Page 85 of She Who Devours the Stars
I hit the ground so hard that, for a second, I thought the trial had malfunctioned and killed me on entry. But the pain was real: a spike up my tailbone, a pop in my left shoulder, and thenthe numbing static of mythic overflow, which always felt like the aftertaste of electroshock and cinnamon.
I groaned, rolled onto my back, and stared at the sky.
It was not the sky.
Above me, two horizons warred for attention: on the left, a white hole so blinding it tore logic into fractals, on the right, a black hole that gnawed at light like it was born starving. The interface between them wasn’t a line, but a swirl, a never-ending hunger spiral where event horizons overlapped and lied about their own radius. It was, in a word, hot.
I sat up. The world around me was a city. No, not a city, a recursion of cities, every building nested inside its copy, each block repeating until the laws of geometry gave up and let the next one win. Frost caked every surface, but nothing melted. The air was sharp, flavored with the chemical snap of ozone and the metallic sweetness of old blood. Every ten seconds, a train whined overhead, arcing through the void on a magrail that flickered in and out of existence, sometimes carrying passengers, sometimes just cargo, sometimes nothing at all.
I looked down. My hands were raw, scraped from the landing, but the pain faded instantly as the trial’s mythic buffer caught up. The suit I wore was gone, replaced with something stitched from gold-thread mesh and polycarbonate plating, like the Athenaeum A.I. had decided I needed to cosplay a mythic gladiator before I died. I flexed my fingers and watched the light from the split sky crawl over my skin, turning the scars on my knuckles into tiny blue shadows.
Alyx landed three meters away, upright, knees bent, hands spread wide like she’d meant to stick the landing. She wore the same getup as me, but hers fit better, hugged her frame like the universe was designed around her center of mass. She stoodthere for a second, eyes closed, head tilted like she was listening to a broadcast only she could hear.
The world trembled. For real. Not metaphorical, not emotional. The city itself stuttered, the ground jumping a full centimeter, then returning to baseline. I felt my teeth clack together.
“This is not my dreamscape,” I said, but Alyx didn’t answer. She opened her eyes, and the color in them wasn’t brown anymore; it was gold, with an overlay of glitching zeros and ones, like her irises were little processors running debug mode.
She smiled, but it was a closed-lip, dangerous thing.
“I know this place,” she said, voice soft but clear. “I built this in a loop. When I was six.”
I whistled, low and impressed. “You did good. I’d kill to live here.”
She laughed, but the sound was wrong, compressed, like the air itself was scared to transmit it. She looked around, then at me, and the gold in her eyes pulsed.
“I think we’re supposed to go to the core,” she said. “That’s where the trial resolves.”
I pushed myself up, dusted off the frost, and stretched my arms overhead. The world wasn’t cold, but it looked like it should be, so the mythic fields made my skin tingle and my breath smoke. “Lead the way, captain,” I said, and watched her flinch at the word.
We started walking, the ground under us crunching like frozen glass. The city was silent except for the distant scream of mag-trains and, every so often, a pulse from the sky, two gods trading heartbeats. The buildings were a blend of glass, steel, and something bone-white that might’ve once been alive. No doors.No windows. Just reflections, us, again and again, walking into our own futures.
Alyx walked ahead, all control and tension, her movements precise, like she was holding the entire Trial together with muscle and willpower alone. I trailed half a pace behind, not by design, but because I couldn’tnot. She wasreally hot. And yeah, maybe that wasn’t new, but here? Now? The Trial didn’t just put her in armor. Itsculptedher. Broad shoulders, hips like they’d anchor tectonic plates, legs that made the combat plating look like a polite suggestion. Even the way she moved, balanced and unbothered, like the city would get out of her way if it knew what was good for it.
And the armor! Don’t get me started. The Trial wrapped her like a gift and left zero to the imagination. From behind, the cut of it practically framed her ass, and yes, I was looking. The gods gave her legs that could break empires and a chest that could start riots, and I wasn’t about to pretend I was immune when the Trial itself had decided to put her on display.
Her hair had gone full myth-mode, too. Her braids were tipped in light, catching every shimmer from the white hole sky and scattering it across her skin in bursts of gold. And that skin, dark and flawless, burnished with all that mythlight until it looked like she’d been carved from shadow and set on fire. Against the frost, she didn’t just stand out, she dominated it. Like the whole city was just a backdrop to make sure I saw her. I saw her. I couldn’t not see her.
It wasn’t fair. The Trial had turned her into a mythic monument, and all I could do was follow like a feral cultist trying very hard not to drop to my knees and worship.
She didn’t know. Or if she did, she didn’t care.
I tried to focus on the city. The strange maze of frozen loops, paths folding into themselves, time stuttering in the corners, but I kept coming back to her. The way her breath steamed, steady. The way her hands flexed when she thought no one was watching. The way she didn’t flinch when the world distorted, she just adjusted.
And maybe the worst part? The deeper we got, the more the world flexed to her pace. She was becoming something, someone I couldn’t predict. I followed because I wanted to see where that went. And okay, because the view was… let’s call it a mythic learning experience.
Alyx finally stopped in front of a structure that could have been a church or a server farm or a mausoleum, depending on your trauma. The doors were a pair of interlocked gears, one silver, one black. She reached out, pressed her palm to the seam, and the whole thing shuddered before unlocking with a hiss.
“Ready?” she asked, not looking at me.
I shrugged. “Was born for this, apparently.”
We stepped through together. The inside was bigger, brighter. The walls pulsed with data, running feeds in languages I only half understood: some Latin, some code, some just raw emotion rendered as color. At the center of the room, a dais. On it, a single chair, facing away from us.
I circled the edge, slow, letting Alyx take the lead. She walked straight up to the chair, stared at the back of it, then reached out and spun it around.
The chair was empty.
For a second, we both just stood there, dumb.
