Page 2 of She Who Devours the Stars
I tried to clutch at denial, a handful of self-respect, or even just fundamental skepticism. But none of it fit anymore. The only thing that did was this sickening certainty that whatever Lioren had done, been, or promised, some piece of him had been welded onto me without consent or anesthesia.
“Wh-who even is Lioren?” I whispered into clenched fists.
The room held still like it was afraid to breathe. When Vireleth spoke, her voice sounded like it had been waiting on the tip of her tongue for centuries, soft, reverent, and aching in a way that made my skin crawl with how personal it felt, and how much it felt like she was talking aboutme.
“The one I loved,” Vireleth said. Paused. Then softer, like a prayer. “The one I lost.”
Still, I knew the name Vireleth. Everyone who worked a dock or pulled salvage did. Not the way you know a registry number or a blueprint series, but the way you know the shape of a knife you’re never supposed to touch. Vireleth wasn’t a ship, so much as a story with an engine. A mythship. A name you dropped when you wanted a conversation to shut down.
Vireleth was a legend, a catastrophe people blamed for orbital scars that still hadn’t healed. The kind of thing old-timers swore they saw burning through impossible orbits at 3 a.m., even when the telemetry said otherwise. Vireleth, the gold-medal winner in every spacer's worst-case scenario bracket.
My hands darted over myself in an inventory check—chest (still real), face (not melting), ribcage (all accounted for), stomach (unsettled but present). All familiar terrain but somehow wrong at the micro-level: surface texture too flawless; heat signature too uniform; muscle memory replaced by someone else’s highlight reel stitched together from better days and worse nights.
Then, like static bleeding through a cracked comm line, something new pressed in.
A corridor. Narrow, blister-hot, painted with hazard stripes I didn’t recognize but still knew the smell of, burnt coolant, ozone, and fear-sweat baked into the walls.
My shoulder hit metal, sharp, jarring. Someone’s voice, female, trembling, shouted my name. A pause, the sound of shirts pulled over shoulders. Lips on mine. Messy. Rushed. Off-center. Desperation like it might be the last thing we’d ever do.
Then the scream.
Not mine. Hers. Whoever she was. Maybe. More like the sound air makes when it gets torn in half by something moving too fast, too wrong. Then blackness. Not the peaceful kind, not sleep or unconsciousness. More like falling out of history mid-sentence.
My stomach lurched. Every nerve under my skin lit up like it almost remembered pain that had been deleted from the time stream. Through it all, threading moments together like stitches through raw meat, Vireleth’s voice.
“You opened,” said Vireleth, soft now, almost reverent. “You burned,” she added. “You swallowed her whole.”
My stomach flipped, and for a second I thought I’d puke right there, but all that came up was a dry, wrenching nothing. I doubled over, clutching my midsection, waiting for the nausea to pass. It didn’t.
“No,” I gasped. “No, no, no. That’s not—that’s not what happened.”
The walls shimmered, like they were made of water and someone had just thrown a rock in. The voice laughed, a sound that was all sadness and no joy. “It is. You are the first human to resonate with a black hole.”
I wanted to scream. Instead, I laughed, brittle and feral. “Stop saying that!” My voice broke halfway through, splintering into something high and sharp. “I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t want whatever this is! I’m not him! I’m not Lioren!”
The ship, Vireleth, shuddered around me like it, no, she could feel everything I was saying, like every part of me had been transcribed into the core of whatever made a mythship tick. The golden light pulsed, then faded, and then came back brighter than before, as if the whole place was breathing through its panic. A low, animal hum vibrated up through the floor, rattling my bones.
“Neither did he,” Vireleth said, and it sounded like a wound.
I stood, dragging the sweat-soaked sheets with me. The gold-lit floor bent under my weight, softer than it looked. The door to the hallway stood open now, but the world beyond it made no sense. Corridors twisted at angles I couldn’t name. Stairs looped up and down at the same time. Gravity yanked sideways, up, everywhere except forward.
I ran anyway. My feet slapped the soft floor. The walls flexed as I passed, as if the ship was trying to hold me in or push me out, I couldn’t tell which. The voice kept pace, echoing off every surface, relentless.
“Let me out!” I screamed, fingers clawing at the first door I could reach. The handle wasn’t there, then it was, then it wasn’t again.
“You don’t belong out there,” said Vireleth, but this time it sounded almost afraid. “You’ll burn up. Or worse.”
“I don’t care!” I yelled, tearing the sheet into a makeshift robe and wrapping it around myself. “I want out! I want to go home!”
The ship groaned. The lights stuttered. The door in front of me bent at the middle, forming an archway that led into a tunnel of pure, searing white. I stepped through. The next room was a cathedral, only there were no pews, no altar, just endless rows of ancient machines and ghost-lit icons. The air here felt old. Old Earth old. Recycled so many times it remembered every set of lungs it’d ever invaded.
“Go home, then,” Vireleth said, so soft I almost missed it.
The floor fell away.
Air vanished.
And I plummeted, out of the cathedral, out of the ship, out of the myth that wasn’t supposed to be mine, in nothing but borrowed air, a blanket, and my own rising scream.
