Page 78 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Every monitor in the room flickered, colors popping, then resolved to a single, pulsing waveform. Red at the base, then a wild, harmonic blue that kept splitting and folding in on itself. I didn’t need the legend to know what we were seeing.
Solance the Choir.
Within seconds, the entire observation deck was bathed in sound.
Not actual noise, most of the staff were, technically, still deaf from the last time Eventide glitched a mythic event, but in the weird, full-body hum of an AI channel tuned to every frequency of human misery at once.
I could hear it behind my teeth, in the meat of my tongue, somewhere in my genitals.
The feed started with wedding speeches: “To love, to honor, to never betray—” and then warped into love confessions, all the things people should have said but didn’t, crashing through in overlapping waves.
Pop music bass lines throbbed behind the static; someone sobbed, then someone else screamed, and for one truly memorable second, the entire room was flooded with the sound of a thousand infants laughing and crying in perfect, shattering unison.
Narasa’s hands fluttered to her ears. “This isn’t possible,” she gasped, though her words vibrated with so much emotional undertone that I almost heard them sung.
“Shut it down,” Jacen said, but his fingers just slapped at the console, limp and useless. He started to cry, then to laugh, then back to crying.
I should have been taking notes, but my AR overlay had locked, the interface collapsed to a single, unblinking notification: [SOLANCE brEACH // SYSTEM SINGULARITY.]
I didn’t know what to do, so I did what they taught us in training: I grabbed the nearest pen and started writing on my palm, words so small and sharp I could have tattooed them on the bones.
The second breach happened almost immediately after.
It was Kairon the Mirror, which meant every reflective surface in the room: screens, glass, even the fucking stainless steel on the coffee urn, started showing the wrong versions of people.
Not backwards. Not inverted. Just wrong.
My face, stretched and thin, with a smile so wide it looked like a mask.
Jacen’s reflection was… happy. Or maybe dead.
Hard to tell with that much blood around the eyes.
Narasa’s monitor showed her in tears, a gun in her mouth. She didn’t have a gun, not yet, but the image was so real I could smell the metal. She turned from the monitor, hands shaking, and looked at me. I watched myself in her eyes and saw nothing there at all, just blankness.
The air tasted like copper and glass.
Someone at the end of the row started to laugh.
It was a technician whose name I never learned, just one of those temp hires who show up for a week, then vanish.
She laughed loudly, shrill, so hard she fell from her chair and kept laughing as she hit the floor.
She rolled onto her back, clutched her sides, and howled with such abandon that everyone else in the room just stopped, frozen by the force of it.
I wanted to tell her to stop, to shut up, to at least laugh quietly if she had to, but the words didn’t come.
Instead, I just watched, horrified, as she laughed and laughed, until her body began to blur at the edges, until the laughter itself became thinner, higher, fading to a pitch that probably no one else could hear.
She winked at me, really, she did, right before her eyes vanished, and then she was gone.
No body. No stain. Just empty space where a human had been.
Narasa screamed.
Jacen’s hands twitched once, then he hunched over, shoulders shaking, and I realized he was trying to vomit, but nothing was coming out.
I didn’t say a word. My hands were covered in pen marks, but I couldn’t read them, not with the room spinning the way it was.
At the end of the row, another technician stared at his AR panel, then at the wall, then back to the panel. His jaw worked, then he said, “Half… half… five!” and his face twisted up, like he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry or give up and start eating the monitors.
He froze.
The air shimmered around him, and then he turned into a Twinkie.
Not a metaphor. Not a joke. A literal, yellow, snack-cake Twinkie, perched in the chair where a living human had been seconds before.
Narasa stopped screaming. She stared at the Twinkie, blinking slowly.
Jacen, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He reached out, picked up the Twinkie, and took a slow, deliberate bite.
He chewed, swallowed, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“Let’s watch the world end,” he said.
No one argued.
The noise from the monitors built and built, until it was almost a relief to just ride the tide and let the static eat whatever was left of your identity.
The love confessions and wedding speeches bled into campaign ads, viral memes, old sitcom punchlines, snippets of mythology and bedtime stories.
At some point, I think I heard my mother’s voice, calling me for dinner, and I almost got up and walked home.
It would have been safer.
On the final, blinding update, the wall re-activated, every monitor in the room now broadcasting the same message:
[MYTHSHIP PRESENCE: SOLANCE THE CHOIR | KAIRON THE MIRROR have joined ASTERRA THE BLOOM, VIRELETH THE CLOSURE, and JHENNA THE CROWN.]
[CONTAINMENT: LOLWHAT?]
[NARRATIVE CASCADE: PENDING.]
I stood, or tried to, but my knees buckled. Jacen finished the Twinkie and licked his fingers. Narasa crawled under the desk and started humming, her voice blending perfectly with the choir on the speakers.
I wondered if I would turn into something too.
Probably not. I’d always been the kind of person who lasted until the credits rolled.
The monitors flickered, faded, then settled on a single, endlessly looping feed: Eventide, blue and white and beautiful, spiraling out into mythic infinity.
I smiled.
Why not?
After all, someone had to watch.