Page 79 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins
The Ruins learned fast.
I kept walking. If I stopped, I knew the Ruins would just start in on the next round of home movies. I could handle physical torture, but the nostalgia stuff was how they got you. Nobody walks away from the past without at least a limp.
The ground underfoot changed, too. It went from forest dirt to ancient tile to a flexdeck sidewalk that could only have come from three centuries ago, the kind they’d used on Earth before anyone realized it would outlive the people walking on it.
My boots left prints in the dust, but when I looked back, the prints were gone.
Like the world was erasing every record of my passage, as if to say: “You were never here, and nobody’s going to remember you anyway. ”
I could have lived with that.
But then the time slip started. At first, it was just a lag in my own perception, like a bad AR stream. Then, it was a full-on desync: the sense that my body was three seconds behind my own thoughts, my mouth moving before my brain had even decided what to say.
“I’m not afraid of this,” I said, voice pitched low and cold.
But that wasn’t me.
That was Lioren, the original flavor, running diagnostics in my skull. He liked to pop up at moments like this. Maybe it made him feel important.
“I know you’re not,” Zevelune replied, but she hadn’t been there a second before. She was just… beside me now, walking at my pace, not touching but close enough I could feel the field of her hunger scraping at my mythprint. “But you should be.”
I tried to ignore her, but my own hands betrayed me: they curled into fists, knuckles popping, just like Lioren used to do in the holos. My stride lengthened. I started to stalk, not walk, each step a threat.
“Why are we here?” I asked, and this time it was my own voice, high and brittle. “What’s the fucking point, Zevelune?”
She smiled, but there was no joy in it. “You’re fracturing, darling. Good. The Ruins love a little drama.”
The world flickered. For a split second, I was in the Eventide quad again, the air full of fire and song, the faces of students all turned to me in awe or terror or both. Then I was back in the Ruins, standing in a patch of dead grass, the sky overhead a swirl of black and neon orange.
I touched my face. It felt wrong—too angular, too old. For a moment, I wasn’t Fern at all. I was Lioren, standing at the edge of his own apocalypse, waiting for the universe to flinch.
Zevelune watched, eyes narrow, reading every microtremor in my expression.
“You’re losing the thread,” she said, and this time her voice was soft, almost pitying. “Do you want to be him that badly?”
“I don’t want to be anyone,” I spat, but it came out as a whisper. “I just want to be done.”
She shook her head. “You don’t get to be done, not here. The Ruins eat quitters.”
I laughed, sharp and ugly, and for a second the world doubled: Fern and Lioren, standing shoulder to shoulder in the same skin, both sneering at her.
“Then what’s your plan, Sovereign?” Lioren’s voice, filtered through my teeth, low and velvety. “Break me until I shatter? Get in line.”
Zevelune stopped. I kept walking, but she was suddenly in front of me, blocking the path. She moved like liquid, her dress a smear of impossible color.
She leaned in, close enough I could smell her perfume—blood, and the memory of rain on burnt stone. Her mouth brushed my ear.
“This is the part where you choose,” she murmured. “Or break for real.”
Something snapped in the Ruins. The air pressure dropped, and my ears popped hard enough to make me stagger. The ground fractured under my feet, lines of blue mythlight threading the cracks, racing out in every direction.
I tried to run, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate. I looked down and saw my feet had changed—one was mine, pale and freckled, the other was Lioren’s, booted and scorched and built for war. I started to panic, but Lioren’s calm bled through, a cold fire in my veins.
“Which are you?” Zevelune asked, and her face was right in front of mine, eyes wide and hungry. “Fern? Lioren? Or just another ghost for the Ruins to gnaw?”
“None of the above,” I tried, but my voice split, echoing in two registers. “Or maybe all of them. Who cares?”
The sky overhead started to rotate, the sun peeling away in bands of purple and green. The trees bent toward us, their branches now tongues, each one lashing the air for a taste.
Zevelune grinned, savage and perfect. “You either write this story,” she said, her fingers curling under my jaw, forcing my eyes to hers, “or the story writes you.”
I tried to pull away, but she held tight.
“You think you’re special, Fern? You think you’re the first to spiral out here?”
She let go, and I staggered back, tripping over nothing. The world bent, the light going hard and mean. The Ruins laughed, a sound like glass in a blender.
“You are a recursion,” Zevelune said, softer now. “But you could be a vector. You could be the break in the pattern.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Every muscle had locked up, the mythprint on my spine burning cold, the blue-white light now bleeding from my eyes.
Zevelune stepped closer, her breath hot on my skin. “Or you can let the world eat you. Up to you.”
The Ruins trembled. The ground caved, and I dropped to my knees, palms pressed to the dead earth. The mythprint on my arms went nova, light arcing from every pore.
“I’m not afraid,” I heard myself say.
But it wasn’t my voice.
It was Lioren’s.
And it was terrified.
I collapsed, the world spiraling in on itself, and as the light died, I heard Zevelune’s last words, soft and sweet as a curse:
“Make the choice, darling. Or the Ruins will make it for you.”
Thread Modulation: Dyris Trivane Axis Alignment: Aboard Vireleth the Closure
I’d always considered myself immune to melodrama, but the universe never tired of calling my bluff.
Three hours had passed since Zevelune hijacked Fern out of the mythquake, and I’d spent each minute of it in the observation deck, cycling through every replay, every glitch, every last frame the AR feeds could scavenge from the spiral.
The rest of the ship had gone dark for “containment protocol,” which was mythship for “nobody wants to witness a war widow’s breakdown.
” The only light came from the surface: blue-white corona rising in the west, a mythic dawn that didn’t obey planetary logic or any Accord rules worth the memory bytes.
I wore Velline’s last and greatest outfit as armor.
The bodysuit pinched my waist so hard I’d lost the will to eat, and the heels, fuck the heels, added just enough altitude to make every move feel like a battle.
When I glanced in the glass of the viewport, the effect was obscene: all sharp lines and cold silver, my mythprint stitched across my neck like the signature on a contract I never agreed to sign.
I reran the feed. Fern, outlined in blue, locked in a face-off with Zevelune at the center of the Ruins. The way she moved: unpredictable, but weirdly graceful, even as the world bent around her. When Zevelune whispered something in her ear, Fern didn’t flinch, not even a little.
She’d always been better at pretending to be fearless than I was.
I punched pause, rewound, stared at Fern’s face, then my reflection beside it. We looked nothing alike, but I felt the narrative pressure all the same, the sick, exquisite certainty that if Fern were going to burn, I’d be the fuel.
The deck was silent. I liked it that way.
It kept the mythship from getting too chatty.
Vireleth had been pacing me for hours, running security pings and emotion audits at random intervals, but I knew the old bastard’s real trick: if you didn’t speak, he couldn’t answer back.
A warship built for a dead god, now stuck with me and my mess.
The mythprint on my skin ached. Sometimes it stuttered, going dim, only to flare up when I thought of Fern.
The doctors said it was a “resonance bleed,” a side effect of the Magnetar event, but I knew better.
It was want, leaking from every cell, trying to claw itself into Fern’s orbit and stay there forever.
I blinked, once, and the feed jumped forward, except this time, the playback was wrong.
Fern was still in the Ruins, but the background had changed: the petrified trees were gone, replaced by a cathedral of bones, arches made from the ribcages of extinct megafauna.
The sky was black, the only light coming from the blue-white of Fern’s mythprint, now so bright it cast shadows across the altar at the center.
At the altar, Zevelune waited.
She looked up, smiled, and said: “Little root, the field still waits for you.”
The voice wasn’t Zevelune’s. It was older, warmer, ruined by history but not by malice.
Asterra.
I blinked again, and now the feed was back to normal, Fern and Zevelune, locked in mythic standoff, the world barely holding itself together.
I shivered. The mythprint on my neck pulsed in time with my heart.
Another voice broke through, cold as a star’s corpse:
“Your duty remains unfulfilled.”
I recognized the signature before the tone: Jhenna the Crown. Judicial, predatory, always a little too disappointed for comfort.
I stared at the playback, hands white-knuckled on the edge of the desk.
“This isn’t my job,” I whispered. “I’m not the vector. I’m not—”
But the mythship voices were insistent.
Asterra, again: “You’re closer than you think.”
Jhenna: “You’ve always known it would end this way.”
I closed my eyes. The silence in the room cracked, then rebuilt itself around the rhythm of my breathing.
The next ten seconds were the worst of my life.
I paced the room, back and forth, nails digging crescents into my palms. Every step brought Fern’s face back to mind, sometimes her real face, sometimes the Lioren overlay, sometimes just the memory of her mouth pressed against mine, hungry and a little cruel.