Page 65 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

I tried to ignore them, but it was like tuning out a fire alarm because you’re busy microwaving batteries.

I’d been at this for an hour, and the results got less plausible by the minute.

The grid was no help. Its little diagnostic eyes whirred, its needles danced in half-circles, and every so often it beeped a warning that could only be described as “existentially distressed.”

Aenna Caith was the source of the problem.

She floated in the margarita pool’s central gyre, arms out, face blank, one toe just brushing the surface.

If she had ever been conscious, she was now in a state best described as “cosmically adjourned.” She glowed faint blue, the kind of blue you only get from a nova in its teens or a drunk who’s managed to rupture her reality three days in a row…

or if you absorbed far too much of Fern’s mythfire.

I paced a tight circle around the balcony, reading and re-reading the diagnostics. On the sixth revolution, I finally cracked.

“Resonance is off the charts,” I said, voice clipped. “You didn’t just bind her. You bound… something. Multiple somethings. New.”

Fern stretched, made a show of examining her nails. “Aren’t you proud?”

I scowled. “I’m concerned about the systemic consequences.”

She grinned, wicked and beautiful. “That’s your way of saying you’re proud.”

Alyx, now balancing on the lip of the pool with a towel over her shoulder, looked from Fern to Aenna, then to me. “I tried to talk to her. She’s not—” Alyx made a looping gesture with her finger. “She’s not in there.”

“She is,” Fern said. “She’s just busy.”

Alyx scowled. “With what?”

Fern shrugged. “Being legendary. It’s a full-time job.”

I made the mistake of trying to use logic. “She should have crashed hours ago. Her echo signature is cycling at seventy percent above tier, and her vitals—”

Alyx cut in, “She’s alive, right?”

“As alive as any of us,” I admitted.

Fern’s eyes glittered. “See? She’s fine.”

There was a brief, beautiful silence, the kind that only exists in the seconds before a catastrophe realizes it’s late for an appointment.

Then Fern said, “I got crabs!”

Alyx dropped her towel. I dropped the scanner. The universe, for a moment, stopped.

Fern watched our faces, let the line land, then rolled her eyes. “Not literal crabs. M1. The Crab Nebula. We’re both resonating it.”

I snatched up the scanner, recalibrated, and stared. Fern was right: the waveform was spiking on the M1 channel. Aenna’s body was a live wire, signature clear as day.

I pressed a thumb to my temple. “You pulled her into a full celestial override. That’s—”

“A first?” Fern said, voice so smug I wanted to punch it. “Go ahead. Say it. History. You’re not the only one who gets to write it anymore.”

I didn’t trust my hands not to shake, so I set the scanner down. “What did you gain?”

Fern’s eyes locked on mine. She didn’t break eye contact, not for a second.

Instead, she slid one hand down her front, tracing the line of her torso, the movement slow enough to make it clear she knew we were both watching.

When her palm reached her abdomen, the skin there flared blue-white.

The wounds from the last “event”, bruises, shallow cuts, the kind of mythic debris field you pick up just from being near Fern, all healed over, skin knitting shut, blood flow resuming in a neat, mythlogic spiral.

She flexed her hand, and for an instant, every muscle in her body rippled with the afterglow of the new resonance. Power arced down her arm, a blue flicker running the length of her veins. She inhaled, then exhaled, and the temperature in the air went up three degrees.

“…This,” she said, softly. The smile she wore was brighter, meaner, and a little bit holy.

I stared. I could have said anything. I chose honesty.

“Fuck.”

Alyx, still balanced on the edge of the pool, tried to drag Aenna out by the ankle. The effort was doomed, but she persisted, hissing, “The electric glowworm won’t get out of the tequila pool! Fern, help me!”

Fern made a show of standing, stretching, then padded barefoot to the pool’s edge. She reached for Aenna’s wrist, but instead of pulling, she leaned over and said, “You can come back, you know. The story needs you.”

Aenna blinked once, and for a second her eyes were so wide open the blue in them bled out into the air.

She rolled onto her back, started spinning slowly, and as the pool rotated, her body began to glow even brighter.

Her eyes were pure emerald, now that Fern’s blue mythfire had left dissipated.

She was smiling, the kind of smile you see in saints and addicts.

Fern watched her, then turned to me, conspiratorial. “I told you she was fine.”

I made the mistake of thinking it was over. I should have known better. With Fern, nothing ever really ended; it just gathered mass until it became the next disaster.

She walked over, took my hand, and held it up to her chest. Her pulse was faster than usual, wild and eager. She didn’t let go.

“You worried?” she asked, voice low.

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t need to. She already knew.

“Good,” she said. “Because I am, too.”

We stood there, side by side, hands clasped, watching Alyx try to coax Aenna out of the pool with reason, force, and finally the promise of “a taco and a full day of print-shop access.”

None of it worked.

Eventually, Fern laughed, sharp and bright, and the sound of it echoed off the glass, off the water, off the very edge of the world.

Alyx gave up, collapsed onto the nearest lounge, and threw a towel over her face. “We’re all going to die here,” she said, voice muffled but sincere.

Fern grinned. “Not today. Today, we swim.”

I rolled my eyes, but the gravity in my chest said: Yes. Today, we swim. And then we save the world, if it’s stupid enough to need us still.

On the pool, Aenna spun, glowing, unconcerned. The sun caught her hair and scattered it across the water in a corona of impossible color.

Fern squeezed my hand.

“Can you hear it?” Fern asked, her gaze fixed unwaveringly on the pool, the tilt of her chin that of a sovereign daring the cosmos to answer back.

I wanted to scoff, to tell her not to be ridiculous, but my mouth dried up, the words trapped behind my teeth like prisoners who’d glimpsed the executioner’s axe.

Because I did hear it. Not the laughtrack of Alyx’s grumbling or Aenna’s half-mystic humming, not the syrupy slosh of the margarita pool, not even the staccato of Fern’s predatory-lovely pulse beneath my hand.

No: what I heard was astronomy itself, a kind of deep, bleak, aching resonance that started somewhere in the death-rimmed silence outside Eventide and worked inward, toward the soft center of every atom in the city.

It was absurd. And it was happening. The resonance grid’s needles jittered, the diagnostics spat out null after null, as if the machine were embarrassed to confess what it was seeing.

The air itself had the taste of burnt neon, the ache of ozone after a reactor surge.

If I closed my eyes—which I did, just for a moment—I could map the new shape of destiny with my tongue.

What Fern had done wasn’t an anomaly. It was a declaration of war.

The mythic grid, which should have been flat-lining after the last event, was instead bending itself into new forms, not just accommodating the new celestial resonance of an entire fucking Nebula, but mutating to serve it.

I could feel the world’s perimeter flex and ripple, like a sealed room’s air pressure when something much, much larger than you enters through a door you forgot was there.

I opened my eyes. Fern’s pupils had gone wide, black holes rimmed in blue, swallowing the sun’s reflection and returning it as a challenge.

The pool spun, and Aenna spun with it, but it was Fern who anchored the room, Fern who, despite her sweatpants and tattered shirt, looked for all the world like the axis upon which every disaster and miracle in the universe now rotated.

Alyx stood there, open-mouthed, holding a towel like it might shield her from whatever was coming next.

Above us, the sky had changed. The blue was too saturated; the clouds had lost their laziest edges and now curled around the tower’s spires with purpose, as if even the weather was closing ranks.

I flicked my attention back to the diagnostics, and this time, I let myself see what it was telling me: the baseline was gone.

The world had no baseline anymore. There was only Fern, and whatever new order she was slamming into place, one brutal, beautiful resonance event at a time.

I thought of all the simulations, all the post-Lioren mythic cases, all the times I’d stared at impossible outcomes until my eyes bled.

None of them had ever predicted a convergence like this.

The universe was supposed to resist, to isolate her, to starve her out with entropy and narrative exhaustion.

Instead, it was feeding her. She’d gone from a volatile null to something more.

A force that devoured stories and spat out better ones, whether reality liked it or not.

Fern’s lips parted, and I realized she’d been watching me, waiting to see whether I’d flinch or run or merely combust on the spot.

I didn’t. I couldn’t. My own heart was thrumming in time with hers, my skin prickling with the voltage of proximity.

I wanted to touch her again, to test the edge of what she’d become, but I knew that if I did, I might not come back out the same.

She looked down at our clasped hands, then up at me, grin as sharp as a wolf’s. “You feel it, don’t you? The new myth. The hunger.”

I managed a shaky breath. “It’s not just Aenna. It’s not just the pool. It’s everywhere now.”

Fern nodded, and if she was afraid, her eyes didn’t show it. “I like it better this way. I used to think I was connected to the Astrum, but now? I think I am the Astrum.”

And underneath that, I heard Fern’s hunger. Still not sated. Again.

How did you contain someone like this? You didn’t. You just prayed the rest of the universe learned to adapt before she decided to eat it all for breakfast.