Page 119 of She Who Devours the Stars
The last time Kaela Vaelith called, she did it from the deck of a burning party barge with seven dead assassins and a live peacock in the shot. This time, she was broadcasting from what looked like the glass-roofed solarium of her penthouse, which was only slightly less chaotic and only somewhat more legal. I was in the middle of the stabilization protocol, barefoot, hair unbrushed, the marks of Fern’s teeth still red on my collarbone, when the system chimed and threw her face across half my wall.
“Is this a bad time?” Kaela asked, her voice high and dry, a jetstream over the usual mythic background hum. She wore a bathrobe in scandalous off-white, a strand of pearls, and nothing else. Her hair was up in curlers shaped like little mythic caducei, each one blinking with its own comm bead. Her makeup was perfect except for the lipstick, which was smeared across the rim of a glass the size of a tactical bucket.
I let the system authenticate my face, then glanced at the blinking overlays in the room’s periphery. Three of them said: EMERGENCY. The fourth said: YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT. The fifth, running a little script I’d written as a teenager, scrolled: say hi to auntie.
“You look sober,” I said, which was a lie, and she snorted so hard she splashed the wine. A pale hand with the world’s oldest ring flicked the spill away, then returned to petting the enormous, shaggy dog curled at her feet.
“It’s noon somewhere,” Kaela said, then gestured grandly at her own chest, the bathrobe parting just enough to suggest she’d finally invested in the mythic augmentation kit she’d always threatened. “And it’s always noon in the Vaelith main house. Look at you, Dyris. You’re radiating. I mean that in the literal sense. Do you need to borrow a containment suit?”
I tried to modulate my breathing, which was not helped by the fact that my own resonance was still spiking every thirty seconds. “If I did, it would have to be alloy. SGR 0418+5729 is showing up on the satellites, now.”
“I saw! Oh, I saw.” Kaela clapped, twice, making her pearls jump. “I always said you’d slip the leash, darling, but this? I thought you’d end up with a cute little coil-field. Instead, you’ve got enough magnetic resonance to peel a god off its throne.”
The dog groaned, rolled over, and tried to eat one of the caducei out of her hair. Kaela ignored it. “Tell me everything. Tell me what it felt like. And don’t you dare say it was just another day at the office.”
I could have stonewalled. I could have deflected. Instead, I did what every daughter of Vaelith did when her arch-matriarch called in for damage control: I lied, but beautifully.
“Honestly? It was like being run over by a star and then being expected to apologize for denting it.” I caught my own face in the overlay reflection, saw the flush, the pallor, the shimmer of old adrenaline in my eyes. “We didn’t plan for a twin event. It just… happened.”
Kaela cackled. “That’s the old Trivane coming out! Lioren never planned for anything. He just saw the fire and ran straight into it, screaming, ‘First one there owns the myth.’”
There was a new ache in my throat, hearing my name in that context. The satellite feeds had all tagged the event as TRIVANE/VAELITH, but hearing her say it out loud—like it was a thing, a legacy, something that actually belonged to me—made the room feel smaller and bigger at the same time.
Kaela studied me, all the laughter draining away, leaving the focus that had gotten her through three coups and four annulments. “You did it, didn’t you?” she said, softly. “You found your axis.”
I stared at the wall, at the burn marks in the mythglass where the last containment ring had snapped. “I didn’t want to,” I said.
“Oh, darling. Want is never the point.” She leaned in, lowering her voice to a war-room hush. “But you did it, and you’re still here. And the Accord can scream all it wants about propriety, but it can’t erase this. Not even if it tries.”
I nodded, once. The energy in the room was finally settling, the gravitational hum a soft constant instead of the full-body vibration it had been all morning. “There’s fallout,” I said. “A lot. One researcher is missing, and the mythic grid is… jumpy.”
Kaela waved that away. “Grid’s always jumpy. They built it on a stolen algorithm. The important thing is this—” and she pointed, not at me, but through the screen, as if she could see Fern somewhere behind me, lurking just out of sight. “You made history, Dyris. You and that beautiful mess of a girl.”
She refilled her glass, this time letting the spill land on her thigh. “Did you know,” she said, “that the last time anyone pulled a Celestial-level magnetic event was six generations ago? And the story says it didn’t just bend the rules. It snapped them, andthe world had to glue itself back together with rumor and spite. You’re in good company.”
I tried not to laugh. It came out anyway. “Is this the part where you warn me not to let it go to my head?”
Kaela’s face softened, the lines around her mouth going gentle for once. “No, darling. This is the part where I tell you to be careful, because the universe loves a second act, and there’s always a critic with a sharper tongue waiting in the wings.” She winked, then sat back, letting the dog lick wine off her wrist.
“Be good to her,” Kaela said, meaning Fern, but maybe meaning herself, or maybe meaning the myth that built us both. “And if the resonance gets dicey, call me. I’ve got lawyers who make the Concord look like kindergartners.”
“I will,” I said, and meant it.
Kaela winked again, then did the thing she always did when she was about to hang up: she blew a kiss at the camera, rolled her eyes, and mouthed “no gods, just us,” a family motto so old it had probably been the cause of at least two civil wars.
The screen went black, but the mythic afterimage hung in the air, sharp as ozone.
For a long minute, I just stood there, feeling the weight of the line—the belonging, the pressure, the expectation. It was a lot, but it was mine.
And if I failed? At least the legend would be worth the fallout.
There was work to do, and now I had permission.
I smiled, sharp and unsparing, and started dialing Fern’s comm.
Some news was too good not to share.
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane
