Page 72 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins???

I didn’t remember walking here. My brain, still overloaded, maybe fractured, was playing catch-up, rewinding the last few minutes like it didn’t trust what the eyes were sending up.

This wasn’t Eventide. This wasn’t even the ghost of Eventide.

It was a ruin, yes, but not a romantic one.

Ruined stone towers, blasted to shit, littered the horizon in every direction, reaching for a sky so purple it almost looked fake.

Between the towers, the land was a freeze-frame of apocalypse: petrified trees, twisted and dead, caught in poses that made it look like they were trying to warn you off.

Everything was the same color, at first, but then you’d catch the quick flicker—red, then blue, then the soft, bone-yellow of decay.

Someone had tried to terraform this place, once.

The planet had said “no” and killed the concept out of spite.

The air was thick enough to chew. Every time I inhaled, it felt like the myth-pressure here had replaced the oxygen with powdered glass and old secrets.

That’s what I noticed first.

What I noticed second was Zevelune, standing next to me, as if she’d been there the entire time and had just been waiting for me to look around and realize I was out of my league.

She was smiling. Of course she was.

Not the “I’m about to kill you” smile, not even the “I’m going to fuck with your head until you beg me to stop” smile, but the one in between.

The one she saved for special occasions, where she didn’t even need to open her mouth to say, “I already won, and I’m just here to see if you’ll figure it out before it hurts. ”

Her dress was still in perfect order, which pissed me off.

Not even the mythic wind could muss it, and her hair, now gone white to match the sun, wasn’t moving at all.

The only thing that gave away her excitement was the line of her jaw, sharp and feral, and the way her fingers flexed at her sides, like she was resisting the urge to pet me or break my neck.

My mythprint was on the verge of giving up.

I could feel it, coiling tight in my back, then leaking blue-white along my arms and out through the tips of my hair.

Each pulse left a wet, cold numbness that crept up my skin, and when I looked down, the backs of my hands had started to redecorate themselves, flickering between ancient script and pure math based on symbology I’d never learned.

I shivered, hard, and caught Zevelune’s eyes on me, watching.

“What the hell is this place?” I said, because if I didn’t start the conversation, she’d win it by default.

Her voice came soft, but with that gravity that made you want to kneel before you realized you’d even bent. “Fey Ruins. Outer Layer. My favorite failed experiment.”

“Nice vacation spot.”

She looked up, admired the sky, then gave a slow, elegant shrug. “It’s better than most. And it’s convenient for fixing a Drift problem, if you’re capable.”

She let the last word hang in the air like a dare.

I wanted to punch her and kiss her at the same time, so instead, I flexed my hands until my bones cracked, and said, “Are we here to fix me, or fuck?”

She didn’t laugh. She just stepped forward, closed the distance until our bodies nearly touched, nipples to nipples, knee to knee, no preamble, and the mythic field between us went taut, as if the entire world had been wound up for this single, idiotic moment.

She was taller, but I didn’t tilt my head back. If she wanted my eyes, she’d have to earn them.

“You wouldn’t survive me in this state, darling,” she said, voice a little lower, a little more sincere. “I’d eat you whole and not even remember your name.”

“Then we’re even,” I replied, because it sounded cooler than admitting she was right.

Neither of us moved.

I could feel my mythprint reeling, trying to decide whether to spiral into violence or self-annihilate on the spot.

Zevelune’s own resonance was ice-cold, needle-sharp, but there was something else, something familiar?

No, that wasn’t it. It was like she’d mapped out every version of this conversation and was waiting to see if I’d surprise her.

She smiled again, wider now. “You remind me of him. The original. But with better taste in trauma.”

I let that one land. Lioren’s name was a knife in every conversation, but here, in this dead forest, it just made the hunger worse.

“So, what’s the plan?” I said, fighting to keep my voice level. “We punch each other until the universe lets me out, or you going to lecture me about the importance of mythic containment?”

She leaned closer, until her lips almost brushed mine. Her breath was warm, scented like burnt sugar and the ozone just before a storm.

“Neither,” she whispered. “You walk into the ruins and see if you can hold together longer than the last Nullarch. It’s a trial by collapse, Fern. Don’t you love those?”

I wanted to say no. I wanted to say, “Let’s just get this over with, so I can kill you, fuck you, or both, and then go home.”

Instead, I let my body lean forward, closed the last centimeter, and for a heartbeat, our foreheads touched.

The mythic field snapped, sending a shock down my spine, and the world fuzzed out, then snapped back sharper than ever.

“So much potential,” Zevelune murmured, her tongue flicking out to taste the space between us, of which there was none. She licked my lips. I liked it. “So much like him. And still not enough. Not yet.”

I grinned, even though it hurt. “Give me five minutes.”

She laughed, and the laugh was so beautiful it made the petrified trees bend toward us, just to hear it again.

Without another word, she turned, and I followed her into the stone forest.

The narrative crucible was waiting.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Trivane Axis Alignment: Aboard Vireleth

The first thing I noticed was the lack of pain.

This was not the same as comfort. This was the raw, exposed absence of suffering, like the universe had cut the wire to the part of my brain that made me feel anything, and left the rest of the system to reboot in a room with no gravity and no mute button for the alarms.

I opened my eyes and found myself lying in a containment pod, naked except for a clutch of green-gold vines that pulsed, faintly, where they wound around my chest and thighs.

Each vine bloomed with a slick, wet flower, more surgical than pretty.

The petals flexed open and closed, sipping at my sweat or whatever exudate the last mythquake had left behind.

Above me, the ceiling domed up forever, white stone curving into silence, broken only by lines of blue light that flared at my every breath. It was quiet, except for the humming undercurrent of the Vireleth, which was the kind of quiet you could only get on a mythship built to outlast eternity.

I flexed my fingers. They worked. I flexed my mind. It, too, worked, which was less of a relief.

My last memory was Fern, Zevelune, and the Eventide plaza peeling open like a can of scream. After that, nothing, except a cold sense of being watched. I didn’t know what day it was, or whether Fern was dead, or whether I was.

I sat up, peeled the vines off my chest (they retracted with a damp, satisfied sigh), and looked around. There was a glass of water at my side, and a single white jumpsuit, tailored to my size, hanging on a hook three meters away. The water was room temperature. The jumpsuit was clean.

I was not.

My body had been rebuilt, I could tell. The usual scars were there, but in the wrong places.

My mythprint was threaded with unfamiliar patterns, tighter, brighter, almost buzzing against my skin.

Asterra’s handiwork, no doubt: her signature was the floral undertone that lingered in my sweat, and the way the air now tasted of chlorophyll and half-digested honey.

I stood, feet unsteady, but the vertigo passed in a second. I slipped into the jumpsuit, too tight at the hips, as always, and stalked to the nearest door.

It slid open before I could even think, “let me out.”

I was in a corridor: white, silent, lined with the skeletal ribs of Vireleth’s containment core. Somewhere in the ship, a memory of Fern echoed, but I shoved it down and focused on the present.

“Welcome back, Dyris Vaelith,” said a voice, smooth and infinitely tired. Vireleth was never one to waste bandwidth on formalities.

“Status?” I snapped, already moving. “Where’s Fern? Where’s Zevelune?”

The ship didn’t answer. Instead, a hologram flared to life in front of me: Zevelune, wearing the same iridescent dress as last time, but with her hair down and lips painted a shade of mythic blood red. She winked, slow, as if she had all the time in the world.

“Don’t panic, darling,” Zevelune said, voice like silk dipped in arsenic.

“I’ve taken Fern to the only place in this universe that might unbreak her.

Think of it as a spa day. For gods.” She leaned forward, and I could see every detail, the gloss on her teeth, the barely concealed violence in her gaze.

“I’ll bring her back better, or not at all. You’ll thank me later.”

She blew a kiss.

I swatted at the projection. The kiss stuck anyway, a perfect lip-print burned in cherry-gloss on my right cheek.

I wanted to punch a hole through the bulkhead.

Instead, I kept walking. “Vireleth. Override her access. Bring Fern back.”

The ship’s reply was almost gentle. “You’re not in condition for that, Dyris. Asterra’s repairs are temporary. Your systems will degrade in ninety-three minutes if you don’t let them set.”

“I don’t care,” I hissed. “She’s out there, with—”

“With someone who might help her,” the ship finished, and for a second, I heard a note of genuine sympathy in the circuit-cold monotone.

I pressed my hands to the wall, trying to steady my breathing.