Page 107 of She Who Devours the Stars
She just let the world run, content to know she’d had a hand in making it so gloriously, catastrophically ungovernable.
Just the way she liked it.
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane
Axis Alignment: South Tower
In the aftermath, the room was a cathedral for silence.
Not the chill, ghost-white kind of hush that settles after a disaster, but something slower, warmer—a hush you could pull over your shoulders and nap in, knowing the universe had finally, however briefly, decided to stop trying to kill you. Every mythic spike in my skull had fizzled to a gentle hum. My muscles were loose, my bones soft, and the only thing keeping my head from floating off the pillow was the magnetic, utterly unearned weight of Dyris’s arm slung over my stomach.
She was out. Not dead, not even in stasis, just… depleted. She looked less like a war goddess and more like a weirdly beautiful traffic accident, skin still glowing in places, hair stuck to her jaw, one cheek mashed into the pillow. If you squinted, you could still see the afterimage of the event: the threadlines of resonance running down her neck, out along the clavicle, vanishing into the tangle of sheets. If you didn’t squint, you could just look at her and think: that is the face of someone who just rewrote history with their mouth.
My body hurt in all the right places. I wasn’t even sure which parts were bruised and which were just being dramatic. The air in the suite was heavy with the scent of us—sweat, ozone, the faint edge of mythlogic melting. I turned my head to the side, blinked at the display hovering just above my eye-line. At some point, my AR lens had rebooted and started scrolling through notifications.
The first one caught my attention:
[SYSTEM UPDATE: CONVERGENCE STATUS / SUBJECT: DYRIS TRIVANE]
[NEW RECORD: BINARY RESONANCE / SGR 0418+5729]
[COMMENT: "YOU'VE DONE IT AGAIN."]
[AI NOTE: IS THIS EVEN ALLOWED? LOL]
I snorted, and the movement made Dyris grunt, then burrow deeper into the sheets. I poked her in the ribs, just to see if she’d react.
She didn’t, so I read the rest out loud, voice hoarse:
“SGR 0418+5729. Two. Count ‘em. Two convergents. Accord mythologics, primary and secondary—wait, this can’t be right—‘affinity is marital in vector, but physical in force.’” I blinked. “Marital? Did the Accord management algorithms just marry us?”
That woke her.
Dyris peeled one eye open, surveyed the room, then me, then the AR overlay. She squinted, like the interface might scuttle away if she didn’t lock it down fast enough.
“What time is it?” she croaked.
“Early,” I said. “Or late. Or possibly tomorrow.”
She rolled onto her back, letting her arm flop over her head. For a few seconds, she just stared at the ceiling, chest rising and falling. Then, without looking at me, she said, “You’re laughing.”
I was. And I couldn’t stop.
She turned, eyes narrow. “What.”
I wiped my cheeks because there were tears. “The System. It just… System’d you. You’re my wife now.”
Dyris groaned into her arm. “Unsubscribe.”
“Nope,” I said, wheezing. “Too late. You’re Sexretary Trivane forever.”
She tried to hit me with a pillow, but missed and just smushed her own face instead.
I let the laughter run its course, then slid closer to her, tucking my face into the crook of her neck. She was still warm, and under the war-scorched exterior, she was just as soft and stunned as I was.
“Hey,” I whispered. “You okay?”
She considered, then nodded. “Yes. But if you repeat that, I’ll have you assassinated.”
