Page 78 of She Who Devours the Stars
Then we were back. Two idiots, standing in a hallway that was already rewriting its own history to make room for the disaster we were about to cause.
The world tried to warn us. The lights flickered, the air chilled, and a Monitor drone zipped overhead, broadcasting silent alarms in every direction.
But we didn’t move.
Not until Alyx, voice softer than myth could tolerate, said:
“You ready to break it?”
I didn’t answer.
But I smiled, wide and bright, and let the mirror crack all the way down.
Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron
Axis Alignment: Classroom, Eventide.
If there was a Hall of Fame for unteachable students, Fern would have been its burning, tattooed patron saint.
The morning’s first session was supposed to be a gentle intro to “Fey Lineage and Accord Social Structures.” The instructor, a fails upward type with three PhDs and a receding hairline, ran through the House banners, the genealogies, the intricate little threads of blood and myth and backstabbing that held the Spiral’s power structure together. Half the class paid attention. The other half watched Fern, who slouched in her seat with a violence reserved for apex predators and girls who’d never been told “no” in a way that stuck.
She looked bored. She looked dangerous bored, the kind of “bored” that either kills the time or makes it wish it had never been born.
I kept my head down and annotated the notes, but every line found its way back to her: the scuff of her boot against the chair ahead, the way she tipped her head back so far it looked like a dare to the ceiling. The fact that every time the instructor made a point of mentioning House Trivane, her eyes flicked just a little too sharp, a little too blue, and then she let her gaze drift out of the room like she might never come back.
Today’s lesson was supposed to be about power. But it was really about avoidance.
At the halfway mark, the instructor pulled up a full-room projection of the Lioren Family Tree. The graphic bloomed into a corona of names and faces, so dazzling it shorted the ambient lights and made the air taste like static. At the center, in sharp white letters, floated the name:
LIOREN TRIVANE
I expected Fern to flinch. She didn’t. She just rolled her eyes so hard it could have destabilized the campus’s mythic field.
The instructor, either oblivious or addicted to pain, invited Fern to “comment on the intersection of House legacy and mythic resonance in contemporary praxis.”
She replied with a shrug that would have gotten most kids expelled. “You want a quote? Call my dad. He’s the one who cared about bloodlines.”
Which is when, with the punctuality of a curse, the wall screen behind her lit up with an incoming FaceStream: Dax Meldin, hair wild, still in oil-stained overalls. He was not on the syllabus.
He grinned, looked directly at Fern, and said, “You know, Lioren once said, A name is a mask that becomes your face—”
She cut the call without even turning around.
The instructor, groping for dignity, tried to move on, but Dyris, in the back of the room, deadpanned, “He would say that.” Which made half the class snort and the other half question whether Dyris was even listening.
She was. She always was. Today, she stood at the edge of the room, arms folded, eyes tracking every micro-expression Fern made and, just as often, the lack of them.
You could write dissertations about what Dyris Vaelith was thinking, and all of them would be wrong.
#
We broke for lunch. Fern vanished in under a second, trailing only a vapor trace of sass and maybe a curse for whoever updated the cafeteria menu with “sovereign nachos.” I lingered near the door, thumb hovering over my screen, pretending to read messages I hadn’t checked in weeks. Most were from my scholarship sponsor, a bot with the personality of a thumbtack, reminding me to “network and represent.” The rest were unfiltered memes of Fern, some from the class itself: her face, exaggerated, with laser eyes and captions like “Nullarch: She’ll Eat Your Lunch (and you).”
I didn’t save them. I didn’t have to.
They were already burned in.
#
