Page 73 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Asterra was a monster, but she didn’t do anything for free. If she’d patched me up, it was because Fern had bought me another chance at relevance, at the cost of her own story.
“Recharge,” the ship said, low and almost maternal. “She’ll need you when she comes back.”
There was a pause, then the voice went even softer.
“If she comes back.”
I stared at the wall. My hands shook, but I couldn’t stop them. The mythprint flickered, and for a second, I thought I’d collapse. Instead, I pressed my forehead to the stone, trying not to cry, not to think, not to give in to the certainty that Fern was already gone.
The door behind me snapped open. I turned, ready to fight, but instead of a threat, I was greeted by the full, unfiltered presence of Velline Meldin.
She didn’t walk in. She stormed, bringing with her the scent of hair dye, fake leather, and enough motherly contempt to cow a regiment.
She wore what looked like a tactical bathrobe, studded with metallic spikes, and her hair was a weaponized mess of fuchsia and orange, so bright it made the mythprint scars on my face go dark in self-defense.
“Gods, you look like trauma,” she said, voice both diagnosis and insult. “Let’s fix that.”
I tried to protest. “Velline, this is not the—”
She was on me before I could finish. She gripped my chin, turned my face side to side, then dug her thumb into the lip print on my cheek and wiped it clean in one brutal swipe. The sting hurt more than anything Asterra had done.
“I’m serious,” she said, and there was no room for argument. “You want to win, you need to look like it. First lesson they teach you in cargo culture: confidence is the only thing they can’t repossess.”
She dragged me, literally, arm in an iron grip, down the corridor.
Thread Modulation: Dax Meldin Axis Alignment: Vireleth the Closure
The first sign of a bad day was the butter-coffee.
The second was the state of my workshop: two inches of oil on every surface, half-disassembled drone corpses scattered like failed suicide attempts, and a perfectly good bottle of orbital whiskey sitting untouched next to the holo projector.
The third, and by far the worst, was Perc, eating his own weight in cold pizza and watching me like a particularly stubborn fungus.
I hadn’t changed shirts since Fern left, which was fine because I wasn’t wearing one.
The butter-coffee tasted like guilt. I drank it anyway.
“Let’s just get this straight,” I said, voice half a growl, half a wet cough.
“I still believed in him. Even after the moon impregnation holo. Even after the ‘Singularity Slut’ meme. Even after the riots, when half my friends couldn’t tell if he was dead or just busy ghosting the sector.
I watched the transmission at least ten times. I still thought he was the answer.”
Perc made a noise that was somewhere between a burp and a short-circuit. “To be fair, the production values on that holo were top tier. The sound design—mwah. You could hear the moon crack.”
I glared. “I’m talking about the failure of the whole mythic system, Perc. The utter collapse of generational trust. The betrayal of hope, and you’re stuck on the bass mix.”
“Look,” Perc said, pizza slice waving like a white flag, “I’m an appliance, not a therapist. But if I was, I’d recommend you eat something with a vegetable in it and stop watching the Lioren collapse loop on repeat. It’s starting to mess with my analytics.”
I grunted. “If you ever cared about Fern, you’d know why I can’t.”
He flicked his little LED eye at me. “She’s not dead, Dax. She’s just… mythic. That’s what you wanted, right?”
I wanted to punch something, but the only thing nearby was Perc, and he’d survived worse than my fists.
“I wanted her to have a future,” I said, finally. “Not just a legend.”
Perc was silent for a while. He nibbled at his pizza, then, softer: “You did your best. If there was a manual for raising mythics, you would’ve read it. Then you would’ve glued the pages together and made fun of the author.”
That almost got a laugh out of me. Almost.
I finished the coffee, set the cup down, and let my head slump into my hands.
The drone parts smelled like ozone and failure.
Fern’s holo, frozen at the moment she smiled at the camera during the Taco Miracle, glared at me from the bench.
It was supposed to be comforting, but it was just proof I’d never really understood her.
“You want to watch it again?” I muttered.
Perc’s eye brightened. “Is that a trick question?”
I hit the button, and the projector hummed to life. The feed: Lioren Trivane, front and center, chest bare, eyes like nuclear dawn. Behind him, the mythic event played out in perfect, horrifying detail: rings of fire, the sky tearing, the planet Jupiter twisting under the weight of his will.
He said, “Observe,” and then he bent the moon in half, just like the old stories promised.
Even the audio had a low, animal whine, the kind of sound that stuck in your teeth long after the show was over. “Oh Lioren, that’s past my Roche limit! Oh, Moonbreaker! By Sol! Harder!” Europa begged.
When it ended, the room went quiet.
Perc leaked a bead of grease from his servo. “Still impressive, even on the eleventh go.”
I nodded. My throat was tight, but I wasn’t about to let Perc see it.
We sat there, the two of us, just watching the holo fade and waiting for something in the world to get better.
It wouldn’t, of course.
But we couldn’t stop watching.
The loop was going to play out, with or without us.
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins
The air in the ruins got thicker with every step.
At first it was just humidity, or so I lied to myself, but after twenty meters the pressure settled into my skull like a migraine, pushing out all the convenient lies and leaving only the red rawness underneath.
I could feel my mythprint flexing, then stretching, then bleeding into the environment.
It made sense: every inch of this place felt hungry, like it had been built to hollow out anyone dumb enough to try and pass through.
Zevelune didn’t seem to mind. She moved ahead of me, picking her way between the ancient trunks, her silhouette always a little too precise, never blurred even when the air started to shimmer and twist. She had a way of stepping into a shadow and coming out six meters ahead, as if time and space had agreed to let her cheat.
The only reason I kept up was that every time I slowed, the ruins themselves seemed to close in—branches moving closer, bark creaking with a noise like a fist being unwrapped from a human heart.
The first challenge was nostalgia.
It hit without warning. One second I was breathing the rot and ozone of the stone forest; the next, I was on Pelago-9, standing in the half-collapsed hallway outside my childhood bedroom.
The walls were the right shade of gray, the air still tinged with industrial solvent and the sour-sweet of vending broth, but everything was too quiet.
I went to open the door and found my hand bleeding, every knuckle split.
When I pushed inside, there was a family dinner in progress—Mom, Dad, even a younger version of me, all sitting around the battered metal table.
None of them looked up.
I tried to speak. The words stuck. I tried to move, but my legs went soft, bones turning to taffy.
Zevelune’s voice cut through the memory, low and dry: “You miss them, don’t you?”
I spun, but she wasn’t in the room. Instead, she was at the window, leaning in from outside, her smile too wide for the angle. Her eyes had gone dark, no light in them at all.
“I don’t,” I said, and it was the world’s worst lie.
The memory looped. Again. Again. Every time I reached for the door, my hand bled a little more. Every time I tried to call out, the words tasted of rust.
After what felt like a thousand cycles, the room started to burn. The smoke was thick and sweet, and it didn’t hurt—at least, not in the usual way. My family didn’t notice; they kept eating, jaws working through invisible food.
I turned to Zevelune, who’d finally materialized in the seat next to my mother, legs crossed, chin in hand.
“Are you going to help?” I demanded.
She blinked, slow and lazy. “Help? This is the test, darling. You walk through or you don’t.”
I forced myself to stand. My legs worked, now, but the pain followed, a hot white pressure at the back of my knees. I staggered to the table, slammed my hands down, and shouted.
No one looked up.
I flipped the table. Food and plates and people went everywhere, but the fire just burned brighter, licking at the edges of memory. My family faded out, one by one, until it was just me and Zevelune, surrounded by the sound of a world ending.
I tried to hit her.
She caught my wrist, held it tight. Her grip was cold, absolute.
“Next,” she said, and with a snap, the room vanished.
I was in the taco bar, but not any taco bar I’d ever seen.
The counter was the right height, the stools welded to the floor at just the right angle, but the only thing on the menu was blood.
It dripped from the neon letters, pooling behind the glass, running in slow, thick rivers across the floor.
I wanted to gag, but my mouth was full—cheeks packed, jaw aching.
I spat onto my hand, expecting food, but found a chunk of raw mythlogic, pulsing and blue-white.
Behind the bar, Dyris was waiting. She looked incredible—hair perfect, suit pressed, eyes cold as the event horizon. She poured herself a shot of tequila, sipped, and watched me chew.
“Hungry?” she asked.
I tried to answer, but my throat was packed with the raw stuff. I choked, spit again, this time finding my own tongue in the mess.
Zevelune, now three stools down, laughed into her glass. “You always had an appetite, Fern. Never figured out how to feed it, though.”