Page 68 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

- [ MYTHDRIFT: Perseid sector at 99% mythic saturation. Accord recommends prayer. ]

- [ Fern Trivane risk index: 11.2 and rising. System models suggest non-linear escalation. ]

- [ New mythic signature detected: “Pulse of the Broken Echo.” Origin: Unknown. Destiny: Catastrophe. ]

Every time Fern’s name hit the feed, I felt it in my teeth.

I was supposed to be analyzing convergence fallout, writing the postmortem that would let the Accord sleep at night.

Instead, I was watching old classified feeds of Lioren in combat, over and over, trying to convince myself that what Fern had done wasn’t just a rerun of history, set to a new soundtrack.

The feed I kept coming back to was the worst: Lioren on the crust of an uninhabited planet, sleeves rolled to his elbows, voice steady and cold as a dead star.

He said, “Observe.” Then he bent the planet in half.

Not metaphorically, he actually folded it, mythic fields blooming from his hands, until the crust shattered and the world snapped in on itself like a broken toy.

The noise was beautiful and awful. The afterimage left black on the screen for a full thirty seconds.

I always flinched.

I couldn’t stop watching. Not because I admired him, but because I was terrified. Of Fern, of myself, of the way I’d looked at her the last time I’d touched her shoulder and thought: This is what it’s like to be myth.

The AR in my room kept escalating itself.

Every hour, my Accord clearance increased, and my House Trivane access doubled.

It made no sense; security didn’t work like that.

But I was getting pinged with files I’d never requested, incident reports so recent the ink hadn’t dried, even the ancient, pre-Accord blueprints for the city’s mythic grid.

It felt less like a promotion, more like a countdown.

Kaela Vaelith pinged in on video, the feed so glitchy I could barely recognize her. She looked hungover, or maybe just scared.

“Dyris?” she said. “What the fuck is happening over there?”

I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because the air was too heavy for words.

Kaela’s face shimmered, pixelated, then reassembled itself at double size. “You’re not responding to the Accord,” she said, tone brittle. “The comms say you’re present, but the mythic grid—” She trailed off, staring at something on her screen.

She looked at me again. “Dyris, tell me you haven’t—”

The feed went black.

I stood up, or tried to. My legs worked, but the room fought back, every surface charged with static, the lights pulsing in sync with my pulse. The world didn’t want me on my feet.

I paced a circle, three meters, then back. My AR kept pinging:

[ TRIVANE VECTOR: CONVERGENCE ESCALATION ]

[ Mythship Connection Detected: Proximity Echo – SOURCE: CLASSIFIED ]

The air changed.

I noticed it first in the taste, like the moment before a thunderstorm, when all you can do is brace for the flash. Then the scent: ozone and the sweet rot of cut flowers, something so rich and strange it felt like it was blooming behind my eyes.

The lights in the walls cycled, brightening, then dimming to an intimate low. The shadows stretched, twisted, began to curl in on themselves. I could hear the softest whisper, not from the speakers, not even from the feed, but from somewhere else:

“Little root…” the voice said, soft and wet and impossibly close, like the words were being grown inside my own skull. “You touched the grave-light… and now I see you blooming. What will you grow next?”

I shivered. The voice was nothing like Fern, or Lioren, or even Vireleth. It was ancient, sweet, patient, hungry. It made me want to curl up in a ball, or let myself be eaten alive. Maybe both.

I pulled up my compad, tried to type a message to Fern:

I think I broke something.

Deleted it.

Are you hearing this too?

Deleted that.

I tried again, hands shaking: Just stay you.

I didn’t send it.

The AR in the room flickered again. For a second, I saw my own reflection, but it wasn’t me—just a version of myself with flowers growing from every joint, petals pressed between my teeth, eyes gone soft and green.

I shut off the news, the feeds, every screen and sensor I could find. But the voice kept whispering, weaving through my bones like a vine in heat. It wasn’t going to stop.

I sat in the middle of the floor, sweating, and waited for morning.

The room was dark, but I could still see the flowers.

And outside, somewhere, I knew Fern was growing hers, too.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Eventide

I ate the next Doner on the floor of the corridor, alone, half naked, grease and sauce dripping straight onto my towel and the tiles below.

I wasn’t even trying to be hot about it; it was pure survival, no room for shame or seduction.

Still, I could feel the way my own body responded, tongue buzzing, hands shaking as I licked every last shred of meat from the flatbread, then ran my finger along the inside of the wrapper and sucked it clean.

I’d never been this hungry in my life. Not even during the ration riots, not even the time Dad spent three weeks in the medbay, and Mom “cooked” nothing but instant algae chips and hydrogenated sadness. This was a mythic hunger. An urge so big it hurt, so deep it echoed in the base of my spine.

I finished the first, then the second, then the third, all in the space of a few minutes. I didn’t slow down until my jaw ached and my chest started to burn with the weird, sweet heaviness of a world that wasn’t built to contain you.

When the last bite was gone, I pressed the paper to my lips, licked the wrapper until it tore, then sat back and let myself breathe.

Still not enough.

I wiped my mouth on my arm, then looked down at my hands. They glowed faintly, blue at the knuckles, white at the fingertips, like the mythic was leaking out in slow pulses, trying to escape the meat and bone it was trapped in.

I leaned back against the wall, cross-legged, letting the adrenaline die off. In the distance, I could hear HoloNet still howling, screams, memes, and the sound of three quadrillion people losing their minds in perfect synchrony.

Somewhere under the noise, I could sense Aenna, her signature curled up inside me like a sleeping animal, soft and safe and so alive I almost started to cry. She wasn’t gone. Just… folded in, echo on echo, nested inside the mythic hurricane that was eating the world.

I closed my eyes.

I heard the distant, sweet hum of Dyris’s field, straining against itself, trying to hold the city together even as the rest of the universe started to spin out of alignment.

Something verdant was growing out of the cracks in reality, reaching for my Sexretary, but it was familiar and radiated… helpfulness?

I grinned, feeling the stretch of my lips, the way the smile was equal parts hunger and promise.

There were no more Doner, but I was still hungry.

I flexed my hands, watched the light flicker.

I felt of Zevelune’s laugh, sharp and pretty, the way she’d tossed the bag at me like she was feeding a zoo animal, and I was her favorite.

I saw Dyris, locked in her room, staring at the screens and the darkness, trying to fix everything and not realizing it was already too late, and that her room was now a botanical garden.

I thought of Aenna, sleeping inside my bones, but also sleeping in her dorm room. Exhausted by the extreme forces that had reforged her physical form during her mythic rebirth.

Alyx danced through my mind, all dark skin and defiance, dripping sauce and myth. She offered herself up as Snackrifice, her lips curled in challenge, knowing she couldn’t survive it and doing it anyway, in the dim hope it’d keep me from withering away for a few more minutes.

And I thought of myself, alone in the corridor, covered in sauce and myth, waiting for the next disaster to crash through the door and demand to be devoured.

I wiped my hands clean, then licked my fingers again, slower this time, just to see if the taste would ever go away.

It didn’t.

“Still hungry,” I said.

And the corridor echoed it back.