Page 80 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
I tried to think of anything else, but the world didn’t allow it.
On the fourth lap, I stopped dead, turned to the nearest console, and stabbed in the Trivane override code. It was old, from a war that never officially happened, but Vireleth had never scrubbed it. The interface hesitated, as if daring me to finish what I’d started.
I pressed Enter.
The ship’s lights flared, then dimmed. A security panel opened in the far wall, the path to the lower docking bay illuminated by a line of red LEDs.
I went, because what else was there to do?
At the door, Vireleth’s voice cut in, dry and careful:
“Dyris. If you do this, there’s no walking back.”
I laughed, sharp and mean. “No one walks back from her anyway.”
I keyed the final code, and the door opened.
The docking bay was empty, except for a single, gleaming drop pod, one built for mythprint events, sealed at the joints with blacked-out signatures that screamed “do not touch” in a dozen languages.
I didn’t care.
I stepped inside, heels clicking against the carbon mesh, and locked the hatch behind me.
The pod’s display blinked alive. “Destination?” it asked, all formal and clinical, as if it hadn’t been waiting for this moment since the universe coughed up Fern Trivane and dared someone to do something about it.
I stared straight ahead, the pulse in my neck matching the blue-white corona of Fern’s last AR ping.
“Take me to the Ruins,” I said.
The engine cycled up. The world outside shrank to a pinhole, then vanished altogether.
Inside the pod, I was alone.
It felt like the first time in weeks I’d been able to breathe.
My mythprint burned, brighter and steadier than ever.
For the first time in my life, I felt absolutely, perfectly ready.
I closed my eyes.
And waited for impact.
Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron Axis Alignment: Eventide Labs
I’d always known I’d die for someone else’s narrative, but I’d hoped it would at least be a good one.
Aenna and I had barricaded ourselves in the mythlab, living off caffeine, freeze-dried apology pudding, and the raw, undiluted dread of knowing your favorite disaster girl was about to collapse the universe in real time.
The place reeked of burnt ozone and terror sweat, the only light coming from the array of consoles that lined the room, each one locked on a different feed of Fern’s last known signature.
The lab was chaos: every surface buried under diagnostic holos, spilled energy drink, and the fragments of half a dozen “emergency stabilization” projects that neither of us had the heart to throw out.
The AR overlays flickered so severely I could barely see my hands.
Sometimes I’d get a glimpse of my face reflected in the glass, and it would be wrong, eyes gold instead of brown, mouth curled in a sneer I’d never practiced.
I knew what that meant. Solance and Kairon were piggybacking the signal again, each trying to one-up the other in a contest nobody had explained to me.
They liked to mess with my overlays, but the side effect was a kind of emotional nausea, like having to watch your parents fuck just to get the WiFi password.
Aenna, for her part, was thriving on it.
She’d gone full post-mortal, her mythprint so saturated it bled red through every sleeve and collar.
She hadn’t slept, probably hadn’t even blinked, since I woke her up, and now she sat cross-legged on the main table, surrounded by a halo of diagnostic glass and her psychotic confidence.
“She’s still in the Ruins,” Aenna said, not looking up from the feed. Her voice was raw, threaded with feedback. “Resonance hasn’t flatlined, but the harmonics are spiking hard. Lioren’s signature keeps overlaying. It’s… beautiful, but also very, very bad.”
I nodded, because it felt like I should. “Is there anything we can do?”
Aenna’s eyes glowed, not metaphorically. “We can make it louder.”
I didn’t even pretend to understand. I just reached for the nearest diagnostic and tried to focus, but my vision kept doubling.
When I looked at the monitor, I saw three overlays: Fern, hunched and shaking, her mythprint burning blue; Zevelune, all hungry elegance, never breaking a sweat; and Dyris, beautiful and terrifying, falling through mythspace like the world owed her a fucking apology.
The room buzzed with a static that got in your teeth. I blinked, and suddenly Kairon’s voice was in my head, smooth, bored, the kind of tone you could only get from a being that had watched the world end a hundred times and never been impressed.
“You’re all variables in the same equation, Alyx,” Kairon purred. “Be clever. Be cruel if you must. It’s what she would do.”
Solance cut in, her voice a harmony of love songs and nervous laughter. “Don’t think. Feel. Love her loud enough to make the world listen.”
I clapped my hands over my ears, which never worked but made me feel slightly less unhinged.
Aenna reached over and grabbed my wrist. Her hand was hot, like she’d swallowed a power core.
“You with me?” she asked, eyes wide, mouth split in a wild smile.
I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure. “You’re going to try it, aren’t you?”
Aenna’s smile sharpened. “We’re not letting her go down alone.”
She let go of my wrist and bent over the central console, fingers flying across the interface.
The display filled with lines of mythvector code, each line a precise, violent argument against entropy.
She was amplifying Fern’s signature, feeding it every last bit of local mythic bandwidth, and then some.
When the system started throwing redline warnings, Aenna just laughed.
“C’mon,” she muttered, “just a little more. You can take it.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking to the system, Fern, or herself.
I watched the feed. Fern was on her knees now, the ground beneath her alive with blue-white fire. Zevelune hovered above, part lover, part executioner, part mythic correction agent. I wanted to scream at her to leave Fern alone, but the voice wouldn’t come.
Instead, I did what I always did: I hacked the local net.
Pulled up every dormant social channel, every comm system, every public address thread that the blackout hadn’t shut down.
The main campus feed was dead, so I rerouted through the old student meme server.
It still worked. I dumped the raw event footage, every bit of data I could scrounge, straight into the mythlab console.
The effect was immediate. The system screamed, literally, a high-pitched warble that made my teeth ache.
Aenna’s laugh cracked and doubled, echoing off the walls.
Kairon: “Unorthodox. Reckless. Predictably her.”
Solance: “Oh, I like this one.”
I felt the pressure building, a physical weight on my chest. “Aenna, is this… is this safe?”
She didn’t answer at first. Then, without looking up:
“This is a bad idea.”
She paused, grinned, and this time her eyes were brighter than ever.
“But she’s ours, and I’m not losing her.”
She hit the last key, and the entire room went white.
The mythlab filled with music, not actual sound, but the distilled emotional memory of every time Fern had made me laugh, want to punch her, or just ache with the knowledge that she’d never, ever want someone as broken as me.
It was the sound of every argument we’d ever had, every drunken confession, every dumb joke about being “too old for heroics” and every time I’d wanted to kiss her but never did.
Aenna’s mythprint burned red, brighter than the warning lights on the console. She stood, arms out, and the light bent toward her, a corona of pure narrative hunger.
I felt it, too. My own mythprint, usually nothing but a vestigial buzz, spiked, shimmered, then went wild, the overlay pulsing with Kairon’s signature and Solance’s song.
The pulse built. You could see it on the feed: every mythic signature in Eventide, even the half-dead ones, aligning, stacking, folding into a single, impossible vector.
Aenna grabbed my hand.
“You ready?” she asked.
No. “Yeah.”
She squeezed.
“Say it,” she said, voice a little broken.
I looked at the camera, at Fern’s face on the screen. She looked back, just for a second, like she could see me.
“I’m not letting you go,” I said. “Never.”
Aenna’s laugh was wild, unfiltered joy.
The pulse began to fire.
The last thing I heard before the world went white again was Solance’s voice, soft and everywhere:
“Good girl.”
The system flooded with light, with song, with the raw, ugly love that only a couple of queer losers could ever make matter.
And for once, it felt like enough.
Thread Modulation: Vireleth the Closure Axis Alignment: Eventide System
Some would say the moments before a mythic correction event are sacred, a hush before the choir cracks its voice and the world resets itself around the most convenient survivor.
Those people had never been a containment-class mythship tasked with holding the vector steady while four competing narrative engines lined up to play god with a single ruined girl.
I was Vireleth the Closure, and as Fern Trivane’s flagship, I had no illusions about sacredness. Not anymore. There was only protocol and hope, and the former was failing fast.
The containment vault was built to outlast eternity.
Still, eternity had never accounted for the possibility of simultaneous correction attempts by Jhenna the Crown and Kairon the Mirror, let alone the absolute disregard for causality that Solance brought to every transmission.
Asterra, sweet monster that she was, had already broken every upper-bound containment metric within the first microsecond of the event.
I envied her, a little. It must be nice to overflow your purpose and not care who drowns.
At t-minus six seconds, the comm layer detonated with a triple handshake from the Crown. I felt it in my hull, a low, ceremonial pulse that rattled every vector between myself and the Fey Ruins, where the Nullarch’s mythprint was already fading.