Page 74 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

I tried to lunge at her, but the bar stretched, stools multiplying, floor sliding away under my feet.

Dyris’s voice cut in, sharp: “Is this who you want to be?”

She was right in front of me, now, hands on my face, eyes so close I could see the shatter-lines in her irises.

She pressed her lips to mine, and the taste was salt and blood and something sweeter.

I kissed her back, desperate, and for a second, I thought maybe I could pull her out with me, escape the memory together.

But her lips burned. They scorched. She pulled away, and her mouth was gone—just a smear of mythic fire left on her chin.

Zevelune’s voice, right next to my ear: “Nice try, darling. But you’ll have to do better.”

Next, I was falling.

No, not falling. Being pulled.

I tumbled through the stone forest, the trees now so close together they scraped at my skin.

Each branch that grabbed me left a memory—a real one, not a manufactured hell.

The time I’d hidden under the junk pile for six hours to avoid Mom’s fashion-mandated haircut.

The night I’d smashed a window just to hear what it sounded like.

The time I’d kissed Gallo, then ran for two blocks because I was so scared he’d tell my dad.

I thought I could ride out the nostalgia, but the branches kept coming, each one heavier than the last, until I landed in a clearing. Zevelune was there, perched on a slab of dead stone, watching me with the patience of a cat who’d already eaten her fill.

This time, I didn’t bother to speak.

She looked me over, then said, “You’re getting closer.”

I wiped the blood from my arm, stood, and faced her. “Is there a point to this? Or are you just hoping I’ll break before the end?”

She considered that. “Either would amuse me.”

I closed the gap, got right in her face. “Why me? Why this?”

Zevelune’s smile softened—not with sympathy, but with a darkness that felt honest. She spoke softly, voice velvet and broken stars.

“He stood here too, once. Lioren.” She looked away, just for a second, as if embarrassed to mention his name. “He tried to beat the universe into shape with his bare hands. Bled for it. Burned for it. And when the world told him no…” She shrugged, slow and mean. “He just made it a yes anyway.”

She rose from the stone, stepped in close—closer than anyone had ever dared. Her mouth was right at my ear, breath warm and thick with the scent of chocolate and sweet wine.

“So what’s it gonna be, darling?” she whispered, tongue flicking out to almost touch my cheek. “You weaker than a shirtless flirt with frosted tips, or are you building something even worse?”

She pressed a hand to my chest, right over the spot where the mythprint flared brightest. The touch was electric. My whole body tensed, every muscle ready to shatter.

I couldn’t think. I could only burn.

“Again,” I said, teeth gritted, every cell in my body screaming for more.

She laughed—low, indulgent, almost proud.

Then the world went white.

When I came back to myself, I was on my knees, hands digging into the black earth. My mythprint was lit, blue-white and jagged, crackling down my spine and out through my fingertips. I was shaking, but not from fear. I was alive, and I wanted to kill something just to prove it.

Zevelune stood before me, arms open, as if ready to catch me or let me fall, depending on which was funnier.

I got to my feet, swaying.

“Better?” she asked.

I nodded, once. “Still hungry.”

“Good,” she said, and her eyes flared with something like approval. “Now let’s see what happens when you stop pretending you’re not the center of the story.”

She turned, and I followed her deeper into the ruins.

Behind us, the stone forest twisted, closed, then vanished.

Ahead, the world waited, already on fire.

I was ready.

Maybe, this time, I’d burn the right things.

Thread Modulation: Aenna Caith Axis Alignment: Eventide Lab

I’d locked the door, but it didn’t matter. Nothing outside the lab was real. Not anymore.

My hands jittered over the console, running simulation after simulation, each one a slightly more warped version of the event.

I had Fern’s mythprint mapped to seventeen decimals, every quiver of the Eventide plaza replayed in a dozen models: spiral logic, hunger vector, meta-narrative pulse.

The Magnetar. Eirona-Null. The aftermath that should have erased us both.

I hadn’t slept in three days. My body said it needed to, but the new me—the mythprint me—overwrote fatigue with pure, recursive terror.

The room was bright, brighter than I remembered.

The walls seemed to glow, then fade, then pulse with the rhythm of my heartbeat.

Sometimes my hands looked wrong: too pale, too long, fingers trailing blue and white, the skin semitransparent.

I’d check, and it would be normal again, but then the next scan would show the fingers two centimeters further apart, or warped, or fusing into each other.

I logged the phenomenon as “perceptual phase bleed.” I didn’t mention the part where it hurt.

I looped the Fern data again. Spiral collapse at t-minus zero: hunger curve trending positive.

Re-entry: mythprint loss of self. Post-crisis, she still functioned, but something inside had begun to…

breed? That wasn’t the right word. It was more like she was growing a mythic cancer, each “event” feeding it, making her resonance more dangerous, more unstable.

I watched the part where she left the world for the Spiral, where she met me and ate my signature in a way that was both a compliment and a war crime.

I’d replayed it a thousand times, searching for the seed of her new behavior.

I was convinced I’d caused it. I let her “go again” with me, over and over, until she couldn’t stop.

“Recursive hunger,” I muttered, tapping the phrase into my notes. “Self-sustaining. Nonlinear. Feedback loop.”

My own mythprint responded: the band around my wrist flared, then sent a jolt up my arm, so sharp it made me cry out.

The lab lights flickered; a panel in the ceiling groaned and warped, as if gravity had tripled for a half-second.

I logged the effect as “local warp anomaly.” I didn’t log the part where I nearly bit through my tongue.

The simulations were supposed to help. They made it worse.

On loop #1002, I saw it: a signature I didn’t recognize, riding Fern’s mythprint like a parasite. It wasn’t Lioren. It wasn’t Fern. It was cold, recursive, a logic engine bent on eating every line of difference until the world was blank.

I froze the feed, zoomed in, split the waveform.

The third signature was there, hiding in the gaps between Fern’s own pulses. Every time she reached a new mythic threshold, it got clearer—darker, more precise.

My mouth went dry. I’d missed this for three days.

“No, no, no, no—” I whispered, hands frantic on the glass, dialing back the simulation, checking against the original Eventide feed, then my own. The signature was there, too, in the Spiral, lurking just outside perception.

I pulled up the Magnetar logs, desperate for proof I’d imagined it.

It was there.

It had always been there.

My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t slow down. My own mythprint was now fully active, the nebula cluster in my chest burning blue-hot, every breath feeding the growing panic.

I reran the feed.

Every time Fern reached out to “devour” someone, the third vector twitched, adjusting itself to the new context, eating the old narrative and spitting out something sharper, more beautiful, more doomed.

The air in the lab thickened. My eyes watered, then stung, then started to burn.

I tried to stand, but my legs didn’t cooperate. I crashed against the edge of the table, caught myself, then kept typing, because if I stopped I knew I’d lose the thread and probably never find it again.

I muttered to myself, “It’s not her. It’s not Lioren. It’s—” but I couldn’t finish. My tongue wouldn’t make the words.

The third vector was watching me now. I could feel it: in the cold behind my eyes, in the way my shadow stopped matching my body, in the hunger that was no longer Fern’s but mine.

The nebula in my chest flared. My hands turned to starlight, the flesh and bone burning away, replaced by pure, blue-white fire. My hair lifted off my scalp, red shifting to gold, then to white, then to nothing at all. The world lost color, then shape, then meaning.

The lights went out.

A new voice, neutral and flat, echoed in the darkness.

[KAIRON THE MIRROR HAS INTERVENED.]

Every system froze. My hands stopped moving, but the pain didn’t. My mythprint collapsed, the nebula turning to cold ash. My body was paralyzed, not with fear, but with the knowledge that something had overwritten my every protocol.

[SLEEP,] the voice said, as if it had never known the concept of failure.

I tried to resist, but my body obeyed before my mind could protest.

I slumped forward, my face landing on the console, starlight leaking from my fingers as they spasmed once, then went still.

In the final moment before oblivion, I felt the third vector settle over me, like a shadow or a lover or a god.

It was amused.

It knew I’d found it.

It wasn’t done.

Neither was I.

But for now, I slept.

Thread Modulation: HoloNet Axis Alignment: Who even knows anymore?

The communal lounge was half-lit, sticky, and full of dead noodles. I was not Aenna, but I lived with her, which meant most of my life was spent trying to parse mythprint emergencies over the low drone of instant food and disaster memes.

Tonight, the HoloNet was a dumpster fire.

I surfed feeds with one hand, the other shoveling cold ramen into my face while the world tried to decide if it was ending or just in its fun new midlife crisis.

The main news desk was already down a host—she’d started screaming about narrative recursion mid-broadcast and had to be replaced with a substandard meat puppet who didn’t even blink in sync.

On the big screen, the mythic theorists were at war.

One, a classic Accord analyst in a suit that cost more than my tuition, was openly weeping and muttering “it’s not possible” on loop.

The next, a posthuman with hair like blue fire, was live-annotating a death spiral diagram and arguing with himself in three voices.

The third—my favorite—looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, eyes wide and yellow, shirt spattered with what I hoped was pizza sauce.

He was shouting.

“She’s done it! THREE mythships in-system! Three! Eventide can’t survive that! Vireleth alone could erase the entire galactic core, and you’re telling me they’re all in play? What is the Accord supposed to do, PRAY?!”

The Accord rep, a paper-thin woman with the smile of a lapsed cultist, tried to restore order. “Let’s remember, these are just rumors—”

He cut her off with a hoarse laugh. “Oh, rumors? Did you miss the part where the South Tower’s clocks are all running backward?

Or the part where the mythic containment grid just fucking gave up?

Or do you want to talk about the raw event footage, where Fern Trivane eats a god and smiles for the cameras? ”

She looked to camera three, dead-eyed. “We encourage all citizens to remain indoors and limit their mythic exposure. The Accord is deploying specialists to—”

That’s when the other analyst, the weeper, detonated.

No, really. He just exploded—body went from solid to meat pinata in under a frame. The feed jumped, cut to black, then came back with a new host, who looked exactly like the last but with more hair and slightly less fear in his eyes.

No one even paused. The chat stream below the feed was already full of memes: #MeatPinata, #NullarchBae, #PrayForEventide.

Someone in the lounge howled with laughter.

My compad vibrated. I ignored it.

The death-spiral guy was now in full rant. “It’s over, you get it? There’s no baseline anymore. She’s the narrative now. If you think the Accord can just staple this back together with a new meme or a ‘corrective protocol,’ you’re—” His voice glitched out, but the intent was clear.

I finished my ramen, slurped the last broth, and wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

In the side panel, the trending clip was a raw feed from outside South Tower: Fern’s mythprint lighting up the sky, Zevelune’s silhouette beside her, the world bending around their argument. Underneath, the hot take: “Nullarchs gone wild.”

In the private feed, someone messaged: “Aenna’s not answering. Should we call her?”

I typed, “She’ll surface eventually. If not, the world won’t matter anyway.”

The news desk fell into a weird, beautiful silence. Nobody wanted to speak. On screen, the three mythships hovered, their silhouettes like teeth marks in the sky.

The cult leader, patched in from who-knows-where, started to pray: “Pray for the Nullarch. Pray for the one true myth—”

Someone off camera yelled, “Which one? Lioren or Fern?!”

For a second, the whole feed hung.

The host looked straight into camera, the smile gone.

“I… don’t know,” he said.

And then the world kept spinning, and we all kept watching, because what else was there to do?