Page 69 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Eventide

The plaza was empty, which was weird for Eventide.

Even weirder for a Tuesday, when you’d expect at least two brawls, a failed publicity stunt, and three holographic protests over whatever the cafeteria did to protein this week.

I stood alone at the edge of the outer lecture stairs, coat zipped against the last spasm of autumn, eyes on the sky.

For once, it wasn’t the sky I was worried about.

It was the air: the way it pressed, thick and spongy, like the whole world had wrapped me in old memory foam and then punched out the oxygen.

If you’d asked me, an hour ago, what I was doing out here, I would have said “getting some fucking air” with my trademark sincerity, but the truth was: I’d wanted to see the next mythquake up close.

Not the usual, meme-tier microdrift, but the real thing.

The one everyone whispered about but nobody ever actually saw.

Of course, nobody ever thought to schedule a mythquake right on the plaza.

I shifted my weight, boots sticking a little on the stone. My AR overlay tried to compensate, adjusting my balance calculations, but the effort just made the floor seem stickier, like someone had spilled a thousand bottles of premium reality and let it dry in the sun.

A voice behind me: “What are you even doing here, Trivane?”

I didn’t turn. I knew the voice—one of the upper-year Resonance kids, probably sent to monitor the perimeter in case I decided to go Nullarch on the quad.

She sounded nervous, but I could tell she didn’t want to be seen caring about my well-being.

Eventide never cared about its own, unless you were the kind of disaster they hadn’t yet figured out how to contain.

I flicked my AR to “disdain” and kept my mouth shut.

The pressure ratcheted up another notch.

Static buzzed along the nape of my neck, an old, unwelcome friend.

I could feel the mythprint on my spine humming, then stuttering, then pushing every nerve in my body to the edge of whiteout.

There was a taste in the air—like ozone and burnt lemons and something just a little too sweet for its own good.

That’s when the world broke.

It didn’t announce itself, not really. No grand fanfare, no cataclysmic warning from the System, just a silent, sickening shift that dropped me to my knees.

My AR overlay crashed and rebooted in a single judder, the world around me freezing and shattering like cheap mythglass.

The sky peeled away, color bleeding out until there was nothing but the bone-white glare of an old CRT left on overnight.

I tried to stand, but the plaza buckled under me.

The stone, usually so solid you could break teeth on it, rippled and cracked, each step a new disaster.

Pillars of fire—yes, actual fire—ripped into view along the event horizon, curling up in slow, deliberate arcs that made the whole sky look like it was trying to eat itself.

The ground under my hands was suddenly… wrong. Texture like sandpaper, but dry, so dry, as if someone had blasted the world with a decade of drought in a single instant. My skin itched, burned, tried to flake away.

From behind me, the voices started.

Older, lower, Eventide staff and faculty: “It’s Sere again!” “Oh stars, no—It’s Sere.” “Get them inside, NOW!”

Somewhere, a siren tried to go off, but the mythic pressure sucked the sound out of the air, leaving only the taste of char and panic.

Closer: “Shut down the core resonance nodes! We’re getting a full Reclamation echo!”

Students started to panic. Not the fun kind, where people run for cover from a fake drill or the Friday “Gas Leak Social,” but real, chest-thumping, animal-fear panic.

Screams tore down the rows of benches, the sound fracturing as mythprint after mythprint overloaded.

Some kids ran. Others collapsed on the steps, hands on heads, like it might help keep the narrative from digging into their brains.

There was one, maybe twelve, who just stood there, eyes wide, mouths open, lost in the spectacle. My people.

The mythquake built, then doubled, then detonated in a ring of force that knocked every sense out of my skull. My vision doubled, tripled, split into nine overlapping timelines, each one fighting for dominance.

In the confusion, I caught a blur of Zevelune. She was walking straight into the firestorm, wine glass in hand, hair up, smile broad as murder. She looked up, winked, and the sky bent around her.

The Lioren vector inside me sang.

I tried to say something, but my throat had dried to nothing. All I could do was swallow, eyes locked on the pillars of fire, wondering if I’d ever see anything this beautiful again.

Near me, a cluster of students huddled, one of them—brave or stupid or both—shouting, “Wait—what’s Sere? Is that a drift class or something?”

Another: “I thought this was just a contest glitch, like, a mythic meme?”

A third, older, voice, trying to herd them away from the epicenter: “Move! Sere Prime is a kill event. You do not want to be here for this!”

My AR tried to reboot again. It failed, flashed a single line of text across my retina:

[LIOREN GHOST EVENT: SYSTEM OVERRIDE]

I could feel the ghost of Lioren in my bones, a pulse so pure it erased my own thoughts for a second, replacing them with a burning clarity. I wanted to get up, to run, to do anything but sit there and wait for the sky to collapse on my head.

But I stayed.

I always did.

The mythdrift sucked at my mind, stretching my narrative until I couldn’t tell if I was still Fern, or something else entirely.

I blinked, and the world faded to grayscale.

Blinking again, it snapped back—only now the plaza stones were scorched black, the fire pillars rising twice as high, and the students were mostly gone, scattered like so much ash in the wind.

I could hear the Eventide staff shouting, but the words melted together, a soup of panic and protocol. The only phrase that made it through:

“It’s Sere. What’s Sere?”

I tried to laugh, but my mouth wouldn’t move.

At the edge of my hearing, a whisper—so quiet it could have been my own thought, if I still had any left.

“You’ll learn,” it said, amused, low, and utterly unforgiving.

I recognized the voice. It was Lioren, of course.

And as the next mythquake wave hit, flattening the world to an endless, horizonless plain of white heat, I realized he wasn’t talking to the crowd.

He was talking to me.

I let the pressure roll over me, let it compress my ribs and hollow out my lungs, and didn’t resist when the sky bent down and swallowed me whole.

If this was Sere, I was going to meet it with my eyes open.

And maybe, if I got lucky, with my teeth in its throat.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Trivane Axis Alignment: Eventide

I’ve always been good at ignoring pain. Not the sharp, useful kind—the sort that tells you to move your hand off the fire—but the dull, planetary ache that wraps itself around every muscle and decides it’s a new baseline.

House Vaelith calls it “adaptation.” Eventide called it “clinical dissociation with prestige.” Either way, it’s why I made it this far.

But nothing, nothing in my entire career of walking into disasters could have prepped me for the mythquake that hit the Eventide quad.

It was a wall, but not a real one. Walls at least let you bounce off.

This was… a suffocation. Every step from the admin wing to the main plaza was a fight against air that wanted to be solid, a universe that had decided, arbitrarily and with zero warning, to invert all its permissions.

The pressure was worst at the joints: knees, elbows, the vulnerable spots of old scars.

By the time I’d made it halfway across the lawn, my teeth were grinding themselves to powder.

Every blink of my AR brought new warnings. “CONTAINMENT brEACH – CLASS ZERO,” “SIGNATURE VECTOR: UNMODELED,” “MYTHIC DRIFT: NON-LOCALIZED.” I dismissed them as fast as they spawned, but they just kept layering, until the whole world was a jittering patchwork of hazard tape.

Somewhere up ahead, through the glass-walled corridor, I could see Fern. Or at least, the residue of Fern, outlined in blue-white corona so bright it threatened to overwrite my retinas. She was at the epicenter, of course. Always the center, even when she tried to run.

I pressed forward. Each stride shrank by a third; the world bent like a slow-motion funhouse, but one that wanted you dead at the end.

I tried to tune out the noises—my own breathing, the screaming from the quad, the arrhythmic klaxon that kept failing and restarting, like the building’s soul was stuck in a death loop.

At the doors, my hand barely worked. I mashed the panel, missed, then finally slammed it with my whole palm. The glass parted, and the mythquake hit me full in the face.

For a second, nothing. No sense, no self, not even a name. Then the pain flooded back, not as agony, but as raw, uncut signal: every atom screaming its coordinates, every heartbeat a punch to the inside of my ribs.

I could see her—barely. Fern, on her knees, head up, staring the mythquake in the eye.

The plaza around her was a blasted, blackened nightmare, every stone split and glassed by heat that hadn’t existed a minute ago.

The sky over her wasn’t a sky anymore, just a vertical rip of red and white and the kind of color you only saw on the other side of detonation.

I called her name. I think I did. Nothing came out but static.

I tried to move closer, but the world refused. My feet skidded, my lungs locked, and my own mythprint—usually so reliable, so elegantly engineered—just shrieked and shut down. I could feel it, the old familiar resonance, but it was as useless as trying to light a candle in a hurricane.

The narrative pressure collapsed in. The only way forward was to override the pain, burn through it, brute-force my way to her.