Page 8 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Dan swallowed. “It’s an immature signature. Not yet stabilized. Early-stage resonance, but with a power factor in the Astral Sovereign range.”

The vice-marshal bared his teeth, a predator born in committee. “So it’s a fake, or an accident. No human can spike that high, not even the shirtless founder of House Trivane. We scrub the source, log the collateral, and never speak of this again.”

The monk finally touched ground. His voice was barely human. “You do not understand. The soul is the same. Lioren Trivane. The vessel, the mind, is new.”

For the first time, Cadris’s hands betrayed her, curling into fists. “Where is the epicenter?”

“Pelago-9,” Daxil said. “Local signal traces indicate a civilian. Female, nineteen, maintenance class.”

The monk whispered, “She will not remain a civilian for long.”

Another officer, a career bureaucrat with the profile of a frightened bird, leaned forward. “We can contain her. Right?”

“We have nothing,” the monk said, and smiled, teeth filed to points. “House Trivane built the Accord. All of our failsafes, our counters, our last desperate salvation… all of them run on Trivane AI. They will worship at the feet of the Nullarch.”

The room watched as the screens flickered. Faces and feeds, voice and void, it all collapsed into a single line of text:

NULLARCH REACTIVATED.

Cadris stood, voice gone low. “We need to escalate.”

The vice-marshal scoffed. “To what, folklore?”

Cadris didn’t smile. “To existential.”

The resonance monk started to chant, low and guttural. The holodisplays flickered, then stabilized. The science officer typed furiously, pulling up deep archive files and redacting even her inputs. After a moment, she looked up, eyes wide.

“She has a family,” she said. “They’re still on Pelago-9.”

Cadris nodded. “Tag and isolate them. No direct action unless we lose control.”

The monk laughed, his chanting done. “There is no containing a black hole.”

Then he vanished. Not a blink. Not a shimmer. Pure absence, sudden and total, as if he’d given up on reality mid-breath, and reality, in turn, had agreed.

“Update. An entire Containment Force has been wiped out on Pelago-9.” Footage played.

“Send our Vaelith.”

Thread Modulation: Cerise Axis Alignment: Pelago-9.

The alley shrine was never meant to hold more than three or four desperate souls at a time. Tonight, it was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with bodies, most of them alive, all of them hungry.

Smoke—thick and sweet, laced with the illegal kind of hallucinogens—curled in from the street. The walls, patchwork slabs of refab and vandalized adboard, were covered in sigils drawn in everything from old lipstick to what looked suspiciously like arterial spray.

At the center, the seer knelt, knees raw against the pitted concrete, hands trembling as she sifted the relics. They were nothing, really: a sliver of memory drive, a broken ring, a strip of faded cloth. But here, in the heart of the Glimmer Zone’s devotional sector, they were as sacred as blood.

She dragged in a breath, the air electric with pre-dawn tension. Her name, once, had been Cerise, but the cult had burned that away. Now, she was just the Seer. The only one who could read the starwinds and survive.

She started the chant, low and careful, so as not to spook the newcomers. The words were ancient, stolen from the bones of dead religions and soldered together with desperation.

The relics began to hum, the memory drive glowing at the edge of visible light. The crowd pressed closer.

Cerise lifted the drive, held it high, and let the resonance move through her. It started slow, like a headache in a forbidden color. Then it hit.

A wall of sound—no, not sound, but the aftertaste of a scream—blew through her skull, flattening thought, flattening self.

The vision arrived in pieces: a girl, naked and incandescent, burning with the signature of a collapsed sun.

The Seer’s own hands clamped to her ears, and her eyes rolled back so far she saw only the stars inside her head.

The name came then, echoing and impossible.

Fern.

Cerise howled, fell flat, and clawed at the ground until her fingernails tore loose. “She is here!” she shrieked. “Nullarch! The Devourer comes!”

The cultists lost their minds. One bit off the tip of his own finger and painted the nearest wall with a sloppy, ecstatic spiral.

Two more started fighting over the strip of cloth, each certain it bore the new messiah’s scent.

The air filled with shouting, prayer, and a metallic rain of teeth on cement.

Cerise wept, the resonance still drilling through her. It hurt, but it was beautiful, the most beautiful thing she’d ever touched. She felt herself dissolve, atom by atom, into a faith that tasted like static and warm, coppery blood.

She lifted her head just long enough to watch the others fall to their knees, faces upturned, hungry for the next sign.

It would come, she knew. They all knew.

The city would break itself open to greet the Nullarch.

All Cerise had to do was survive until dawn.