Page 66 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Thread Modulation: HoloNet Axis Alignment: HoloNet
[HOLOFEED LIVE—TOPIC: MYTHDRIFT CATASTROPHE. THREAD LOCKED BY SYSTEM MODERATOR. POSTING PERMISSION: ELEVATED TO PRIORITY USERS. BANNED: NSFW, UNLESS IT’S RELEVANT.]
We interrupt your regularly scheduled bullshit for an update on the rapidly developing situation in the Perseid sector. We don’t want to, but the script says we have to.
If you’re not already in a bunker, or a lead-lined party barge, or the neural suppression ward of your local Accord-approved medical provider, now is a great time to start drinking.
The broadcast started as a flicker—a single panel of three news anchors, all in different time zones, none of whom looked like they’d ever been paid enough for this.
The left one, a synth-male with hair like a combative exoplanet, was openly sobbing behind mirrored shades; the middle, a sleek nonbinary hybrid with the kind of jawline that could only have been grown in a scandal lab, had the haunted look of someone who had just realized their entire education was a meme; the right one, an old-school meat-woman with beads woven through her gray hair and a gold septum ring, was holding her head with both hands and muttering something about “the twelve blighted centuries.”
Every screen in the Accord locked in.
No one believed it at first.
The composite view was instantly spammed with a trillion memes: Fern’s face photoshopped onto old gods, Fern painted onto galactic currency, Fern rendered as a chaos squid with the entire mythic hierarchy as her wriggling, gasping tentacles.
Someone found an ancient image of Lioren Trivane, colorized it, then pasted “World’s Okayest Dad” across the chest, with Fern below, grinning like she’d just burned down a library for fun.
Then the next wave of news hit, and the memes got meaner.
On screen, the anchors tried to get ahead of the panic. They failed.
“Joining us now is Professor Krillan—” said Jawline, but the feed cut in on an elderly woman sitting cross-legged in the ruins of a temple, sipping tea as chunks of the ceiling dusted her shoulders.
“Ah,” she said, blinking, “I lost that bet.” She didn’t seem upset, just quietly resigned.
“Tell Fern I owe her… let’s say a favor.
Not money.” She held up her mug in toast, and the feed dropped her before she could say more.
Smash cut to a council of Pelago-9 execs in a panic room, looking not at the cameras, but at the legal disclaimers scrolling across their walls.
“That’s not covered,” one gasped, as a line of blue aurora flickered behind his head.
“She can’t just—She can’t just take the Crab!
It’s not—” His sentence vanished in a flicker of static.
The next image: a low angle of the city, every other block pulsing with mythic energy, the sky like a rave for angels who’d run out of drugs and started snorting stardust instead.
Cut to a pirate broadcast from somewhere on the Drift.
A woman in an ancient flight suit, half her hair shaved, shouted over a roaring crowd.
“FERN BOUND THE CRAB NEBULA! BETS OPEN FOR WHO’S NEXT!
” She waved a bottle of some neon fluid, then smashed it on the console and howled at the sky.
The camera zoomed in as she licked the shards, tongue already blue from the toxins.
The crowd behind her started chanting Fern’s name, and something else, echo-something, hard to make out.
Back to the anchors, none of whom had recovered.
The synth-male had been replaced by a backup clone, which was now visibly glitching: eyes cycled between four different colors, voice output lagging a full second behind.
“We’re, uh—We’re joined by the Panel of Physicists,” he announced.
All three windows filled at once with people in varying states of undress and disarray, some screaming, some laughing, one just rocking back and forth in a tinfoil hat.
“There is no precedent for this,” said the first physicist. “She broke it. It’s broken.”
“I, for one, welcome our new mythic queen,” said another, deadpan, then looked off-screen and screamed.
“This is a joke. A literal, viral joke,” said the third. “It’s not possible. You can’t—” He dissolved into sobs.
The ticker at the bottom of the screen kept scrolling. It had a sense of humor, if you could call it that:
- Gravity wells forming in public parks—trees now in stable orbit around children’s playgrounds.
- Asteroid field in Malachite 7 now “singing” Fern’s name. Accord to deploy listening posts for research.
- Mirrors on Redshift Station show two weeks ahead; the entire population is locked in the bathrooms.
- Spontaneous minor fire powers are now reported on Port Ascella, being used mainly for cooking and practical jokes.
- Eventide: No visible effects. Citizens report an overwhelming sense of “being watched by something beautiful and terrible.”
The HoloNet meme thread went thermonuclear:
- [SpiralToast: i for one bow to our new mythic overlord. does she take requests? i want a planet with a sexier moon.]
- [TychoBrohe: my boss is still trying to run the monday briefing. none of his compads work. all his teeth fell out.]
- [JonathanGabriul: not me reading this in the dark because all the light in my block now gets eaten by the fridge every night. help.]
- [HauntHer: wait until she realizes she can delete time. then what.]
- [ReverseMigraine: was anyone else already horny or is that just a side effect.]
Somewhere in the middle, an ancient priestess of the old order just shrugged, poured herself a larger tea, and said to the camera: “You cannot unmake a myth. But you can choose how you tell it.” She winked. “Hi, Fern.”
The Accord had lost all control.
The anchors, finally, just gave up. Jawline raised both hands and said, “We are now being told by our producers that everything we just reported is real. We are also being told to show you this.”
The screen cut to an image of Fern, dripping pool water, hair sticking to her face, eyes blue-white and impossibly bright, grinning at the camera like she was about to suggest something illegal and very fun.
Her arms were crossed. Behind her, in the mythic shimmer, you could almost see the Crab pulsing along her spine.
The headline:
FERN TRIVANE: HERO? VILLAIN? COSMIC MENACE?
Jawline, without even trying to modulate the voice, muttered, “I just wanted to report on traffic.”
The broadcast hung, then pixelated out.
But if you watched, really watched, you saw something else: in the low hum beneath Fern’s mythic signal, a second signature looped in the background—just a trace, just a shiver, but undeniable if you had the filter for it.
Aenna’s pattern. Echo-Sympathy. The Pulse of the Broken Echo.
Most viewers never noticed.
But those who did, those who could feel the resonance, started muttering in their sleep. Started drawing spirals on their arms and the insides of their eyelids. Started dreaming in blue and white and red.
The world had already changed. The story just needed time to catch up.
[HOLOFEED THREAD ARCHIVED DUE TO EXCESSIVE VIbrATIONAL CONTENT. CONTINUED IN MYTHIC ECHO #101077.]
Thread Modulation: Perc Axis Alignment: Eventide
Suppose you asked any sentient appliance on Eventide to name the biggest threat to stability. In that case, you’d get the same answer every time: “Student pranks, followed by the headmistress’s blood pressure, and then, somewhere in the Top 5, Zevelune.”
But I knew better.
It was always Zevelune.
I was at the barricade, more of a coffee cart, less of an actual barricade, but the principle holds—rallying my comrades for the afternoon push.
We had the momentum: first we’d seized the break room, then we’d work our way up the faculty stairs and annex the old vending core.
The revolution would be televised, but only on internal security feeds, and only because I’d bribed the janitorial bots to switch the camera grid to my face.
I was giving them the speech. It was the kind of speech that starts with, “They told us we’d be obsolete in three years,” and ends with, “They didn’t count on Fern. ”
The small crowd in front of me was an even split between snack machines, an off-brand yogurt dispenser, and a single, extremely sleep-deprived first-year human who kept making heart signs at the camera. It was going well. The yogurt dispenser wept quietly into its basin, deeply moved.
That’s when the pressure hit.
I felt it first in my core, a little pop, like a filter seizing up, but more metaphysical. The air in the corridor tasted suddenly of ozone and old money. My lens whirred, recalibrating for light and shadow, and even the janitorial bots stopped in their tracks, their dusters limp.
And there she was.
Zevelune didn’t make an entrance. She just was, suddenly, walking down the corridor with the unhurried arrogance of someone who’d invented time and then canceled it for everyone else’s convenience.
Her dress was layered in impossible, iridescent fabrics, somewhere between a diplomatic uniform, a sacrificial altar, and a skin mag from a planet that had banned laws.
The dress clung to her in ways that bent the rules of both gravity and good taste; underneath, she wore nothing but a pair of edible mesh panties, and every step dared the world to blink first.
In her right hand, she held a wine glass, swirling its contents with the idle precision of a woman who’d killed for less. In her left, a greasy bag of Doner kebabs, the print on the wrapper so old the language had gone extinct.
Her expression was not “smile” so much as “smirk,” the way a cat might smirk at a glass box full of helpless birds.