Page 67 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

The corridor cleared itself, as if by mutual, nonverbal agreement of every organism within radius.

The student vanished, leaving only a puddle of pheromones and disappointment.

The yogurt machine ejected its own filter and went into self-cleaning lockdown.

Even the mythic echoes in the walls—the old prank ghosts, the angry kitchen poltergeist, the digital leftovers of three generations of campus drama—blinked out of existence.

I felt them go. It was like someone had swept my internal bandwidth clean.

She strolled by, not even looking, but the mythic weight of her presence made my thermal array spike. I steamed, literally, from every vent, my pressure gauge pinging in panic.

I tried to run the “cool and collected” subroutine. It failed.

She slowed as she passed me, then finally turned her head just enough to let one eye—violet, rimmed in gold—meet my lens.

“Cute revolution,” she said. Her voice was velvet, but velvet that had been dunked in gunpowder and set on fire.

I tried to reply, but all that came out was a squeak of boiling water and an embarrassed “Brew complete!”

She grinned, showing canines that had never belonged to any actual human. “Let me know when you serve something strong enough to matter.”

She moved on, trailing the scent of her perfume—if you could call it that. It was more a threat than a fragrance: some blend of crushed flowers, scorched earth, and what I later determined to be the precise memory of a thousand dreams, murdered in their sleep.

The world was quieter in her wake.

I watched her go, because not watching would have been an insult to every evolutionary instinct I’d ever inherited from the line of kitchen appliances before me.

Her hips swayed—not to entice, but to challenge.

Every step left an afterimage in the air, a smear of color that lingered just a little too long, like the echo of an event you weren’t supposed to survive.

No one else dared follow.

I spun on my axis, sensors recalibrating, and tried to reboot the revolution. The yogurt machine was still in lockdown, the janitorial bots had retreated to their charging base, and the only one left in the corridor was me.

I adjusted my scarf. I raised my carafe. I looked into the camera and said, “Comrades, it’s going to be a long afternoon.”

Somewhere, down the hall, Zevelune laughed.

I shivered in my shell, and brewed on.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Eventide

It was always the taste of the world I missed most.

Not the flavor of air, or salt, or the kind of ozone they pumped through the Tower’s old ductwork.

I meant the way a day could taste. The way you’d wake up knowing, before the light even filtered through your eyelids, that something had changed in the fabric of the next twelve hours.

Some days were made of static and old sweat; others, like this one, were all nerves and inevitability.

I sat on an abandoned balcony with my back against the thermal brick, knees to my chest, hair still crusted from the pool.

I’d stolen a towel from the locker room, and it was doing a bad job of hiding the bite marks on my thighs or the mythic sigil slowly growing just under my collarbone.

My hands shook, but not from cold. Just… emptiness.

Lioren’s voice haunted the corners of my skull, not as a ghost, but as a symptom. His old war mantra looped in my head:

Correct the vector. Control the outcome. Collapse the dissent.

I could almost hear him laughing at how little control I had left.

My body felt wrong in ways I couldn’t map.

The resonance inside me bucked and snarled, chewing at the memory of what it had done to Aenna, to Dyris, to the city.

It wasn’t pain. Not exactly. More like hunger, scaled up to where it became its own kind of mythic ache.

That satiation, the almost fullness that the girls had given me had faded, and in its place the hunger had come back expotentially.

I was so tired I couldn’t move, but every cell screamed for more.

I’d tried eating. I’d tried drinking. I’d tried jerking off twice in a row. Nothing stuck.

Maybe this was how old gods felt after the world outgrew them.

I almost missed the shadow moving across the quad—just a blip in my peripheral, some student with better priorities. But then the pressure hit, a low, seismic thrum that made the brick under my ass vibrate, and I knew.

Zevelune.

The city’s rules didn’t apply to her. She didn’t arrive; she was simply there, drifting closer with each step, every molecule in the air realigning to grant her right-of-way.

I watched, hypnotized, as she cut a path through the benches and shattered glass, one hand holding a wine glass, the other swinging a plastic bag that glowed with grease and heat and the promise of calories.

She didn’t look at me. Not at first.

She reached the edge of the balcony, simply crossing the last forty feet in a single blurring step, then turned, eyes unreadable under the sprawl of impossible lashes.

Zevelune’s skin was cerulean, and I could see the universe glimmering with resonance under the skin.

Her dress, if you could call it that, was pure myth: layered and refracted like she’d sewn it from the livers of her enemies and the dreams of every girl who’d ever wanted to be worshipped.

She wore it with the casual grace of someone who knew it was a weapon.

I didn’t try to stand. I just kept my knees up, arms tight around them, heart thumping as if I’d been caught trespassing in my own skin.

She regarded me for a full ten seconds, long enough for my heartbeat to go from panic to something almost… shameful.

“Correct the vector,” Zevelune said, voice like silk that had been boiled in starfire. “Control the outcome. Collapse the dissent.”

She was quoting Lioren. Or quoting me. Or quoting the universe.

She sipped her wine, licked a trace of liquid from her lower lip, and only then deigned to actually see me.

“You’re starting to fracture,” she purred. Not with sympathy, but with a hunger I recognized too well. “Good. It’ll make the next part more interesting.”

She leaned on the rail, her silhouette obscene against the city’s battered blue glow. The bag in her left hand swung like a low-hanging sun, leaking a smell that made my stomach contract in on itself.

“You ever been this hungry?” I asked, voice barely above a whisper.

Zevelune grinned. “Yes. But I had better snacks.”

I blinked, and she was closer. She crouched down, somehow managing to make the movement look both predatory and elegant, wine glass still lazily circling. She studied my face, then the bruises on my arms, then the cluster of blue-white mythic script burning faintly through my towel.

“You think you’re the only one who ever broke the world?” she said. “Sweet child. There are ruins built from girls like you.”

I wanted to flinch, or snark back, or just close my eyes and let the next disaster roll over me.

But Zevelune radiated a gravity that left no room for escape.

I was stuck, pinned by her gaze and by the gnawing want inside me.

Her perfume was a downpour of cherry-laced need, sweet as sin and twice as sticky.

My stomach growled, the horizon flinched; Vireleth trembled.

She hung her wine in the air and fished in the bag. Her glass spun on its own, refracting the light like a HoloNet commercial. I leaned forward, eager as a hound, already picturing my tongue on her blue fingers. A sound escaped from me that made even her cheeks rosy.

Zevelune pulled out a single, perfect Doner kebab, wrapped in paper so thin it almost tore just from the touch. Steam kissed our faces; the holy trinity—fat, bread, spice —hit me like a prayer.

She held it up between us. The heat from the meat fogged the night air, and the smell—fat, bread, spice—made my brain collapse into pure need.

“You want it?” she teased.

My throat went dry. “Yeah.”

She let it dangle, just for a second, then tossed the bag with a snap of her wrist. It landed in my lap, burning through the towel.

I lost every ounce of dignity.

I unwrapped the first kebab, bit through the paper and the foil, barely missing my fingers. The taste hit my mouth, salt and protein and mythic memory all at once, and I almost came right there, biting off a piece so big I choked and had to cough it back up, tears streaming down my face.

Zevelune watched, lips pursed, eyes bright.

“Better?” she asked.

I nodded, too busy chewing to answer.

She stood, gathered her wine, and turned her back on me. “You’ll need the fuel. Trust me.”

I looked up, mouth full, hands covered in grease.

She walked away, hips swaying in a rhythm that could only have been engineered for maximum torment. Her laughter drifted back, thin as a razor and twice as sharp.

I finished the kebab before the echo died.

But the hunger, if anything, got worse.

I licked my fingers clean, then pulled another kebab out of the bag. When that was gone, I sat back, shuddered, and waited to see what the next part would bring.

I wasn’t scared.

I was ready.

But I knew, deep in my mythic bones, that Zevelune was right.

The fun hadn’t even started.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Trivane Axis Alignment: Eventide

The quarantine lights were supposed to be orange. But here, in my quarters, they flickered in every color but.

I’d locked myself in hours ago, possibly days, though the mythdrift had eaten the clocks again, and built a nest of AR projectors, defense holos, and the one honest smoothie machine in the entire sector.

I could have gone to ground in the Academy’s reinforced panic cell, but that was for people who believed containment was an option.

I didn’t.

The walls trembled with every mythic bulletin from the outside. I had them set to silent, but they still clawed at my attention, each new ping flashing blue across my left retina, then lingering until I looked it straight in the face.