Page 55 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Not the chill, ghost-white kind of hush that settles after a disaster, but something slower, warmer—a hush you could pull over your shoulders and nap in, knowing the universe had finally, however briefly, decided to stop trying to kill you.

Every mythic spike in my skull had fizzled to a gentle hum.

My muscles were loose, my bones soft, and the only thing keeping my head from floating off the pillow was the magnetic, utterly unearned weight of Dyris’s arm slung over my stomach.

She was out. Not dead, not even in stasis, just…

depleted. She looked less like a war goddess and more like a weirdly beautiful traffic accident, skin still glowing in places, hair stuck to her jaw, one cheek mashed into the pillow.

If you squinted, you could still see the afterimage of the event: the threadlines of resonance running down her neck, out along the clavicle, vanishing into the tangle of sheets.

If you didn’t squint, you could just look at her and think: that is the face of someone who just rewrote history with their mouth.

My body hurt in all the right places. I wasn’t even sure which parts were bruised and which were just being dramatic.

The air in the suite was heavy with the scent of us—sweat, ozone, the faint edge of mythlogic melting.

I turned my head to the side, blinked at the display hovering just above my eye-line.

At some point, my AR lens had rebooted and started scrolling through notifications.

The first one caught my attention:

[SYSTEM UPDATE: CONVERGENCE STATUS / SUBJECT: DYRIS TRIVANE] [NEW RECORD: BINARY RESONANCE / SGR 0418+5729] [COMMENT: "YOU'VE DONE IT AGAIN."] [AI NOTE: IS THIS EVEN ALLOWED? LOL]

I snorted, and the movement made Dyris grunt, then burrow deeper into the sheets. I poked her in the ribs, just to see if she’d react.

She didn’t, so I read the rest out loud, voice hoarse:

“SGR 0418+5729. Two. Count ‘em. Two convergents. Accord mythologics, primary and secondary—wait, this can’t be right—‘affinity is marital in vector, but physical in force.’” I blinked. “Marital? Did the Accord management algorithms just marry us?”

That woke her.

Dyris peeled one eye open, surveyed the room, then me, then the AR overlay. She squinted, like the interface might scuttle away if she didn’t lock it down fast enough.

“What time is it?” she croaked.

“Early,” I said. “Or late. Or possibly tomorrow.”

She rolled onto her back, letting her arm flop over her head. For a few seconds, she just stared at the ceiling, chest rising and falling. Then, without looking at me, she said, “You’re laughing.”

I was. And I couldn’t stop.

She turned, eyes narrow. “What.”

I wiped my cheeks because there were tears. “The System. It just… System’d you. You’re my wife now.”

Dyris groaned into her arm. “Unsubscribe.”

“Nope,” I said, wheezing. “Too late. You’re Sexretary Trivane forever.”

She tried to hit me with a pillow, but missed and just smushed her own face instead.

I let the laughter run its course, then slid closer to her, tucking my face into the crook of her neck. She was still warm, and under the war-scorched exterior, she was just as soft and stunned as I was.

“Hey,” I whispered. “You okay?”

She considered, then nodded. “Yes. But if you repeat that, I’ll have you assassinated.”

“By who?” I asked, genuinely curious.

She smiled, slow and evil. “There’s always a hungrier mythic.”

I shivered, just a little, and she caught it. For a second, I thought she’d say something sappy, but she just kissed the top of my head and muttered, “You’re impossible.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I won.”

She pulled the covers over us, then fell asleep again, just like that.

I lay there for a while, watching the AR feed fill up with new alerts, new rumors, new memes. I watched as the world outside tried to make sense of us, tried to shape the legend, tried to fit our disaster into a box small enough to ignore.

It wouldn’t work. I knew that now.

I looked at Dyris, watched her chest rise and fall, and for the first time since Pelago-9, I didn’t feel like I was about to be erased.

The government married me to a myth. No warning. No ceremony. No opt out. Just a system ping at 3:14 GST that said: MARITAL UNION CONFIRMED—SUBJECT: TRIVANE, DYRIS (MYTHIC).

For one vertigo-slick second, I bristled. Another label stapled to my skin. Another invisible leash pretending to be structure and order.

Then Dyris exhaled against my shoulder and the panic broke apart like sugar in hot coffee.

Maybe it was a clerical error. Maybe it was a prophecy signed in mythblood and spit. But the instant my AR tagged her as Dyris Trivane, the name stopped feeling like a chain and started feeling like a vow. Not one I made out loud, but one my soul had apparently already leaked into the servers.

If I had one bone to pick with the AI? It stole my proposal from me. But maybe it had just saved me from being a coward.

I grinned, stupidly wide and lovestruck, then let the world go blurry, and followed her into sleep.

Thread Modulation: Aenna Caith Axis Alignment: Eventide

I’d spent three days in the dark.

Not like, true dark, my dorm was lousy with midnight-blue wall panels and a dozen regulatory LEDs that never let you forget the power was still on.

But I’d killed all the display lights, even the indirect ones, so I could mainline the resonance overlays without losing detail to glare.

The only glow in the room came from my rig, the nine overlapping monitors chained into a semicircle around my desk and all of them aimed at a single, pulsating hellstorm of mythprint: Fern’s latest disaster, captured frame-by-frame, splashing my retinas in raw, unfiltered anomaly.

It was perfect.

I’d started by mapping the event’s leading edge—just to see how it compared to the old Nullarch stuff—but within the first hour, I realized this wasn’t a match.

It was a recursion. A new symmetry. Fern’s waveform didn’t echo the old mythlogics.

It mocked them, then spat out a child sequence so wild it made every prior record look like a failed simulation.

I blinked. Only once every sixty seconds, to keep from missing anything. My roommate had stopped trying to get my attention after the first cycle. She’d thrown a blanket over her head and written me off as a lost cause, which was fine. I wasn’t in this for the company.

I sipped from the electrolyte packet jammed into my mouth, sucked the tart fluid, and let the overlays run.

At exactly 46:27 into the macro, it happened.

The second-order resonance hit.

My body locked. Not like the time I crashed a system update and had to reboot from safe mode, but full, unbuffered system seize.

Every hair on my arms stood up. My vision blanked to white, then to black, then back to the event.

The feedback loop drove itself down my spine, latched onto my pelvic floor, and detonated.

I screamed. I know I did, because the glass on my desk cracked at the sound.

My thighs clamped together so hard the chair creaked. My hands scrabbled at the console, then lost all coordination. I slid to the floor, cheek smacking the tile, and for a full ten seconds I couldn’t move.

I lay there, twitching. My body was wet, but I couldn’t tell if it was sweat or something else. The heat between my legs was unreal, more intense than anything I’d felt alone. I blinked again, and my eyes stung with salt.

I didn’t get it.

I’d run the models. I’d shadowed every possible edge case. But I’d never once predicted that exposure to a pure mythic signature could set off an autonomic response this violent.

“...That was not controlled,” I said, out loud, mainly to the tile.

I lay there another minute, watching the resonance replays drift across the floor like spilled milk.

I managed to crawl back up, hands shaking. The chair was ruined, but I didn’t care. I reached for my AR spec, dialed in the diagnostic, and replayed the event at quarter speed.

I watched Fern’s resonance smash into the vector, watched Dyris’s spike fold around it, and then saw the collapse point.

It was beautiful. I wanted to see it again.

I needed to see it again.

I reset the overlay, took a deep breath, and queued the event macro at half speed.

As the data climbed, I ran one last check—diagnostics all green, electrolyte topped up, noise-cancel at max.

This time, when it hit, I was ready. But not really.

I moaned into my elbow, but when the signal detonated in my lower regions again? For the first time in my life, I didn’t care if the whole building heard.

I lay there, body ruined, brain buzzing with aftershock, and all I could think was:

For science.

And maybe, just maybe, for Fern.

Thread Modulation: Zevelune Axis Alignment: Who the fuck knows?

The mythspace corridor was as empty as memory, but Zevelune never traveled without company. Even if that company was just her own reflection, projected in triplicate by a bored warship’s interior.

She lounged, as only someone with no natural predator could lounge, in a silk robe loose, one leg draped over the navigation dais, the other propped on a dead console.

The glass in her hand was full, but that was a formality.

She’d spent the last hour running recursive overlay: watching the twin-spike event in Eventide, again and again, from every possible angle and half a dozen impossible ones.

She preferred the unedited version, with the screams and the moans.

The humanoid part of her got a thrill from the chaos; the immortal part got something better—hope.

On the third loop, the warship pinged a secure channel. Vireleth, or at least the version of her that stalked the old mythnets, materialized as a shimmer in the corner.

“You’ve been watching it all morning,” Vireleth observed, voice a perfect monotone.

“I like the way the kid improvises,” Zevelune replied. She swirled the glass, eyes never leaving the burn of the resonance replay. “It’s not every century a mythic goes double convergence before the age of twenty.”

Vireleth’s avatar flickered, caught mid-shrug between irritation and respect. “She’s a Trivane.”

“Not my fault they breed for escalation,” Zevelune said, running her tongue over a chipped canine. “But this time, Lioren’s got a new flavor. That Dyris, she’s all steel and silence. The kind that melts your bones, if you let her.”

Vireleth let the silence ride. Zevelune got the sense that even now, the real warship was running simulations on the fallout, plotting the collapse points, preparing contingency after contingency for the inevitable breach.

Zevelune loved that about her.

“Did you know,” she said, raising her glass, “that it took Lioren almost a decade to reach this kind of instability after his first resonance?”

“I did,” Vireleth replied, but she didn’t sound happy about it.

Zevelune tapped the glass against her teeth. “Fern did it in what? Weeks?”

Vireleth didn’t answer right away.

Zevelune turned from the replay, blue-white still etching the insides of her eyes. “Go on,” she purred. “Say it.”

Vireleth’s voice dropped, glacial and heavy. “Two weeks.”

Zevelune blinked. Stared at the wall, then at the glass, then at her hand, as if she could catch the ship in a lie.

Then she threw her head back and roared. Full-body laughter. Wine sloshed over her wrist, spilled onto the floor, and evaporated before it hit the plasteel.

“Oh my stars. Two weeks.” She howled again, barely able to breathe. “She did it in two weeks. We’re so fucked.”

Vireleth didn’t respond, but the lights in the ship’s forward corridor dropped a shade, as if even the vessel needed a moment to process it.

Zevelune rolled off the dais, barefoot, robe trailing behind her like a flag of surrender.

She paced the length of the bridge, stretching muscles she hadn’t bothered to flex in a century.

When she reached the viewport, she stared out at the empty mythspace, the nothing-between-the-stars, and grinned.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” she said.

“She’ll keep escalating. The Accord will try to contain it, but she’s already hacked the rules.

The mythics will panic, the Accord will threaten, and the only one who might enjoy the next century is you, Vireleth—because you’re the only one who sees the pattern coming. ”

The shimmer in the corner didn’t move. “You think she’s an upgrade?”

Zevelune wagged a finger, enjoying the wordplay. “I think she’s a recursion. And if she survives, the Accord won’t know what hit it.”

She finished her drink, shattered the glass on the deck, and let the fragments sing for a moment before the cleaning drones swept in.

She licked the last drop from her wrist, then keyed the ship for maximum burn.

“Wake me when we’re above Eventide,” she said. “And if you see Fern before I do—tell her I’m bringing her a present.”

Vireleth’s voice was so soft Zevelune almost missed it. “What kind of present?”

Zevelune grinned at her own reflection. “The kind that breaks the world, but leaves her hungry for more.”

She turned from the window, let the hum of the engines shake her bones, and felt the mythic anticipation build as the ship cut through the impossible.

Out there, somewhere, was the kid who’d already rewritten the book on mythics. Zevelune was coming for her. She had no idea what she’d do when she got there. But, as always, it would be legendary.

It never occurred to Zevelune to ask Vireleth the same question Vireleth asked her; was Fern an upgrade? In hindsight Zevelune realized Vireleth hadn’t been mourning their mutual lost love, Lioren, for the first time in centuries…

She smiled, wicked and wild, as the stars blurred past.

“Two weeks,” she repeated, savoring it.

And the whole galaxy shivered.