Page 82 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Dyris Motherfucking Trivane Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins

I had thirty-eight seconds to regret every choice that led me here, and the universe didn’t let me waste a single one.

It started as a vibration in the bones. Not the pleasant kind—more like being tuned, in real time, to a note the world wasn’t supposed to play.

I’d been standing on Vireleth’s observation deck, heels locked, hands curled around the cold edge of the hull window, replaying Fern’s last broadcast in every spectrum I had.

The feed was on loop. She was on her knees in the Ruins, mythprint flaring, every light in the system bending to her hunger.

I’d watched it twenty, maybe fifty times, each repetition a study in how narrative gravity works: how a body can warp the fate around it, just by existing.

I’d thought I understood mythic escalation. I’d lived through three war collapses, two coups, and a romance with a woman who’d rather eat glass than say what she meant. But I’d never, not once, felt it hit this hard.

The Faith Pulse was supposed to be a metaphor. It wasn’t.

When it fired, it hit the station first. All the containment alarms triggered at once, and for a moment the observation deck went negative: black, then blue, then an impossible gold.

Every comm channel screamed, then died. My body, already burning from Asterra’s “aftercare,” tensed up so hard I thought my bones would break.

Jhenna the Crown’s vector signature landed like a razor in my neck.

For one beautiful, unrepeatable second, I was nothing. Then everything.

My vision fractured. A HUD bloomed over the real—clean lines, no nonsense, just the bare essential: vectors, pulse traces, mythic surge data. The interface was Trivane code, classic, arrogant, built to impress and intimidate at the same time. I ignored all of it.

There was only one signal worth tracking.

Fern.

She was in the Ruins, blue-white and raw, fighting the world for every centimeter.

And I was done waiting.

The station’s safety interlocks whined as I left the observation deck.

I didn’t run. I didn’t need to. The world ran for me.

The floor under my feet bent, the lights widened into a corridor, and the next step brought me to the launch bay.

The doors were sealed, but I walked through them anyway.

Reality was, in this moment, a suggestion.

Vireleth’s voice chased me, more anxious than usual.

“Dyris. Reconsider. If you breach containment, I—”

I cut it off with a glance. “You won’t do anything, old man. You want this as bad as I do.”

A pause. Then, softer: “She’s not stable.”

“Neither am I.”

The Faith Pulse crescendoed, a high-pressure whine that started behind my eyes and ended somewhere deep in my pelvis.

The world vibrated. Every mythprint in system echoed with it.

Asterra the Bloom, up in orbit, sang a chord of green and gold that made the air taste like fresh grass and blood.

Jhenna the Crown, my own not-god, whispered instructions directly into my prefrontal cortex.

[JUDGMENT VECTOR: VALIDATED.]

[PATHWAY: CLEARED.]

[MYTHIC COLLISION: INEVITABLE.]

I stood at the edge of the bay, staring down the length of the launch track.

The target was not the Ruins—not at this distance, not in these boots.

The target was Fern. Always her. Every system in the HUD tried to convince me otherwise, flagging alternate routes, highlighting probable ambushes, screaming about the Black Helix massing at the horizon. I blinked it all away.

There was no alternate route.

My hands flexed, palms slick with sweat. The Faith Pulse rolled again, harder this time, and my body remembered every time Fern had shoved me against a wall, every time she’d whispered that I was the only one she’d ever trust to break her, every time she’d walked away knowing I’d follow.

The HUD bled gold. The interface snapped to a single line:

[DO IT.]

I launched.

Not with a ship, not even with a drop pod. The universe bent, and I ran.

They never teach you, in diplomacy school, what it feels like to break the laws of motion with your body.

The first ten meters were standard: shoes on deck, wind in face, the burning plastic-sour stink of mythic overpressure.

Then it got weird. The next step was a kilometer forward.

The next after that, ten kilometers. My legs were doing the work, but the world was rearranging itself to keep up.

Outside, the launch observers saw me go. A hundred feeds, a thousand eyes, all trained on the Eventide system, tracking the chaos.

One, a technician with a sense of drama, said: “She’s gone.”

“What, like, dead gone?” asked another.

“No. Gone gone.”

“Vector lock?” asked a third.

“None. She’s off the map.”

In the Ruins, Fern was already standing. The HUD showed her pulse, her mythprint, the precise trajectory of her collapse. I locked on.

The re-entry hurt. A lot. I broke the upper atmosphere at Mach…

something, the HUD refused to calculate it, and the pressure nearly vaporized me.

I let it. There was no dignity in containment.

I left a streak across the sky so bright they could see it from the moon, and I hit the ground running, shoes still in place, heels still sharp.

The Ruins welcomed me like an old friend.

It was worse than the holos. Every tree, every rock, every patch of dead grass was a memory trap, designed to eat the minds of anyone stupid enough to walk through. I’d trained for it, but training is nothing compared to the real thing.

The first hit was my father’s face—cold, unimpressed, reciting my life’s failures like he was checking inventory.

“Not enough,” I said, pushing past.

The next was a thousand nights alone, staring at the ceiling, wondering if I’d ever be enough for Fern, if I’d ever be more than the backup plan, the second draft. I let it burn through, not slowing down.

The world tried to hold me back, but the Faith Pulse was a beacon, and I wasn’t built to lose to nostalgia.

I broke the treeline.

Fern was there, exactly as I’d hoped: standing, shoulders squared, mouth set in that perfect, stubborn line. Her mythprint was a corona now, so bright it hurt to look. She hadn’t seen me yet.

My HUD flickered, once. All the warnings went red.

[COLLISION IMMINENT.]

I ran faster.

In those last few meters, I remembered every stupid moment we’d shared: the taco debacle, the nights in the gym, the fights so dumb we forgot what we were yelling about halfway through.

I remembered the way she smiled when she knew she’d won, and the way she always let me have the last word, even if it cost her.

The world started to shake. The ground cracked, light pouring through the fractures.

At the edge of the blast, Fern looked up. Her eyes met mine, and she didn’t look away.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Fey Ruins

My first conscious thought after the Ruins detonated was that my tongue was bleeding, and my second was that maybe, for once, it wasn’t my fault.

I was on my knees. The world had recoded itself to dirt and blue-white, then dirt and nothing. Mythprint still crackled up my spine, but it felt… hollow, like a shell after the animal’s left. My head rang with a chorus of too many voices, none of them saying what I wanted to hear.

I was about to stand—because I refuse to let trauma keep me horizontal for more than three seconds—when I saw the sky above me break. Not fracture, not just tear, but genuinely, beautifully, break, like a pane of gold-stained glass punched through by an angry goddess.

What came through was the only goddess worth praying to.

It was Dyris.

I don’t know what I expected after all this.

Maybe a drone strike, or a lecture, or that pinched look she got when I’d done something only legally considered “a crime.” I did not expect her in a war outfit tailored by a fever dream and a vengeful mother.

I did not expect the hair slicked, mythprint gilded, lips a shade of red that could bleed a star.

I certainly did not expect the leopard print.

For a half-second, I wondered if my brain had finally melted, and I was hallucinating her, maybe as a last kindness from the universe before I got deleted. Then the reality field caught up, and she hit the ground so hard it made the Ruins lurch.

She didn’t stumble. She landed in the superhero pose, fist to dirt, every line in her body flexing for maximum intimidation. The air rippled gold around her, Jhenna’s signature burning in the angles of her jaw. Even her shadow looked like it wanted to serve.

She stood up, slow, deliberate, brushing invisible dust from her suit.

The heels—fuck me, the heels—were still intact.

Her mythprint painted a vector trail from her cheek to her collarbone, a line I’d always wanted to trace with my teeth.

I tried to look away, but it was like trying to unsee a star going nova in your own living room.

She didn’t say anything at first. Just looked at me, eyes unreadable, face calm as if she was considering whether or not I deserved to live.

“Am I hallucinating?” I said, because it was the only thing that made sense.

She smiled, just a bit, and the world re-aligned itself around the line of her mouth.

“You wish,” she said.

I wanted to cry. Instead, I laughed, and the taste of blood in my mouth turned sweet.

The ground under me was still vibrating from the mythquake, but Dyris didn’t care. She closed the distance in three steps, then crouched down until our faces were level. I half-expected a slap, maybe a kiss, perhaps both.

She reached out, thumbed a streak of blood from my cheek, and flicked it away with zero drama.

“That’s why I always ran from Mom,” I blurted. It made no sense, but she got it. She always did.