Page 71 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Trending: “She didn’t break the plaza, she just rebranded it.”
Trending: “Taco Miracle 2.0, now with extra cheese.”
Cut to: The Black Helix cult, live feed, leader in ceremonial armor, hair ablaze with mythic dye.
“We have seen the true face of the Nullarch, and it is beautiful. We call upon all brothers and sisters to fast for the next 72 hours and await further transmissions from the SGR 0418 vector. Let the old gods burn and the new ones eat tacos.”
Cut to: Mythic theorist, smoking from a vape the size of his head.
“I’m telling you, it’s a planned escalation. The Accord is covering for a Sovereign breeding program. Look at the timing: Magnetar event, the pizza miracle, and now three mythships in one system? That’s not an accident, that’s a handoff.”
Cut to: Neighborhood bar, everyone watching HoloNet, faces flickering in mythic blue.
“My cousin was at Eventide. Says it was like being inside a thundercloud, except the thunder was a girl and the lightning was, uh, also a girl. Never seen anything like it.”
Cut to: Perc, holding court at the edge of a pop-up pizza riot.
“THEY SAY SHE brOKE THE PLAZA, BUT I THINK SHE FIXED IT! FREE PIZZA FOR ALL! LET THE OPPRESSORS FEAST ON COLD SLICES!”
He tosses a pizza box to the crowd. It’s empty. They cheer anyway.
Cut to: News anchor, now speaking in a whisper.
“We have unconfirmed reports that the mythic event is not over. At least two more mythship-level signatures have been detected in the Eventide system. Accord sources say: ‘Do not panic.’ Local sources say: ‘We already are.’”
[HOLO-NET SIGNOFF]
#PizzaSolidarity now trending.
In a dorm room somewhere, someone watches the loop again, not eating, not blinking.
In a war room across the Core, a hundred Accord strategists argue whether mythic escalation is a risk or an opportunity.
In the space between, three mythships hang in orbit, perfectly still, waiting for the next disaster to unfold.
And on the quad, the grass is already growing back, green and bright as a new world.
In the background, Perc screams, “VIVA THE NULLARCH!” and nobody even tries to shut him up.
Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Modulation: Personal Rock Bottom, dusty training hall.
The gym was supposed to be empty after hours, but Eventide’s “after hours” protocol had been down since the mythquake, so I didn’t bother with the lights.
Dust hung in the air, thicker than before, each mote perfectly outlined by the fractured glow of emergency strips.
Someone had tried to sweep the mats, but the effect was like combing hair after a lightning strike—maybe neat, but never truly repaired.
I sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, AR feeds painted all around me.
I’d set them to half-opacity, so they flickered and shivered over the real: one looped Fern’s walk through the fire, another replayed the moment Zevelune took her hand and rewrote the sky.
A third was set to social, because I liked pain, and the hashtags never stopped updating.
There was #NullarchCollapse, already in all-caps, and a parody thread called #FernOrFamine, which I hated, but kept on screen anyway.
It was cold. The heater had been broken since day one, but tonight the chill was personal, a kind of slow bleed that started in my bones and oozed out into the rest of me. I let it. I’d never been good at stopping leaks, not in myself, not in anyone.
The first wave was terror.
Not just because the feeds made it look like Fern had decided to crash the universe for fun, but because, for the first time ever, I believed she could.
The Lioren ghostprint was back, this time not as a rumor, but as a physical overlay, mapped in three dimensions over her body.
You could see it pulse, see it want. When she looked at the camera, I flinched.
The second wave was rage.
Not at Fern. Not really. She’d always been the disaster, the one who made the rules by ignoring them.
But I hated how, no matter what happened, I was never in the room where it mattered.
Even now—her biggest event yet, and I was watching it on replay, from a gym nobody used, in a shirt that didn’t even fit right.
That’s the thing about mythic events: they only ever need the chosen ones.
The rest of us are just side-channels, the static in the air.
The third wave was shame.
This one stuck. It always did. Years of Accord files, the ones they “never used for real assessment,” said I’d never resonate.
Never even crack a Tier 3, let alone matter to a mythic.
The best they ever said was “showed strong adaptive logic and recursive subroutine awareness, but lacks core narrative inertia.” The translation was: not a hero, not a villain, not even a proper disaster. Just someone who watched.
I stared at the feeds, feeling my pulse drop, then spike, then settle into a flatline of not caring. In the background, someone was doing maintenance on the training drones. One rolled past, slow, trailing a loose arm and the sad whine of a dying battery.
I grabbed it.
The movement was automatic. I yanked the drone from the mat, felt the soft, plasticky skin peel off, and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. The sound was perfect. A crunch, a hollow pop, and the unmistakable shatter of something expensive and unnecessary dying on impact.
Wires dangled. The head rolled, paused, and looked back at me with its one good eye.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The laugh was ugly, sharp, nothing like the bright cackle Fern always managed. But it was mine.
“Fuck it,” I said, voice brittle and mean. “Just fuck it.”
I walked to the wall, picked up the broken drone, and smashed it again, this time until the casing split and the whole thing went dark.
It felt good. It wasn’t enough.
“If I stay like this,” I said to nobody, “I’ll be another footnote. Another loser watching someone else take the story.”
The words didn’t echo, but in this room, every noise was louder than it should be.
I looked at my hands. Still shaking, but better.
“Not this time,” I said. “Not here.”
I walked back to the center of the mat, sat down, and opened my neuralterminal for the first time in days.
The UI flickered, slow to boot, and I almost bailed out.
Instead, I waited. Fingers trembling, I typed in the old override code.
The one I’d written, then deleted, then resurrected a hundred times in my head.
It worked.
The first response was an error, a denial from the Accord’s mythlogic. But that was the trick, failure wasn’t an end state, just a new vector. I rewrote the request, piggybacked it on a dozen dormant update packets, and sent it again.
This time, the system paused.
A single line scrolled across the AR feed:
[HELLO, ALYX. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO NEXT?]
I smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile, but it was real.
I said, “I want to matter. I want to be in the fucking story.”
The system, well, something I’m pretty sure wasn’t the Accord AI, responded.
[ACKNOWLEDGED.]
I sat back, shaking, not with fear, not with rage, but with the raw, quivering possibility that maybe, just maybe, this was my turn. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the Accord AI. It was too… attentive. Like something old and orbiting had turned to face me.
“No more bitchy loser,” I said, soft, almost cracked. “Not here.”
I closed the broken feeds. Pulled up Eventide’s mythic net topology. Started searching for the holes nobody else bothered to see.
This time, I wasn’t waiting for Fern.
I was coming for her.
And if the world wanted to collapse around her, it would have to deal with me first.