Page 176 of She Who Devours the Stars
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 ascale 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 armgoing 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.
