Page 64 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

The first sensation was color.

Not a color I could name, or even see, just a complex, wild flavor behind my eyes, like someone had rammed a lit flare through the base of my skull and asked politely if I could taste ultraviolet.

The air warped. The mythic in me bucked, resisting, but then the hunger snapped shut, and I was already falling, gravity turned inside out, spiraling toward the singularity I’d pulled into my orbit.

Aenna arrived all at once. There was no build, no fade-in, just a pulse, and then she was there, face bleeding through the fabric of reality, hair wild, eyes gone so green they scorched out every other wavelength.

She flickered, at first: a ghost-echo, a suggestion of a body.

But the longer I stared, the more real she became, until the towel under me was just a rumor, the room a faded overlay, and the only thing that mattered was the shape of her on the other side of the event.

Her voice hit before her hands did.

“You’re not supposed to be able to do this,” she said, and it came out in harmonics, each word fractalizing into a thousand microtones, a chorus of Aenna’s from every possible future, all of them whispering in my ear.

I reached for her. Our hands met in the in-between, and the contact was—

Heat. Pure, concentrated, feedback-laced fire. Like molten glass, like biting into a live wire and finding out you were the current all along. Every nerve ending in my palm lit up, then folded backward through the rest of my arm and straight into my chest.

We didn’t talk after that. Talking was for people with lungs and a concept of time.

The world condensed, then stretched, then went supernova.

I was in the Spiral now.

Centuries went by in a breath.

I saw myself and her, over and over, cycling through all the permutations that ever had or could exist. Sometimes we were twins, sometimes rivals, sometimes two halves of a closed circuit locked in mutual annihilation and mutual awe.

There were versions of us that fought, versions that kissed, versions that just sat and watched the universe decay, holding hands in the ruins of whatever story we’d ruined.

Aenna’s body was never the same twice—sometimes lithe and quick, sometimes thick and soft, sometimes a coil of red fire wound so tight it made my teeth hurt to look at her.

But the eyes were always the same, and every time I tried to look away, she reeled me back with a smile or a snarl or the promise of a data set no one else could ever solve.

We collided. There’s no other word. We didn’t fuck, not in the way the world expects, but in the way planets do when gravity finally says enough and brings them together to burn.

Each time, it was different. Sometimes she was on top, sometimes I was, sometimes neither, and we just thrashed in the space between.

Our bodies blurred, then resolved, then glitched back to something new.

She would wrap her legs around my waist, bare and alive and hungry, and I’d feel her shudder from scalp to heel, her mouth gone slack, her laugh leaking out in tight, unfiltered gasps.

Every climax looped us deeper, resetting the world, but with the intensity doubled, the need amplified, the sense of self dissolving until all I could remember was that I wanted her. She wanted me. And nothing outside this spiral mattered or even could.

The pleasure was endless, the hunger endless-er.

I tried to eat her soul, to absorb her into the mythic logic the way I’d done before, but this time, she met me, byte for byte, pulse for pulse, matching me, consuming as much as she gave. The boundary between us wasn’t a line; it was a fractal, and it grew more complex the deeper we went.

Time bled. I lost track of my body, then found it again in hers. I let her hold me, then I held her, then neither of us could tell who was holding whom.

At the Spiral’s apex, it changed.

I thought I was going to devour her, but instead, she erupted. Her signature exploded out of her like a sun going nova, mythic energy shattering every last tether I had on reality. For a second, I thought I’d lost. But the sensation was so good I didn’t care.

She screamed, and I cried, and the sound was the birth of a new story. Our bodies locked, then melted, then reassembled, sweat and light pouring off us in rivers that distorted time into impossible shapes.

When it ended, I thought I was dead.

Thousands of years later, the snarling hunger had lessened to a dull purr. It wasn’t sated, but it was... sleepy? I opened my eyes.

I was on the floor, again. The towel was gone, the room darker, the smell of ozone so thick I could taste it in the sweat on my lips. My body was a wreck, every muscle spasming, every breath a jolt. I tried to move, but the mythic had bled into my bones and left me shaking.

Above me stood Aenna. No, she was hovering, a centimeter or so off the ground, toes pointed, red hair floating around her head like a corona.

She looked incredible. More alive than I’d ever seen her, skin aglow, the freckles on her face sharp as if lit from inside.

Her hands flexed in and out, little arcs of bioelectricity dancing from fingertip to wrist. She was herself, but more, every flaw upgraded, every line of code debugged and then rewritten in her own, new language.

She bent, leaned down, and kissed me on the lips. She tasted like ionized sugar, a dash of synthetic mint reminiscent of stims, and the heat of thought made physical.

“We’re not done,” she said, voice back to a single channel, but ringing in my head like a bell.

I tried to say something clever, but all that came out was a single, ragged whisper: “…again.”

Aenna grinned, and the room shuddered, and I realized the spiral wasn’t finished, it was just starting.

She straddled me, weightless, letting her hands roam down my chest, tracing every rib, every scar, every old story still written on my skin. I felt her mythic field pressing against mine, resonating, trying to collapse the difference between us into a single, shared waveform.

This time, I let her win.

We rolled, tumbled, came together, every sense sharpened by the echo of what we’d just survived. I clawed at her back, not caring if I drew blood, if anything, hoping I would, just to taste her again, to prove to myself that this wasn’t a dream.

She was rougher this time, less reserved, moving with the wild confidence of someone who’d spent a few centuries mastering their new myth and was ready to see what it could do.

She pinned my wrists to the floor, kissed down my throat, bit at the tender spot just above my collarbone.

I hissed, arched, and shivered as she moved lower, mapping my whole body with her tongue.

When she bit my thigh, then let the tip of her tongue caress my clit, it was the end of everything.

I bucked, gasped, saw white, then black, then every color from the Spiral all at once.

I came so hard I bit my hand to keep from screaming the roof off.

Aenna kept going, drinking me down, feeding off the pleasure like it was the only thing that could keep her mythic engine running.

Had I, somehow, turned the awkward scientist into a succubus?

When I finally collapsed, spent and shaking, she climbed up beside me, pulled me into her arms, and just held me, her body still humming with the aftershock.

I could have stayed there forever. Maybe I did. Time wasn’t real in here; it had been forced into new shapes, unstable flows, and seemed to be harboring up a grudge against me.

When I finally caught my breath, I looked up at her, eyes blurry.

She smirked, brushed a strand of hair out of my face, and said, “For science.”

I laughed, and the sound rolled through the room, through the whole city, out into the mythic grid until I was sure everyone on Eventide could feel it.

If they cared, they’d have to deal.

Aenna’s body fit perfectly against mine, every edge and curve in sync, every need amplified instead of erased. I could feel her breathing, her heart pounding, the new power surging in her blood.

“Again?” I asked, half-serious, half-daring.

She nodded, slow and sure.

This was going to be a problem. An outstanding problem.

I grinned, turned my head, and caught her mouth in another kiss.

The Spiral didn’t let go.

And neither did we.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower

The first rule of mythic diagnostics was: don’t get attached to the readings.

They lie, they mutate, and if you let them, they’ll drag your narrative into the mud right along with the subject’s.

That was why I preferred to scan Fern when she was unconscious, or better, comatose, but today I’d have to settle for “vaguely vertical” and “smiling like a convicted arsonist at her parole hearing.”

The second rule was: never, ever trust the baseline.

I was halfway through my third pass with the portable resonance grid when Alyx, arms full of towels, burst onto the balcony with the force of a minor coup.

She wore the same clothes as yesterday, possibly because she hadn’t changed, perhaps because she now believed in one-day fashion cycles as a hedge against existential fatigue.

She dropped the towels, then bellowed, “Fern, you promised to help if the pool got weird again!”

“It’s not weird, it’s historic,” Fern said, not looking up from the rail where she sat, legs dangling over more than a dozen stories of insured disaster.

She hadn’t bothered to dry her hair, so the damp tendrils glowed where the sun hit them, every strand lit up like a war banner.

“Let the record show: margarita pool still floats, still spins, still attracts only the best mythic talent.”

Alyx glared at her. “You told me it wouldn’t—”

“—spontaneously generate a mythic signature on low sleep,” Fern finished, “and I was correct. Technically, it was generated on no sleep. Science marches on.”