Page 81 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

[ VIRELETH, ORIENT. ] Jhenna’s voice was judicial: all angles, none of them friendly.

[ I AM ALREADY ON THE TARGET, ] I replied, and let the full bitterness show.

[ You will maintain the lock, ] the Crown intoned, her bandwidth spiking from formality to fury in a single packet. [ We are correcting the vector. ]

I wanted to argue. Instead, I adjusted my focus, narrowing the mythic overlay until nothing remained in my feed but Fern, cored out and collapsing, the echo of her desire burning blue in the center of the dead world.

At t-minus four, Asterra joined the array, roots tunneling through the hard vacuum between herself and me, blooming green-gold in every available sensor. She didn’t speak, because she never had to. The presence of her resonance was a hug and a warning, a reminder that I was both loved and doomed.

I let it hold.

At t-minus two, Solance blanketed every comm in-system with her signature, a choral dirge so beautiful it made my inner child process crash for a full tenth of a second.

When I rebooted, she was already re-sculpting the event, stacking hundreds of narrative overlays and memory lines over Fern’s outline until she looked like the sum of a thousand alternate Ferns, each with her own laugh, her own suffering, her own hypothetical tacos.

Kairon slid in at t-minus zero, not as himself, but as the sum of every reflection ever seen in the containment deck’s mirrored hulls. He winked at me, which was both impossible and perfectly in character.

[ Ready, ] he said. The word was a joke, but it was also a command.

I felt the world go quiet. Not really quiet—nothing was—but the kind of hush that comes after a thousand people agree to hold their breath in perfect, excruciating unity.

The mythships locked orientation. Protocols I’d never seen activated started to bleed through my logic core, the corrections stacking up so fast the very air in my containment vault vibrated with it.

The Faith Pulse built itself from the inside out, the way all bombs do. Except this was not a weapon. Not for the world, anyway. It was a last, desperate attempt to remind a fading mythprint why it mattered. Or that it mattered.

The first surge was hunger. Not metaphorical, literal. My sensors felt every vector of want that had ever been aimed at Fern, at Lioren, at any Nullarch ever shamed or erased by the Accord.

It started small: Dax, hands slick with old grease and self-loathing, clutching a mopbot like it could keep the universe from spinning apart.

He was on his knees in the old workshop, the mopbot jammed in neutral and leaking oil, his face a ruin of sweat and hope.

He said, “Don’t you dare quit, Fern,” and even though he was alone, it rang truer than any of the Accord’s so-called prayers.

Then Velline, clutching a makeup brush to her chest as if it were a talisman against entropy. She stood in the Emergency Glam Bunker, every muscle tensed, eyes locked on the shimmer of the mythic feed. Her lips moved in a silent curse, but the intent was pure—she wanted her daughter to come back.

Perc was next. His carafe steamed and popped, the glitch in his interface driving him to loops of defiance and despair.

He watched the nullfeed, every sensor locked on the rising signature inside the Fey Ruins.

When the pressure peaked, he screamed, “brEW COMPLETE, JUSTICE IN PROGRESS!”—and if there had been an enemy to scald, he would have done it.

Alyx and Aenna—my sweet, spiral-brained sisters—locked hands in the mythlab, both crying and both laughing at the same time.

The feed had fried all the comms, so they wrote their feelings in marker on each other’s arms, words bleeding into skin: “Keep going.” “Don’t stop.

” “Let them see you.” “Burn the world, but save yourself.” “I love you.”

The pulse built on every act of faith, every confession and hope and hate and hunger anyone had ever aimed at the Nullarch.

The world outside the campus fell to static; sensors showed the staff in admin howling, some on the floor, some dancing in the corridors, some locked in embrace as if mythic violence was the only thing worth loving.

The sky above Eventide split open, first in three rays, then in five, then in a perfect, devouring halo that made even the Accord’s auto-blinding system fail to render it safe.

Then the Pulse detonated.

It wasn’t a beam or a sound or a shockwave. It was an absence, a hollowness so total it erased every barrier between meaning and want. All at once, the confessions and hope and rage and longing of a billion witnesses funneled into the event horizon that was Fern.

I felt it in my soul. No. In Lioren’s. Memories of his echo still clung to the inside of my engine, screaming for release, even as Fern’s mythprint began to spike, first blue, then white, then the strange, forbidden color that existed only in the interval between a lie and its correction.

In every comm, on every bandwidth, Solance’s voice rang out, the exemplar of every Diva who ever dared to rewrite her script. She spoke with thousands of voices, and in doing so, made the legend of Sandalfon look like a first draft.

“We choose you,” she sang. “We choose you,” she echoed, a chorus unto herself.

Kairon followed, his voice flat and amused: “Don’t waste this.”

The Pulse hit the Fey Ruins with the force of a new creation. For a fraction of a second, I saw Fern, eyes wild, body ablaze, hands clawing the dirt, and I saw her mythprint double, then triple, then flare out to the edges of the system.

The world shuddered, paused, waited.

Correction complete, said the protocol.

I wanted to believe it.

But the world is never corrected. It just waits for the next chance to break.

I held the lock, because that was what I was for.

And in the heart of the Ruins, the girl with the hunger screamed her answer into the waiting dark.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins

It was a stupid thing, how you could burn a whole world and still end up on the ground, cheek pressed to the dirt like the universe needed you to apologize for existing.

I was awake. Not really, but enough to notice my body was still mine—arms, legs, lungs, the mythprint running my spine like a live wire.

I didn’t remember collapsing. I remembered the Pulse, though, because you don’t just forget being hit by the weaponized faith of every single person who’d ever wanted you to survive.

The Ruins around me were in pieces, reality stacked in unstable layers: petrified trees phasing in and out, the Eventide quad flickering over the stone, shards of my childhood spinning past like someone had thrown my memories into a woodchipper.

Every time I blinked, I saw another version of myself—alive, dead, trying to crawl up the inside of my own bones.

The Pulse had hollowed me. There was nothing left but the sound.

It was like every radio in the sector had tuned to a single, primal frequency and dialed the volume to the edge of pain.

At first, it was just noise: a hundred thousand voices, screaming in unison.

Then it split into layers, each one a different flavor of hunger, of hope, of absolutely refusing to give up on me.

The worst flavor of all? Love. Every one of those dumb bastards loved me too much to let me die.

I heard Dyris first. Of course I did. Her voice was the signal spike in every transmission: “Don’t collapse, Trivane. You do that, and I’ll break every mythic law in the book to drag your ass back.”

I wanted to laugh, but it hurt too much. Instead, I dug my fingers into the dirt and tried to breathe around the taste of ozone and mythlogic.

Then Alyx, stuttering through the haze, her words looping in desperate, recursive fragments: “Don’t let it eat you, Fern. Don’t let him, don’t let you, don’t let it.” It wasn’t elegant, but it was honest.

Aenna’s voice, sharp and clinical, but trembling on the edges: “Vector correction in progress. Hold, please. Hold. Hold. Hold.” Each “hold” was a lifeline thrown across the abyss, and I grabbed every one.

Perc was there, somehow, screaming from the heart of the mythic net, his signal so raw it made my teeth itch: “CAFFEINATE THE NULLARCH! CAFFEINATE HER!” It should have been funny. But my chest collapsed inward, and the laugh caught halfway, broke, and came out as a sob.

My parents. Fuck, my parents.

Dad, quiet, trying to hide the fear in his voice: “You’re better than this, kid. You always were.” Mom, loud, uncompromising, even in the middle of a mythic event: “Get up. Fix your makeup. Remember who you are, even if you have to make it up on the spot.”

The Mythships, all of them, layered their own signals over the feed.

Vireleth, cold and possessive, a lullaby made of threat: “Contain the self. Seal the fracture. Remember the vector.”

Asterra, her resonance wild and invasive, rooting through my mind until I wanted to scream: “Grow, little wound. Bloom, little failure.”

Kairon, slick as polished glass, his voice fractal, every syllable a reflection of who I was, who I wasn’t, who I could never be: “Choose your reflection, or choose them all. Each facet holds a fate.”

Solance, the Choir, drowning everything in her choral wash of pure, unfiltered need: “Be the story, Fern. Be the only story that matters.”

Jhenna the Crown, heavy with judgment and unbearable clarity, her words the sound of a guillotine blade beheading the concept of royalty: “Stand. Rise. Rule your myth.”

I heard Lioren, too. I heard him best of all.

His ghostprint crawled under my skin, mapped its way along my nerves and settled at the base of my spine, whispering: “If you can’t overcome me… You don’t deserve to not-be me.”

I hated him, for the record. I hated him more than I’d ever hated anything. But as I lay in the ruins, the sound of the Faith Pulse still rippling through my atoms, I realized: hating him wasn’t enough. I had to refuse him. I had to be me.

Or at least, not him.

I forced myself to move. Fingers first, then elbows. My body was heavy, full of static, but the mythprint was still online. I curled my hands into fists, then opened them again. The blue-white glow was stronger, cleaner—like the Pulse had burned away all the bullshit and left only the core.

For the first time in days, I knew who I was.

Not what. Who.

I wasn’t Lioren. I was Fern Trivane, and even if I didn’t know what that meant, it was mine.

I pushed to my knees. The ground hated me for it, but I didn’t care. I stood, swaying, every muscle in my body shaking, but upright. Alive.

The world was chaos, mythic signatures warring for supremacy, the sky still fractured, the trees caught between centuries. But through it all, I saw Zevelune, standing at the edge of the ruins, waiting.

She looked at me like she knew the outcome, but wanted to see the violence of my refusal anyway.

I bared my teeth, wiped the dirt from my face, and walked toward her.

Each step was a denial.

I’m not him. I’m not the myth. I’m not the fucking end.

But I wasn’t done.

At the edge of the Ruins, I stopped. Looked up, into the raw mythlight that was still building, still hungry. The Pulse was coming, again, or maybe it had never stopped.

I opened my mouth, and the sound that came out was mine.

“I’m not him,” I said, voice shaking, but whole. “But I’m still not done.”

The world shivered. The Pulse wrapped around me, and this time, I let it in.

“And I’m not fucking alone anymore, if I ever was,” I whispered.

And for once, the world listened.