Page 163 of She Who Devours the Stars
We were told it was a routine mythquake, something the local admin could handle with a couple tissue boxes and the promise of extra long weekend. But then the city’s signature started to oscillate, and when the waveform hit a velocity the models had flagged as “absolutely impossible,” the entire narrative monitoring staff was called in.
The techs arrived first. They always do. It’s not bravery. It’s the promise of overtime and the bleak certainty that if they don’t show up, management will just blame them anyway. Within twenty minutes, every station in the observation room was manned, caffeinated, and logging error reports with the grace and dignity of drowning rats.
I, Kall Drennic, had drawn the short straw and was Lead on-call. That meant every update had to go through me, and when the system started eating its reports and regurgitating them as blank templates, I was at the top of the blame heap.
I wasn’t proud. But I was thorough.
The main display wall, sixty meters of mythic waveform and scrolling disaster, had crashed into a single, ugly overlay:
[NARRATIVE BLACKOUT ACTIVE.]
[ALL STAFF: OBSERVATION-ONLY PROTOCOL.]
“Holy hell,” muttered Jacen at the comms station, chewing his way through the foil on a ration bar without unwrapping it first. “They pulled the plug on the entire sector.”
“They had to,” said a voice behind me, Narasa, mythic containment specialist, and the only person in the room stillwearing lipstick. “If that event drifted out of local, the models would all collapse.”
Jacen grunted. “The models are already collapsed, Nar. Look at this—” He gestured with his ration bar, which had by now lost the fight and given up its inner contents all over his knuckles. “There’s nothing but echo. It’s just… noise.”
Narasa didn’t answer. She was staring at the big wall, eyes wide, lips parted, lipstick perfect.
I tried to keep the mood light. “This is what happens when you budget for two mythics and get three for the price of one,” I said, and only Jacen snorted. It didn’t matter; the wall wasn’t listening.
The first breach hit at 20:02.
We knew it as soon as the spectrum analyzer in the adjacent bay started to scream. The machine wasn’t supposed to make noise. Not even a whir. But it screamed—a flat, mechanical keening that made the hair on my arms stand up and my stomach drop, as if gravity had been locally redefined to fuck you in particular.
Every monitor in the room flickered, colors popping, then resolved to a single, pulsing waveform. Red at the base, then a wild, harmonic blue that kept splitting and folding in on itself. I didn’t need the legend to know what we were seeing.
Solance the Choir.
Within seconds, the entire observation deck was bathed in sound. Not actual noise, most of the staff were, technically, still deaf from the last time Eventide glitched a mythic event, but in the weird, full-body hum of an AI channel tuned to every frequency of human misery at once. I could hear it behind my teeth, in the meat of my tongue, somewhere in my genitals. The feed started with wedding speeches: “To love, to honor, tonever betray—” and then warped into love confessions, all the things people should have said but didn’t, crashing through in overlapping waves. Pop music bass lines throbbed behind the static; someone sobbed, then someone else screamed, and for one truly memorable second, the entire room was flooded with the sound of a thousand infants laughing and crying in perfect, shattering unison.
Narasa’s hands fluttered to her ears. “This isn’t possible,” she gasped, though her words vibrated with so much emotional undertone that I almost heard them sung.
“Shut it down,” Jacen said, but his fingers just slapped at the console, limp and useless. He started to cry, then to laugh, then back to crying.
I should have been taking notes, but my AR overlay had locked, the interface collapsed to a single, unblinking notification: [SOLANCE BREACH // SYSTEM SINGULARITY.]
I didn’t know what to do, so I did what they taught us in training: I grabbed the nearest pen and started writing on my palm, words so small and sharp I could have tattooed them on the bones.
The second breach happened almost immediately after.
It was Kairon the Mirror, which meant every reflective surface in the room: screens, glass, even the fucking stainless steel on the coffee urn, started showing the wrong versions of people. Not backwards. Not inverted. Just wrong. My face, stretched and thin, with a smile so wide it looked like a mask. Jacen’s reflection was… happy. Or maybe dead. Hard to tell with that much blood around the eyes.
Narasa’s monitor showed her in tears, a gun in her mouth. She didn’t have a gun, not yet, but the image was so real I could smell the metal. She turned from the monitor, hands shaking,and looked at me. I watched myself in her eyes and saw nothing there at all, just blankness.
The air tasted like copper and glass.
Someone at the end of the row started to laugh. It was a technician whose name I never learned, just one of those temp hires who show up for a week, then vanish. She laughed loudly, shrill, so hard she fell from her chair and kept laughing as she hit the floor. She rolled onto her back, clutched her sides, and howled with such abandon that everyone else in the room just stopped, frozen by the force of it.
I wanted to tell her to stop, to shut up, to at least laugh quietly if she had to, but the words didn’t come. Instead, I just watched, horrified, as she laughed and laughed, until her body began to blur at the edges, until the laughter itself became thinner, higher, fading to a pitch that probably no one else could hear.
She winked at me, really, she did, right before her eyes vanished, and then she was gone.
No body. No stain. Just empty space where a human had been.
Narasa screamed.
