff of every mythic circuit we’d tripped.

I lapped at her, long and slow, letting my tongue explore the heat and the ache until she started to shake, her thighs quivering on either side of my head.

She grabbed my hair, desperate now, her words dissolving into raw noise.

I went harder.

I sucked her clit, circled it with my tongue, then plunged two fingers inside her, curling them until I felt the spot that made her cry out.

She writhed, hips lifting off the bed, her body weightless but somehow more anchored than ever.

The mythic energy came back, rippling through her muscles, making every inch of her flash with white and blue and every color she’d ever swallowed.

She came, and the world noticed.

Outside, clouds that had been gathering suddenly vanished, leaving the sky sharp and clear.

Satellites reoriented to the Tower, as if the whole planet wanted to witness this.

Somewhere, birds rose from the trees and circled the city in tight, insane spirals.

In beds and boardrooms and dive bars across the Accord, people climaxed: alone, together, sometimes in confusion, always in awe.

Fern moaned, long and loud, the sound of a star collapsing and birthing something brighter in its place. Her legs locked around my shoulders, then spasmed, then went limp.

I crawled up her body, kissing her throat, her jaw, the salt-bright corner of her mouth.

She was crying, tears bright as mythlight. She didn’t hide it, didn’t even try.

I kissed her again, slow, and held her until the shaking stopped.

She whispered something I almost didn’t catch. “Don’t let go.”

“Never,” I said, and meant it.

I held her face in my hands, thumbed the tears away.

“You’re not a star, Fern,” I said, letting the words cut us both. “You’re the sky that refused to stay still.”

She laughed again, even more wrecked than before, and this time I saw the girl she was before the myth, before the hunger, before any of us learned what it meant to want.

We lay there, skin to skin, pulse to pulse, breathing as one. The world drifted further, the Tower still unanchored, but for once, it felt safe to float.

Below us, the city slept and dreamed of us.

In the far-off orbit, the stars rewrote their charts, measuring time from this night instead of any that came before.

For a while, we just breathed. In. Out. In. Out.

I listened for the next disaster, but none came.

All that remained was Fern, and me, and the silence that had always wanted to be filled with something holy.

We did our best.

And if the rest of the world woke up aching and confused, so much the better.

They would never be able to forget us.

We’d made sure of that.