Page 63 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

I knelt beside Fern, one hand on her breast, rolling the nipple between my fingers until it stood hard and swollen.

I leaned in, licked a stripe up her throat, then bit down, hard, just below the jawline.

She gasped, the sound raw, and for the first time all day her mythic signature flared wild and uncontained.

She was close. Too close.

I pressed my lips to her ear, voice low and dangerous. “Don’t come yet,” I whispered. “Not until I say.”

Fern whimpered, but obeyed, the muscles in her thighs going rigid as Alyx drove her closer and closer to the edge.

I looked down at Alyx. She was a mess—face flushed, hair in chaos, sweat glistening on her shoulders. I reached over, grabbed her by the braid, and yanked her up for air.

She gasped, lips shiny, nostrils flared. “What?” she panted.

“Open your mouth,” I ordered.

She did, tongue out, eyes wide and hungry.

I spat in it, not out of malice, but as a gift—a trace of Fern’s taste, a sample of what she was never going to beat.

Alyx moaned. My nipples ached. Then she dove back down, attacking Fern with renewed purpose. I watched, delighted, as she redoubled her efforts, alternating between tongue, fingers, and the occasional desperate hum that vibrated through Fern’s entire body.

I could see the tension building. Fern’s hands clawed at the towel, legs kicking out, abs fluttering under the pressure. She was holding on by will alone.

I decided to make it harder.

I reached down, touched Alyx’s shoulder, and let my mythic field roll over her. She gasped, then shuddered as the energy rippled down her back, tightening every muscle, making her nipples pebble even harder. Her full, dark, nipples were already standing proud and desperate for touch.

I smiled. “You want me to have a taste?” I asked.

Alyx looked up, face slick, breath hot. “Yes,” she whispered.

I pulled her up, guided her into my lap, then buried my face in her tits, biting and sucking until she was moaning, her whole body shaking with need. Fern watched, her own eyes burning, hips lifting off the towel as if she needed to see every second of this.

I pressed Alyx down, forcing her back to work on Fern, but kept one hand tangled in her hair, the other roaming down her back to cup her ass, squeezing hard enough to leave marks.

For a minute, all three of us moved in perfect sync—Alyx licking Fern, me teasing Alyx, Fern writhing under both. The tension in the air was so thick it felt like the whole city might snap in two.

I decided to break it.

With a simple flex of my mythic resonance, I levitated Alyx off the ground, flipped her upside down, and held her hovering over Fern’s thighs.

Alyx’s tongue still worked, but now her front was exposed.

Her dark nipples looked painfully hard, and she was so wet beads started to trickle down the crease of her hips.

I crawled up and straddled Fern’s face again.

This time, I faced Alyx, and Fern’s hands pressed painfully into my ass and hips.

I pressed down hard, grinding my clit against her tongue with enough force to bruise.

Fern gasped, then licked, the rhythm now wild, desperate, her hips bucking as Alyx, still floating, resumed licking her clit, recovered from the distraction of me stretching above Fern.

I grabbed Alyx’s tits. They were almost obscenely big, compared to Fern’s slight chest and my modest bust. I ran my thumbs over Alyx’s hard nipples, lifted my hips so Fern could see. Fern panted beneath me, a low, dangerous groan emerging from her throat.

I leaned forward, cupped Alyx’s breasts, and sucked and bit at both her nipples like they were a chew toy. Alyx whimpered louder than Fern. Under me, Fern was trembling, close, and Alyx saw the moment to strike. She attacked Fern’s clit with the desperation of a last-ditch attack.

I ran my tongue from Alyx’s tits up her navel, shifted my hips again so Fern had to watch, when my tongue extended in what felt like slow motion, and the assault of my tongue’s rough papillae on Alyx’s clit broke both women.

Fern cried, arching and spasming. Raw, mythic resonance bled from her like light from a sun, the wave molded by her tongue against my clit, pushing me into an orgasm that turned the world white. I, the vicious bitch that I am, continued to stroke Alyx’s clit with my tongue throughout all of this.

Poor Alyx got hit with the resonance after it traveled through my body, and she detonated like an atomic bomb. Her juices covered my face, her body shuddered, and she collapsed, ruined but triumphant.

Fern had come. We all had, but I most of all, not out of greed, but out of Fern’s obstinate refusal to make anything easy.

We were locked together, a single unit of want and release, the boundaries between our bodies erased by the force of what we’d just done.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower, Eventide

We didn’t even try to untangle. Three bodies, six arms, too many legs—every one of them sticky with sweat, mythic fallout, and the kind of afterglow they don’t let on HoloNet.

The air in the training room was too thick to breathe, each exhale a fresh scandal of ozone, salt, and old gym mats.

The floor under us might’ve still been spinning, but I couldn’t be sure, since Dyris had my left arm and Alyx’s thigh was pinning me to the towel with ruthless, sleepy efficiency.

We lay there, steaming, for what felt like a decade of postwar reconstruction.

Dyris moved first. She pushed up on her elbow, grimaced at the line of drool on her bicep, then looked down at me with the same face she’d used to sign the ceasefire at Vireleth: regal, tired, a little bit smug, but mostly just satisfied she’d won. Again.

“That,” she panted, voice cracked and beautiful, “is why I’m top of the food chain.”

Alyx, face buried sideways in my stomach, made a sound halfway between a giggle and a scream. She peeled her cheek off my skin, blinked once, then let her gaze focus on the ceiling and nowhere else. “You’re not even top of the towel,” she muttered. “I can’t feel my legs. Is that normal?”

“Only if you did it right,” I said, and Dyris gave me a look so loaded I actually felt it hit my teeth.

We were all going to be sore tomorrow. Maybe forever. But the moment had its own gravity, and none of us was in a hurry to break orbit.

Alyx wiggled her toes. “Is this what mythic stasis feels like?”

Dyris snorted. “No, stasis is more boring. And you don’t sweat through two towels.”

“It’s a three-towel minimum,” I said, eyes closed. “Ask any janitor.”

We could’ve basked in it, but the hunger was already building. It’s like that, after the first round: the body wants more before the brain even finishes cataloguing the wreckage.

Dyris noticed. She glanced at my hands, saw the way my knuckles flexed, the blue-white pulse already climbing my wrist, and for a second her expression flickered.

“Don’t even think about it,” she warned.

Alyx rolled to her side, pressing her face to the mat, and groaned, “She’s thinking about it. Oh god.”

I reached for the next word, found it in my throat, and let it out:

“Again.”

Silence.

Dyris froze, her perfect lips open in the middle of some biting comeback. The color drained from her face, only to be replaced by a slow, spectral blush that ran ear to ear. Alyx went wide-eyed, then scarlet, then somewhere past ultraviolet, and started to laugh—but the sound was all panic.

“Oh no,” Alyx said, half giggle, half genuine fear. “No, no, no. I am not equipped for round two. I need electrolytes and, like, a full diagnostic. And probably holy water.”

Dyris shook her head, the motion so sharp I heard her neck crack. “Absolutely not. I have appointments. With people who won’t liquefy me.”

“Liar,” I said, but she was already trying to stand.

Alyx tried to follow, but her knees buckled and she collapsed into a puddle on the floor. “Okay, I think I’m dead. Someone tell my parents.”

Dyris scooped up her shirt, tried to put it on, then realized it was inside out and just clutched it to her chest instead. Her eyes never left mine, and for a second, I thought she might stay. Might let the pull win.

But then she muttered, “We need to shower before she figures out how to anchor us.”

Alyx, still horizontal, managed to roll off the towel and toward the exit. “Last one there gets… whatever’s left of her.”

I watched them go, the void of their absence instantly heavier than the bodies themselves.

The towel beneath me was ruined, the floor a crime scene.

But I didn’t move. Couldn’t. The hunger had shifted, deepened, turned from heat to something colder, older.

Like the aftershock of a gravity wave: all the violence spent, but none of the pull gone.

I lay there, breathing, watching the mythic residue drift in lazy spirals above my head. It was almost pretty. Like snow, if snow could hum.

That’s when I felt it.

A shiver, not in the air, but in the bones of the world.

A thread, so thin it was almost imaginary, slicing through the edge of reality.

My vision fuzzed, and for a second, the world tilted thirty degrees left.

My ears rang with a high, sharp whine—like the time the paint mixer at Pelago exploded and coated the whole block in glitter and lies.

I closed my eyes. The thread sharpened, the pitch rising, the taste of it on my tongue so raw and bright I almost choked.

She was here.

Not in the room, not even in the building, but somewhere just outside the event horizon of my mind. Aenna, the red echo. She was bleeding into my world, a ripple at the edge of the pool, a note so pure it made my teeth ache.

I smiled, lips parting on their own.

“Found you,” I whispered.

And then I reached, with everything I was, and pulled.

The world twisted, once, then again, then started to fall toward me.

Black holes don’t chase their prey.

They just wait for the universe to come home.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower