Page 54 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Thread Modulation: HoloNet Axis Alignment: HoloNet
—[HOLO-NET]—
The news anchor’s face split in two. Literally—not a metaphor, not a scandal, but a failure of the backbone server as it tried to render every emotion at once and gave her two mouths: one screaming, the other trying to carry on with the teleprompter.
“—never before witnessed, not in Accord era, not in the archives—”
Cut to raw feed: the Eventide skyline, South Tower burning with a blue-white corona.
Then the feed jittered, pixels trying to find purchase on a story they weren’t coded for.
The disaster drone hovering near the epicenter spiraled, caught in the updraft, then snapped a perfect 8K closeup of the Tower detaching from its roots, floating for a full minute before thunking back into place.
On every channel, the banner ran in a thousand languages—
EMERGENCY: ASTRAL SIGNATURE OVERRIDE / EVENTIDE SYSTEM
A split screen:
—Academics at the Athenaeum, faces slack, some with tears.
—The House of Antellan, live from their panic room, head-of-house sobbing into a comm, then hitting the mute and running both hands through their hair.
—A data-witch on the Lower Reach, arms thrown wide, cackling, “It’s real! It’s so real!” as followers collapsed in fits of joy and/or epilepsy.
The Accord’s official HoloNet feed tried to restore order. The system avatar—a gently-glowing androgyne with the voice of a bored god—materialized, only to glitch so hard it spawned three avatars at once. All of them spoke:
“SGR 0418+5729. Primary Event. Twin Convergent. Repeat: twin convergent, Class SGR.”
Cut to a religious channel. The priest tried to finish a prayer, but the walls behind her melted, the stained mythglass pouring down in rivulets of glowing code. Her lips formed the word “Lioren,” but the broadcast censors blanked it with a sound like someone biting down on a live wire.
Data scrolls at the bottom of every display.
“NEW CONVERGENT IDENTIFIED: DYRIS TRIVANE (AGE 27)”
“INCIDENT WITNESSES REPORT: FERN TRIVANE / NULLARCH PRESENT”
“EFFECTS: UNKNOWN. DURATION: UNKNOWN. OUTCOME: ———”
Somewhere in the Vellari system, a flotilla of mythic cultists threw themselves out of an airlock in what the ticker described as a “Symbolic Gesture.” Half survived; the rest trended for an hour before being replaced by a meme of Fern and Dyris photoshopped onto a pre-Accord honeymoon beach.
—[ON THE GROUND / street cam footage / Eventide Core]—
A crowd gathered around the South Tower, heads craned.
All of them blinked tears from eyes that couldn’t process the afterimage left by the event.
A teen in the front row, snot down her face, screamed, “IT HURT SO GOOD!” and the crowd echoed her, every voice harmonized by a glitch in the mythic grid.
—[IN THE ASTRUM]—
Black: the void, pulsing with hunger.
White: the detonation, the spike, the new pattern.
Inside the churning event horizon of SGR 0418+5729, every sensor, mythic or mundane, recorded a single, perfect moan. Not a scream, not a wail, just a long, rapturous “ohhhhhh” that rippled through the galaxy at the speed of truth.
The mythic archives tagged the sound with the caption:
“First ever. Not the last.”
—[HOLO-NET: EVENTIDE COUNCIL EMERGENCY SESSION]—
Twelve mythic dignitaries, all at once, tried to out-shout each other. The chair, a silver-haired old monster in a neon sash, banged the table until it dented. “We can’t let this spread! We have protocols!”
A junior staffer whispered: “But it’s already trending. It’s… viral.”
Silence. Then, a single, trembling voice:
“Do you think this is how the Accord ends?”
The chair said nothing, just poured herself a drink and watched the city lights flicker from blue-white to something she’d only seen once: a color without a name.
—[WORLD FEED SUMMARY / SYSTEM ALERT]—
[MYTH-RESONANCE EVENT DETECTED]
[CANDIDATE CONVERGENCE: TRIVANE x TRIVANE]
[INTERPRETIVE STATUS: MUTUAL BOND CONFIRMED]
[AGE AT EVENT: 27, 19]
[PRIMARY VECTOR: SGR 0418+5729]
[COMMENT: “IS THIS A MARRIAGE? MAYBE. WHO'S TO SAY.”]
[FILED UNDER: UNPRECEDENTED | FLAGGED FOR MYTH REVIEW]
The feed blinked out.
For a long, giddy minute, the world ran in silence, as every person, program, and ghost in the Accord stared at the new mythology burning its way onto their screens.
And in the afterglow, a little girl somewhere whispered, “It’s real,” and the city wept with her.
—[SYSTEM: RESUME PROGRAMMING]—
But nothing was the same.
Thread Modulation: Kaela Vaelith Axis Alignment: Vaelith Estate, Tenevar Prime
Kaela Vaelith woke to the sound of three marriages dying, one sex scandal igniting, and at least six major houses going into threat posture. All before breakfast.
She sprawled on the marble lip of her penthouse bath, legs bare and hair matted to her scalp by the sweat of an all-night comms bender.
Around her, the air was thick with the perfumes of burnt citrus, old lust, and the kind of high-grade ethanol they didn’t even try to bottle anymore.
Her glass—tall, heavy, hand-cut— held a quarter-inch of the most expensive thing she could still taste.
It shimmered with that blue you only get from void-aged grapes and a total disregard for moderation.
The AR feeds above her head were a mess.
Some overlays still stuck on last night’s drama: a royal wedding dissolving on live stream, a hostile merger between two bloodlines, a rant from a cousin in exile.
But every new feed crashed in, battling for focus, all of them jittering and lagging like the world’s finest minds had been replaced by sleep-deprived bots.
Kaela swatted the old feeds away with a lazy finger, then let the fresh ones stack, side by side, a parade of beautiful idiots screaming about the mythic event.
At 08:44, the System Alert came through.
She didn’t even read it at first. She just stared at the subject line, then cackled so hard she snorted the rest of her drink out her nose.
The text, big and bold:
CANDIDATE CONVERGENCE: TRIVANE / TRIVANE
She let the words burn a hole in her retina, then read the fine print:
[INTERPRETIVE STATUS: MUTUAL BOND CONFIRMED]
[AGE AT EVENT: 27, 19]
[PRIMARY VECTOR: SGR 0418+5729]
[COMMENT: "IS THIS A MARRIAGE? MAYBE. WHO'S TO SAY."]
[FILED UNDER: UNPRECEDENTED | FLAGGED FOR MYTH REVIEW]
Kaela howled, voice shredded from the night before but still loud enough to make the glassware shiver.
“Trivane x Trivane!” she said, to no one but the soapy water and her own ghost. “Oh, you absolute chaos demons. You unhinged, incestuous, narrative-destroying starlets.”
She read it again, then rolled over and slapped the System panel on the wall, queuing up her own public commentary before the rest of the Accord’s leeches could dilute the take.
She typed, one thumb, eyes blurry:
Trivane x Trivane. God help us all.
She considered a meme, maybe a screenshot of Lioren’s infamous “why not both?” face, but she wanted the purity of the raw message.
She hit send, then watched as the feed lit up.
She could feel the response, the way a mythic animal senses an earthquake seconds before the dirt shakes: first a ripple, then a rumble, then the whole world falling in on itself.
Within seconds, the reblogs, quotes, and meme remixes started. First from the expected set—her own family’s retinue of spooks and gossips, the Concord’s media sharks, the mythos humor channels. But then, like a second pulse, from the places that really mattered:
- The Accord’s own news office, “seeking comment.”
- The House of Antellan, “demanding a cease and desist.”
- The cult of the Black Helix, “praising the marriage of null and void.”
- A pack of junior mythic analysts, slicing apart her comment and spinning out ten thousand words of analysis in real time.
Kaela basked in it.
She set her glass down, wiped the sweat from her neck, and pulled her bathrobe on with the practiced indifference of someone who’d been both the cause and the cleanup crew of too many legendary messes.
She wandered to the window, looked out over the city’s ever-glowing veinwork, and let herself laugh, a dry, delighted sound.
“You Liorened her. You absolute menace,” she said, picturing Fern—her runaway mythchild, her favorite little antihero—out there somewhere, making the Accord’s best and brightest melt down on live feed. “This is the act of a man who impregnated a moon.”
She poured another glass—more out of habit than need—and tossed it back. The burn hit her like old memory.
On a whim, she spun up the live social feed.
The trending topic was already “Trivane x Trivane,” climbing faster than last year’s assassination attempt on the Accord head.
The first meme had gone up before she’d finished her own post: Fern and Dyris in bridal combat gear, locked in a gravity-well of marital ambiguity.
Kaela snorted, then slouched into her chair, watching as the notifications lit her skin in neon blue. She let the bath cool around her, let her hair get even messier, let her voice go completely.
At some point, she remembered she’d promised to hate Fern, or at least make her pay for the last disaster, but it was hard to feel anything but pride.
She leaned back, glass in hand, hair wild, bathrobe clinging to her ribs, and watched the mythosphere burn itself clean for the second time in her life.
When the first interview request from the cult of the Black Helix came in—asking if she’d officiate the inevitable “wedding”—she laughed so hard she nearly dislocated her jaw.
“Oh, the cults are awake already. That was fast.”
She didn’t bother replying.
She just let the world run, content to know she’d had a hand in making it so gloriously, catastrophically ungovernable.
Just the way she liked it.
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower
In the aftermath, the room was a cathedral for silence.