Page 83 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

The next thing I knew, her arms were around me.

Not tight, not suffocating—just… there. Solid.

Real. She anchored me to the moment like nothing else could, mythprint folding around us in a gold-and-blue cocoon.

I could feel my own signature responding, pulling itself together, desperate not to disappoint her.

I might have cried then. Maybe. Just a bit.

She lifted me to my feet, set me down gentle, then cupped my face in her hands.

Her eyes were so intense I thought I might combust on the spot.

“You don’t get to break here,” she said, voice low, lethal. “Not now. Not when I came this far for you.”

My knees buckled, but she held me up.

For a moment, there was no war, no mythic drama, no memory of Lioren burning in the back of my head. There was only Dyris, and the pressure of her touch, and the fact that she still wanted me enough to chase me across the universe and straight into hell.

I opened my mouth, about to say something—maybe “thank you,” maybe “I love you,” maybe “fuck you”—but she beat me to it.

She leaned in, forehead to forehead, her breath hot on my lips.

“Hold the line,” she whispered.

I nodded, once.

And just like that, the world stopped spinning.

The next instant, all the mythprint in the Ruins snapped into perfect focus, every fragment of blue and gold pointing at a single, flickering silhouette at the edge of vision.

Lioren. Or what was left of him.

He looked as surprised as I felt, caught between a smirk and a scowl, his form half-collapsed, the mythprint in his veins leaking out like a bad dream.

I felt Dyris’s arms around me, the pulse of her mythic presence, and for the first time, I didn’t want to run.

I wanted to fight.

Together.

I grinned, wild and reckless, and let the blue-white fire build in my hands.

This was going to hurt. And for the first time in my life, I couldn’t fucking wait.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: What’s Left Of The Fey Ruins

The mythic battlefield had rules, and the first rule was this: whatever you feared most would come for you, wearing the face you could least afford to see.

I’d barely squeezed Dyris’s hand before the world unstitched itself, the old stone forest liquefying, re-forming into a spiral of ruins and dead sky.

The mythdrift wasn’t gone—just condensed, like a psychic tumor, blue-white and cancer-bright.

You couldn’t miss it. You couldn’t run from it.

It formed a body, slow and deliberate, out of the ghosts of every bad choice ever made.

It was Lioren, but only at a glance.

He was taller, meaner, built like the silhouette in every nightmare where you realized your parent’s love was a lie.

His face was a fracture of all the portraits, every historic holo, every dirty meme, fused together with a sneer that didn’t know how to stop.

His eyes were twin event horizons, and his hands glowed with the promise of never letting go.

He didn’t speak at first. Instead, he laughed: a sound that didn’t echo, just expanded, like a virus or a song you couldn’t get out of your head.

Dyris stepped in front of me, not shielding, just calibrating the world for maximum violence. “My turn,” she said.

She didn’t wait for a response. Her mythprint flared, a lattice of gold lines from toe to scalp, each line a story of someone she’d outwitted, seduced, or buried. She snapped her fingers, and the ground between us and the Echo snapped to grid: five meters wide, five deep, the classic killbox.

Lioren’s Echo reached out, fingers clawing the air. “You can’t kill an origin,” it said, voice doubled and trebled by every failure I’d ever had. “You can only inherit it.”

Dyris rolled her eyes. “Inheritance is for cowards. I’m here for the hostile takeover.”

She moved, and the world agreed. One second she was next to me, the next she was inside the killbox, hands slicing through narrative logic with the precision of a heart surgeon.

Lioren’s Echo lunged. It was fast—faster than I could track, even with AR maxed—but Dyris didn’t blink. She let the hands get close, let them wrap her neck, then phase-slipped out of their grip, leaving a nimbus of gold static that burned the Echo’s arms clean off.

It screamed, but the scream was the sound of every ex who ever told me “you’re just like your father” and meant it.

Dyris wove through, never more than a blink from death, but never actually dying. She didn’t hit back, not yet. She was mapping the pattern, letting the enemy show its full cycle before deciding which node to cut.

I watched, mesmerized.

That’s when the Maelstrom started watching, too.

It wasn’t a physical presence. It was a pressure behind the eyeballs, a certainty that someone had put your whole life on a scale and was waiting to see which way it tipped. The air got heavy, the light got thinner. The Maelstrom wanted a show, and it didn’t care if I broke doing it.

I was sick of being a spectator.

I stepped into the killbox, mythprint flaring so hard it broke the AR overlays. The world bent in, trying to slow me, but I was tired of playing by mythic rules. If you can’t win the game, change the geometry.

I did.

The Echo swung at Dyris, but I cut the angle, came in from the side. My hands weren’t fists—they were singularity triggers, each finger threaded with the raw want of the Astrum, the refusal of every cycle I’d ever been forced to repeat.

I hit Lioren’s Echo in the ribs, and the echo folded around my arm, trying to eat me, but I was hungrier.

The blue-white flared, tried to overwrite my signature, but I bled the light off, turned it back into kinetic.

The feedback hit me hard—I saw my own death three times, each worse than the last—but I didn’t let go.

“You can’t have me,” I said. “You can’t have her, either.”

The Echo tried to scream, but Dyris silenced it with a palm to the throat.

She smiled at me, fierce and mean. “You want the kill?”

I nodded. “God, yes.”

She locked her arm with mine, braced me for the lunge.

“Ready?” she whispered.

“Always.”

The world bent, the killbox collapsed inward, and Dyris slingshotted me forward, every gram of her Crown Vector behind it.

I felt the mythprint overload, the bones in my arm going hot, then molten.

I hit the Echo with everything, every ounce of history, every wasted apology, every “I love you” that ever went unanswered.

We tumbled, a mess of blue-white and gold, until I had my boots planted on the Echo’s chest. I grinned, bared my teeth, and said: “This is for the moon. The magnetar. And the tacos, asshole.”

Then I dropkicked him in the crotch.

It wasn’t elegant. It was brutal. Mythprint detonated on impact, a blue-white sun blooming from my heel. The Echo screamed, a noise so raw it shook the Ruins apart, then fell, splitting down the middle, crumbling into narrative dust before it hit the ground.

I landed on my feet, knees almost giving but not quite.

Dyris caught me, steady as ever.

The battlefield was empty. The world, for a second, was silent.

Then, from the edge of perception, a voice—not Lioren’s, not the Echo’s, but cold, amused, and so old it made the mythships sound like toddlers—said:

“Ah. So that’s the shape of her defiance.”

I froze.

Dyris didn’t let go.

The Maelstrom was watching.

And for the first time, it was interested.

The Ruins fell silent. Not just quiet—dead, in the way nothing is, right after a supernova. The world didn’t so much rebuild itself as pause, like even mythlogic needed a second to recover from the level of “fuck you” we’d just thrown at the sky.

Dyris let me collapse into her arms, neither of us pretending to be fine. She pulled me down into the dirt, and for a minute we just lay there, the raw taste of ozone and violence clinging to our tongues, each pulse of my mythprint feeding straight into hers.

I wasn’t ready to let go, so I didn’t.

We laughed, first—a stupid, hysterical relief-laugh that doubled us over, then hurt so much we started to cry instead. I could feel her tears on my cheek, and mine on hers, and it didn’t matter which was which. There was no more distance, not even the thin skin of old pain.

I kissed her.

It wasn’t graceful. My lips were split, and hers were bleeding, but the moment our mouths met, the world went hot, fast, and completely out of bounds.

I’d always thought the post-battle makeout was a cliche, but it was the only thing that made sense.

We kissed until there wasn’t a single breath left in either of us, then we stole more from each other, each inhale a crime, each exhale a confession.

I dragged my tongue along her jaw, then bit her ear, hard enough to leave a mark. “You’re insane,” I gasped.

She grinned, eyes wild. “You picked me.”

I didn’t deny it. Instead, I clawed her closer, hips locked to hers, every mythprint nerve in my body screaming for more. We rolled, dirt and sweat and blue-white dust grinding into our skin, until neither of us could remember why we’d ever wanted to be apart.

I wanted her everywhere. In my mouth, in my bones, in the mythic pulses that refused to die down even with the Echo dead and gone.

We didn’t fuck—there wasn’t time, and the world was too new and too raw. But if I’d asked, she’d have done it, right there in the ashes of the old story, right in front of Zevelune.

I kissed her, again and again, until I couldn’t see straight.

She let me.

When I finally pulled away, the world was clearer. The Ruins were still broken, but we were at the center, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like I was about to be written out of my own narrative.

Dyris sat up, tugging me into her lap, arms around my waist. She leaned in, brushed her nose against mine, and whispered, “You won.”

I snorted, choked on a laugh. “Did I?”

She bit my shoulder, not gentle. “You’re alive. That’s the only prize that matters.”

Before I could answer, a shadow crossed the clearing.

Zevelune.

She glided up to the edge, glass of red wine in one hand, the other twirling a strand of hair like she’d just watched the whole thing from a front-row seat and was only now ready to grade our performance.

“Nice form,” she purred. “Good finish. I give it a 9.5, with a bonus for the testicular violence.”

Dyris didn’t bother to move. She just held me tighter, chin on my shoulder, daring Zevelune to take another step.

Zevelune sipped her wine, then glanced at the sky, which was now bleeding new mythvectors at the horizon, raw and black as the heart of a dying star.

She smiled, razor-sharp. “You bought yourself a breather. Not peace. Don’t confuse the two.”

I wanted to snark back, but the mythfire along my spine chose that exact moment to spike, hard, every nerve lighting up with a pressure I’d never felt before. It wasn’t pain. It was hunger.

Something inside me was awake. Not Lioren, I’d made him and his myth my bitch. This was new. Old, maybe, but new to me. A coil of wanting, watching, refusing to be ignored. The hunger… had never been Lioren.

“You’re right,” Zevelune said sadly, answering my thought.

I shivered, and Dyris noticed.

“You okay?” she murmured, low and close.

“No,” I said, honest for once. “But I will be.”

Zevelune gave a small, delighted laugh, like she’d just watched a cat land on its feet after being thrown from a rooftop.

The mythic resonance in my body didn’t lessen or dissipate. It settled in, heavy and certain, like a second heartbeat.

I could feel it thinking. Still here. Still hungry. Still waiting.

I looked at the sky, now fractured with the arrival of the Black Helix—bigger, darker, so much more than mythlogic had ever accounted for. It wasn’t attacking. Not yet. It was just… interested.

Zevelune drained her glass, then threw it over her shoulder, the sound of it shattering echoing forever in the dead quiet.

She leaned in, smiling at both of us.

“And the next act begins,” she whispered, so softly I almost missed it.

Then, louder, amused and hungry: “Soon. Not yet.”

She turned and faded into the trees.

I looked at Dyris. She looked at me.

Neither of us let go.