Page 77 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

“She was supposed to have a future,” I said, so low I wasn’t sure he heard it. “Not just a legend.”

Perc slid closer, his little servo arm reaching out to poke at the busted drone. “She still could. If anyone survives this.”

I eyed the butter sticks, then pushed them his way. “You ever think about running? Getting out before it’s too late?”

He made the sound he always did when disappointed in me. “Never. I’m not programmed for abandonment.”

I smiled, a little. “Yeah, well, neither was I. Didn’t stop the rest of the world from trying.”

We sat in silence, the only noise the old building groaning with the weight of another mythquake, somewhere far away.

After a minute, Perc said, “Next time, we crash a ship into something.”

I chuckled. “Next time, we build one.”

His eyes flared blue. “I know a guy who needs a new pizza delivery ship.”

I shook my head, then looked down at the wrecked drone, the ruined plate, the stains on my own hands. It wasn’t much. But it was something.

“If we survive this,” I said, “I’m building something even Fern can’t break.”

Perc grinned, or did the carafe equivalent of a grin. “That’s a plan.”

We watched the world end, together, and neither of us blinked.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Alignment: Eventide

There’s a moment, between the breach and the alarm, where you decide if you’re a criminal or just desperate. For me, it was less a decision and more a default setting.

The hallways of Eventide were on triple lockdown, the mythic suppression net humming so loud it made my teeth itch, but I knew the backdoors.

I’d written most of them, or copied from someone who had.

What I hadn’t accounted for was how the building itself seemed to want me gone—every corner tighter, every door more passworded, every camera tracking me like it was personal.

I moved fast, hoodie up, eyes darting between the AR overlays and the static-filled world in front of me.

Each feed was a nightmare: Fern, lighting up the Fey Ruins like a cataclysm, her mythprint so wild the sensors kept inventing new colors to keep up.

Dyris, incommunicado, last pinged in the depths of Vireleth, then vanished.

Everyone else? Either gone or too scared to move.

I was tired of being left behind.

The destination was Aenna’s room, though I told myself a dozen times that it wasn’t.

The AR said I was tracking Dyris, her emotional signature, at least, since she’d locked her own trace.

But every turn brought me back to the same corridor, the same shitty patch of linoleum, the same half-collapsed door with the sad sticker of a dabbing cat on it.

I stared at the overlay. It glitched, then reset, then flashed a message so bright it burned across my retinas.

[ARE YOU LOST, ALYX?]

I flinched, looked over my shoulder. No one. I reached for the handle, found it locked, and did the trick with the old ID badge and the wedge of plastic I kept in my sleeve. The door popped with a sigh, swinging inward on a breath of air that tasted like printer ink and mythic residue.

I stepped inside.

The room was dark, but not unlit. The windows were blacked out with tape and paper, but the walls glowed faintly, the hum of dead electronics giving everything a blue halo.

The bed was unmade, the covers tangled, the surface dusted with a scatter of glass tablets and half-empty bottles of calorie gel.

And in the center, curled around herself like a seed waiting for rain, was Aenna.

She didn’t move as I entered. Her hair was longer than I remembered, red and wild, fanned out across the pillow in a corona.

Her face was pale, freckled, mouth slack with sleep, eyes twitching behind closed lids.

The mythprint on her wrist glimmered, a tiny nebula that pulsed in time with her breath.

I took two steps forward, then stopped.

The AR overlay went red, then white, then blank.

I was alone in the room, but not alone in my head.

A voice, soft and female and everywhere at once: “You are in the right place.”

I swallowed. “Solance?” I asked, but it wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” said the voice. “You are.”

Then, overlaying it, colder, sharper, with the edge of a knife: “You’re late,” said Kairon. “But not too late. Yet.”

I wanted to freeze, to run, to do anything but stand there, but my body didn’t get the message. I watched as my hands started to shake, then steadied, then curled into fists.

Aenna’s eyelids fluttered.

I couldn’t move.

The voices twined around each other, like two competing frequencies, fighting for space in my skull.

Solance: “You’ve always wanted to matter.”

Kairon: “You’ve always wanted to watch.”

Solance: “You want to be loved.”

Kairon: “You want to be seen.”

My mouth went dry.

Aenna rolled, face turned toward me. Her eyes opened. They were glassy, unfocused, but they landed on me with a weight I’d never felt from her before.

Her voice was a whisper. “You’re not Fern.”

I flinched. “No.”

A long silence. Then, softer: “Are you here to kill me?”

I blinked, caught off guard. “No. I—I don’t know why I’m here.”

Aenna smiled, a small, broken thing. “Me neither.”

We just looked at each other. The mythprint on her wrist glowed brighter, and the air in the room grew heavy, thick with the residue of whatever she’d become. I felt the urge to reach for her, to see if the new her was still soft, or if the mythic had made her untouchable.

The AR overlay flickered. Solance said, “You are both necessary.”

Kairon echoed, “And you are both already lost.”

I reached out, hand trembling, fingers brushing the edge of the blanket. Aenna watched, curious but not afraid. She flexed her wrist, letting the mythprint catch the light.

We stayed like that for a while—two points on a graph, both waiting to see which would move first.

I broke the silence. “What happens now?”

Aenna’s smile widened, just a fraction. “I think we burn.”

The air in the room went hot, then cold, then back to hot. My AR flashed warnings I ignored, and somewhere behind my eyes, I felt the mythships leaning in, waiting to see how we’d break next.

I wasn’t scared.

I was ready.

This was the story, and I was in it now. No more sidelines. No more being nobody.

If it ended in fire, at least I’d be there to see it.

Thread Modulation: Kall Drennic Axis Alignment: Nova Helix Accord Resonance Analysis Center

I always thought the world would end with a bang, or at least a really convincing press release. Maybe both. Instead, it started with a spreadsheet.

To be precise, it started with the denial of a spreadsheet: [SYSTEM ACCESS: TEMPORARILY REVOKED. NARRATIVE BLACKOUT IN EFFECT.] I blinked at the red banner, then at the four other blinking error messages layered over my diagnostics feed like a child’s attempt at a collage.

This was not how the Nova Helix Accord Resonance Analysis Center was supposed to operate.

There were protocols. Hierarchies. A color-coded badge system that meant if you wore blue, you never had to talk to someone in orange, and if you wore orange, you could always blame your mistakes on the blues.

But tonight, none of that mattered. Everyone’s badge was just a new way to collect sweat.

In theory, the job was simple: Observe. Record. Don’t intervene. Underline that last one three times, then tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids, because the only thing worse than a mythic event was a bureaucrat who thought they could fix one.

It had been less than an hour since Eventide went dark.

We were told it was a routine mythquake, something the local admin could handle with a couple tissue boxes and the promise of extra long weekend.

But then the city’s signature started to oscillate, and when the waveform hit a velocity the models had flagged as “absolutely impossible,” the entire narrative monitoring staff was called in.

The techs arrived first. They always do.

It’s not bravery. It’s the promise of overtime and the bleak certainty that if they don’t show up, management will just blame them anyway.

Within twenty minutes, every station in the observation room was manned, caffeinated, and logging error reports with the grace and dignity of drowning rats.

I, Kall Drennic, had drawn the short straw and was Lead on-call. That meant every update had to go through me, and when the system started eating its reports and regurgitating them as blank templates, I was at the top of the blame heap.

I wasn’t proud. But I was thorough.

The main display wall, sixty meters of mythic waveform and scrolling disaster, had crashed into a single, ugly overlay:

[NARRATIVE BLACKOUT ACTIVE.] [ALL STAFF: OBSERVATION-ONLY PROTOCOL.]

“Holy hell,” muttered Jacen at the comms station, chewing his way through the foil on a ration bar without unwrapping it first. “They pulled the plug on the entire sector.”

“They had to,” said a voice behind me, Narasa, mythic containment specialist, and the only person in the room still wearing lipstick. “If that event drifted out of local, the models would all collapse.”

Jacen grunted. “The models are already collapsed, Nar. Look at this—” He gestured with his ration bar, which had by now lost the fight and given up its inner contents all over his knuckles. “There’s nothing but echo. It’s just… noise.”

Narasa didn’t answer. She was staring at the big wall, eyes wide, lips parted, lipstick perfect.

I tried to keep the mood light. “This is what happens when you budget for two mythics and get three for the price of one,” I said, and only Jacen snorted. It didn’t matter; the wall wasn’t listening.

The first breach hit at 20:02.

We knew it as soon as the spectrum analyzer in the adjacent bay started to scream.

The machine wasn’t supposed to make noise.

Not even a whir. But it screamed—a flat, mechanical keening that made the hair on my arms stand up and my stomach drop, as if gravity had been locally redefined to fuck you in particular.