Page 48 of She Who Devours the Stars
The moment the Lioren file hit HoloNet, containment was a fever dream.
Accord protocol said you couldn’t let myth-broadcasts run for more than twelve cycles uncut, or you risked recursive infestation, “memetic embolism,” and other hilariously underfunded disasters. But no one had prepped for Lioren Trivane’s final performance: thirty seconds of smug, shirtless glory, a glass of liquor in hand, and a message for the entire spiral arm.
Within an hour, the pirates got it. Within two, every compad from Xenthis to the Venusian tankworlds was remixing the loop with vintage porn bass and fake Accordendorsements. “Nullarch Confirmed” trended for a full day. “#RecursionDaddy” outlasted three assassination attempts.
Accord crisis PR teams hit the feeds with the solemn, slow-mo edit: Lioren as hero, the Trivane doctrine as “sacrifice for the greater good,” closing with a 3D morph of his face into the Accord seal. It convinced no one, but did create the first organic meme: “Trivane. He’ll fuck you up, then fuck you.”
Meanwhile, the counterculture went feral.
Within eight hours, the black feeds were jammed with “Lioren Unleashed.” Sweaty edits, fanart, and one truly horrifying “tribute” where mythships blazed into the galaxy in rainbow cock formation. Someone rendered a war memorial in his abs. Someone else tattooed their version of a Nullarch logo across a dome and offered open tours.
But Fern was barely a footnote until the cult started.
First, a meme: her profile, eyes shadowed, cheekbone sliced by the corridor light, with the tagline “Her jawline cuts causality.” Then the fan-vid, shaky and raw, compiling every security cam fragment, every moment she’d walked through fire, every time the mythship shifted in her shadow. Her hand, glowing, at the edge of a glass.
The Cheekbone Cult was born in a comment thread and metastasized in two hours.
People started shrines. Candles and exed-out Accord IDs, incense and burnt rations, and a 3D-printed skull in her exact dimensions. The first recorded prayer: “She devours stars, and we are but the shine left behind!”
HoloNet pundits debated if divinity could be conferred by meme alone. The science channels ran three simultaneous panel fights over whether “the Nullarch” was a myth, a weapon, or anunsanctioned experiment in consensual disaster. The sex feeds, predictably, made her the star of twelve new genres, the most popular being “devoured by myth” and “star-daddy’s new orbit.”
Within two cycles, #NullarchNow and #TrivaneIsBackBitches trended galactic.
Within three, the Accord gave up, archived the scandal, and focused on not losing another planet.
But the meme-religion was loose. People left offerings at airlocks. Workers in the Glimmer painted her outline in neon, with sigils borrowed from whatever ancient faith they’d forgotten. A school on Ventari petitioned to rename itself “Meldin Academy” and commissioned a statue of her, in flight, with a warship in her palm and a planet at her heel.
For the first time in a century, there was a god trending who didn’t want to be.
And that, the pundits agreed, was a sign of the times.
Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith
Axis Alignment: Accord Administration Center, Pelago-9
I watched the Glimmer zone through the lens array, its surface still fuming with mythic residue, every heat signature a scar in the planet’s flesh. The Accord had already moved on, but the world below refused to let itself be erased. My access to the Abeyance’s sensor-suite hadn’t been terminated yet.
I paged through Fern’s file, the official one. The Accord had redacted it so hard you’d think her existence was an ongoing legal case, which, technically, was true. Everything above the signature block was a red line, but the last entry was mine: “Subject alive. Control not recommended.”
There was a time when I would have flagged that as dereliction, or at least a failure of narrative. Now, I found it almost comforting.
Fern’s last words to me looped in my mind, an involuntary override. “You work for me now, Sexretary.” The worst part wasn’t the loss of agency, or even the collapse of every professional boundary I’d ever respected. It was that I wanted to see what happened next.
I flicked the lens, cycling through the dock feeds. On the security cam, Fern was pacing the Accord containment garden, barefoot, punching the air. The medtechs had argued for full sedation, but she’d threatened to break one’s nose if they came near her with another hypo. So now she was loose in a fenced-off orchard, sweat-soaked and radiant, laughing at her own gravity.
She wasn’t just mythic. She was contagious.
Kaela Vaelith’s comm packet arrived at 0400, as always. I opened it on a private channel, expecting a reprimand or, at the very least, a threat of blacklisting.
Instead: “You’re being seconded, indefinite. Accord and House both recommend full immersion. See attached for parameters. P.S., Nullarch prefers her staff unarmored. I trust this will not be a hardship.”
I stared at the photo for a full five seconds before my cortex even bothered to start the decryption process. It was an unguarded capture: Fern, half-collapsed on a bench in the containment garden, shirt crooked and sweat-darkened, hair stuck to her cheek like she’d just brawled a solar storm. Her teeth tore into a protein bar with a violence that transcended calories; jaw flexed, eyes rabid with laughter and chemical fatigue, crimson leaking from one nostril like a mythic annotation. The image quality was garbage, artifacted to hell by the patchy relayfrom Glimmer’s surface, but somehow that only made it more intimate. Something about her in low-res made her seem less like an event and more like a secret.
There was nothing staged about the way Fern occupied space. Most mythics curated their legend, fussing over every gesture and line of dialogue like actors auditioning for pantheons that no longer existed. But Fern, she just lived in it, let the myth slosh out of her as messily as blood or sweat or hunger. The analysts called it “unfiltered resonance,” but I’d always thought of it as narrative vandalism: smashing up the story so hard you dragged everyone else into your gravity well without even asking.
My pulse double-tapped before I could suppress it. I wanted to look away, file the photo under “evidence” and move on, but my thumb hovered over the holo for too long. I hated how much I liked what I saw—the feral angle of her smile, the little fleck of ration paste on her lip, the way her gaze seemed to punch straight through the lens to wherever I was pretending not to exist.
I told myself it was professional curiosity. That I was just studying my new assignment, prepping for inevitable disaster. But when my hand started shaking, I realized that wasn’t even close to true.
