Page 70 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
I focused on her outline. On the pull. My body strained, but my mind just kept repeating her name like a war-drum.
That’s when the voice hit.
It was not Fern. Not Lioren. Not even the building’s overloaded intercom.
It was Asterra the Bloom.
She didn’t speak with air. She was a scent, a heat, a soft, organic ache that crawled up my spine and into the deepest, most private crevices of my mind.
“Little root…” she said, warm and so intimate it made my vision blur. “I’m coming.”
I wanted to scream, to claw her out of my head, but the only thing I could do was stand there, trembling, as the pressure tripled. The world went wet, all my scars opening at once, sweat or blood or something in between leaking through my pores.
Then—sharp, clean, a scalpel after the fever—a second signal.
Colder. Metallic. Unforgiving.
[ VECTOR CORRECTION INBOUND ]
[ JHENNA THE CROWN – SYSTEM ENTRY PENDING ]
My AR exploded. The display didn’t just glitch; it recompiled itself, the warning banners stacking into infinity until my vision was just red.
The pain was gone. Only the cold remained.
I tried to move, but my own body was foreign. My arms didn’t want to lift. My legs were numb from mid-thigh down. Only my face still worked, and even then, I could barely focus past the corona around Fern.
She was no longer kneeling. She was standing, somehow, but she wasn’t just herself anymore. The Lioren ghostprint overlayed her perfectly, like she’d been double-exposed on the film of reality. Her eyes were wide, blank, reflecting nothing but the firestorm in the sky.
Three Mythships in-system, my AR screamed.
[ VIRELETH // ASTERRA // JHENNA ]
[ CONTAINMENT: hilarious ]
Somewhere, the campus’s alarm siren died for good. The backup tried to start, but only managed a strangled, human-sounding wail before giving up.
It didn’t matter. Nobody was listening now. The people still standing were locked in place, eyes skyward, faces slack with the terror of recognizing the names that had never, ever, been meant to walk in a single system at once.
Asterra’s voice curled through me again, less sensual this time and more maternal, pitying.
“Little root, little wound. I will hold you together when the world cannot.”
I wanted to protest, but my throat was full of glass.
A student next to me, braver than most, tried to run for the admin building. She made it three steps before her mythprint collapsed her knees, and she vomited all over the steps. She kept crawling, sobbing, until another wave hit and she just… stopped.
A guy further back, his name didn’t matter, but he had beautiful hands, let out a single, shocked grunt, then lost all control. He pissed himself, face a mask of pure disbelief. Nobody laughed. There wasn’t enough left in any of us for laughter.
Above, the sky fractured. Three rings, one black, one gold, one a color that had never existed. They spun around each other, faster and faster, until the plaza started to lift off the ground, pebbles and bits of debris caught in microgravity, everything wanting to ascend but unable to break free.
Through all of it, Fern just stood. Not moving, not blinking, as if daring the universe to try harder.
At the edge of vision: Zevelune.
She wasn’t running, wasn’t bracing, wasn’t doing anything but strolling into the storm with a wine glass still perfectly, impossibly full. Her smile was the kind you’d see on a wolf that already knew how the story ended.
The world bent. The plaza stones started to float, slow, then faster, bits of ash swirling in weird, lazy vortices. The myth-pressure was now so bad I couldn’t tell where my own body stopped and the Eventide’s ambient pain began.
I screamed Fern’s name again, even though I knew she wouldn’t hear it.
I tried to reach her. I tried to force my legs forward.
For the briefest, wildest second, I thought maybe the mythquake would break me before I broke myself.
Then, all at once, the pressure vanished.
A calm, dry voice in my skull, old as hunger, said:
“You don’t get to die here, Dyris.”
The world went white.
And I was still standing, but I had no idea if there was anything left of me inside the outline.
Thread Modulation: Vireleth the Closure Axis Alignment: Eventide
Some people hated Zevelune because she never broke a sweat.
That’s what they said, anyway, in the corridors and dark lounges where mythics traded gossip as currency.
The rumor was: Zevelune had no blood pressure, no pulse, no bodily secretions at all, just a dry, cosmic disdain for the world and everything in it.
But if you watched closely, like I did, like everyone at Eventide was forced to in the moment, she didn’t just not sweat. She made everyone else sweat for her.
She walked into the mythquake like she was late for a matinee and mildly annoyed by the line.
The plaza was still ground zero, charred and unpeopled except for the two mythic signatures that held the world together by mutual dare: Fern, radiating blue-white, and Zevelune, soaking up the leftover spectrum and dripping it back into reality like nothing.
She was impossible to misplace. Her dress, torn open and fluttering around her legs, showed more skin than it covered, and the skin was pale cerulean, star-lit, dusted with the aftershocks of every war she’d ever refused to lose.
The wine glass in her right hand never spilled.
Her left hand was open, fingers flexing like they’d just remembered what it was like to be a weapon.
Nobody challenged her. Nobody even wanted to.
She didn’t walk toward Fern, she walked through the mythquake, the storm parting around her, the air itself reversing direction in deference. Stones that floated in the grip of myth-pressure drifted toward her, like she was the center of a new and better universe.
A kid in admin, just a normal, not a mythic, hid behind a reinforced window and tried to record what happened next. The footage would later play on every late-night recap, and nobody would believe it was unedited.
Zevelune sipped her wine, paused to adjust the dress (for effect, not modesty), then smiled at Fern. The smile said: I’m performing for the cosmos, and it’s lucky to have front row seats.
She stepped to the very center of the storm. At that instant, the three mythship signatures, I (Vireleth), Asterra, and Jhenna, aligned in the sky, casting shadows that shouldn’t have been possible given the time of day and the angle of the sun.
Fern just stood, mythprint trembling. The Lioren ghostprint pulsed around her, hungry and beautiful and begging for a fight.
Zevelune’s smile widened. She raised her glass to the mythships.
“Three of them,” she said, voice not loud but infinitely clear. “At once. For one girl.”
She downed the glass. The liquid inside evaporated on contact with her tongue, or maybe it just transcended. The next second, she tossed the glass over her shoulder, where it spun for a full seven revolutions before shattering dramatically on nothing.
She turned to Fern. They were only a meter apart now.
“I love this timeline,” Zevelune murmured. She reached out and, with a gentleness nobody could ever have predicted, touched Fern’s cheek.
The mythquake collapsed.
Not with a bang, not with a scream, but with a soft, consensual surrender. The plaza stones drifted down. The sky, still bent around the three mythship rings, unwound itself. The admin kid behind the glass stopped recording, too stunned to remember why he’d started.
Every human, mythic, or hybrid within a kilometer radius felt the shift. Some collapsed in place, boneless with relief. Others kept screaming, but only because their bodies couldn’t cope with the lack of pressure.
Zevelune leaned in, her mouth inches from Fern’s ear, and whispered something nobody but Fern would ever hear.
Then she laughed, long and full and delighted. The sound rolled through the plaza, shattering what was left of the mythquake’s dignity.
“This isn’t a collapse,” she announced, spinning once for effect, arms out. “This is a party.”
She looked at Fern, eyes wide and dark and full of want.
“Too bad this isn’t a fixable problem from here,” she said. Then, softer, “There’s only one place left to go.”
She took Fern’s hand, and in a burst of light that looked and sounded like the beginning of the universe, the two of them vanished.
The storm was over.
Thread Modulation: Holonet Axis Alignment: Holonet
[HOLO-NET GLOBAL TRENDING]
#EventideMythquake (1.3B posts)
#NullarchCollapse (901M posts)
#LiorenReturns (840M posts, 21M flagged as conspiracy/fraud)
#SGR0418 (500M posts, 73% spam memes)
#TacoMiracle (still trending, nobody sure why)
TOP STORIES, ANCHOR: GENEVA CELIX (pronouns: she/her/it/verified)
“Good evening, galaxy. Our top story—what Accord authorities are calling an ‘Unclassified Mythic Cascade’ at Eventide Academy. Let’s go live to the disaster feed—”
[VIDEO: South Tower, Eventide. Plaza cratered, students drifting in lazy orbit. Sky cycling three impossible colors. A single figure, Fern Trivane, outlined in blue-white. Next to her, an unknown woman in a coat and not much else, face blurred by resonance.]
“We have confirmation that, at 18:22 standard, an unmodeled convergence event collapsed the plaza and forced the campus into Level Zero lockdown. Repeat: Level Zero. Accord agents have not responded for comment. All mythic traces point to Fern Trivane, or ‘the Nullarch.’ You may recall her as the face of the Taco Miracle last Quanta.”
Cut to: A LECTERN, Accord Spokesbeing sweating under harsh lights.
“We urge all citizens to stay off high-density mythic channels for the next 36 hours. The risk of memetic resonance or ‘contagious narrative acceleration’ is unknown. Please, do not share videos of the event.”
Cut to: Social media memes, event slowed and reversed, “NullarchCollapse.mp4” set to a playlist of ancient Earth pop hits.
Trending: “It’s not a mythquake, it’s a vibequake.”