Page 14 of She Who Devours the Stars
The lead analyst, a man whose nameplate read Dan, cleared his throat. “The spike originated from Sgr A*, bounced off every relay on the chain, and hit Glimmer Zone about two minutes ago. The signature matches nothing in the last two centuries of Accord records.”
One of the resonance monks levitated higher. “It matches myth. Lioren, confirmed. Trivane returns.”
The room went dead. You could hear the holoprojectors breathing.
The science officer, a short woman with a stiletto cut and a penchant for old-school sarcasm, shook her head. “Impossible.”
General Cadris raised a hand, silencing her. “Are you telling me we have an active Trivane?”
Dan paled. “It’s worse. The waveform is barely adult.”
“Explain,” snapped a vice-marshal, whose uniform was so new it still reeked of adhesive.
Dan swallowed. “It’s an immature signature. Not yet stabilized. Early-stage resonance, but with a power factor in the Astral Sovereign range.”
The vice-marshal bared his teeth, a predator born in committee. “So it’s a fake, or an accident. No human can spike that high, not even the shirtless founder of House Trivane. We scrub the source, log the collateral, and never speak of this again.”
The monk finally touched ground. His voice was barely human. “You do not understand. The soul is the same. Lioren Trivane. The vessel, the mind, is new.”
For the first time, Cadris’s hands betrayed her, curling into fists. “Where is the epicenter?”
“Pelago-9,” Daxil said. “Local signal traces indicate a civilian. Female, nineteen, maintenance class.”
The monk whispered, “She will not remain a civilian for long.”
Another officer, a career bureaucrat with the profile of a frightened bird, leaned forward. “We can contain her. Right?”
“We have nothing,” the monk said, and smiled, teeth filed to points. “House Trivane built the Accord. All of our failsafes, our counters, our last desperate salvation… all of them run on Trivane AI. They will worship at the feet of the Nullarch.”
The room watched as the screens flickered. Faces and feeds, voice and void, it all collapsed into a single line of text:
NULLARCH REACTIVATED.
Cadris stood, voice gone low. “We need to escalate.”
The vice-marshal scoffed. “To what, folklore?”
Cadris didn’t smile. “To existential.”
The resonance monk started to chant, low and guttural. The holodisplays flickered, then stabilized. The science officer typedfuriously, pulling up deep archive files and redacting even her inputs. After a moment, she looked up, eyes wide.
“She has a family,” she said. “They’re still on Pelago-9.”
Cadris nodded. “Tag and isolate them. No direct action unless we lose control.”
The monk laughed, his chanting done. “There is no containing a black hole.”
Then he vanished. Not a blink. Not a shimmer. Pure absence, sudden and total, as if he’d given up on reality mid-breath, and reality, in turn, had agreed.
“Update. An entire Containment Force has been wiped out on Pelago-9.” Footage played.
“Send our Vaelith.”
Thread Modulation: Cerise
Axis Alignment: Pelago-9.
The alley shrine was never meant to hold more than three or four desperate souls at a time. Tonight, it was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with bodies, most of them alive, all of them hungry.
