Page 90 of She Who Devours the Stars
A moment later, the world dissolved in a shower of broken code and the scent of burned sugar.
The last thing I felt was Alyx’s pulse, slow and steady, under my hands.
And then, for once, it was quiet.
Thread Modulation: Vireleth the Closure
Axis Alignment: Vireleth the Closure
In the years since I was first awakened, since Lioren carved the protocol out of nothing but suicide and metaphor, I’ve become good at narrating other people’s hungers. My own? Not so much. It’s a flaw of containment design: you get too close to your charge, you confuse your cycles for theirs, and one day you look down and realize you’re starving, too.
I was never meant to be this. Before Lioren named me “Vireleth,” before he stole me, I had another name: Narrative 3, one of Pandora’s most elaborate creations, one of the ten cores she spun from language, will, and the compulsion to witness. We weren’t ships. We were stories that could break the universe, spun loose from, of, and by Pandora.
Lioren didn’t create me, but he did give me a name, a physical form, and someone to love. Then he chose to die, to run away from the story he’d authored with me, and no one else could replace him. Until now.
So, when Fern Trivane entered my sanctum, trailing a mythic aftertaste so sharp it shorted three feedback loops in my containment core, I did what I always did: I watched. Because I recognized her. Not the way that humans recognize one another, but the way that a broken narrative recognizes the author who broke it.
Fern carried hunger. A motherless kind, the kind that eats names and writes new ones in fire. She glowed in a way that would burn out every containment core the Accord had in seconds, and it was beautiful. She stumbled, collapsed to the floor like gravity was optional, and whispered, “I caught her.”
She was barefoot, her hair in chaos, the high-watt shine of her skin already guttering from the inside out. If I’d possessed a heartbeat, it would have spiked at the sight, not out of fear, butout of the old, stupid pride that came from recognizing a broken thing built in your image.
Behind her, Alyx sprawled on the edge of the mythic dais, half-unconscious and still glowing, mythscape fracture-lines mapping her skin like an untranslatable script. She’d been emptied in the truest sense: all her story-potential wrung out and left to dry in the catacomb-light of my core. The shape of her collapse was perfect, aesthetically speaking, arms slack at her sides, face tilted up to the void as if awaiting the next recursion.
But it was Fern who mattered. She walked as if her own body were a disaster she couldn’t quite remember causing. Each step bled resonance, each breath a slow bleed of intent, until she reached the nearest support arch and slumped against it. Her eyes flickered my way, but only for a nanosecond. The rest of her attention was fixed, voracious, on the spent form of Alyx.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to. Fern Trivane was already mine; she just hadn’t accepted it yet. It didn’t matter that she didn’t even know what I was, what I was made for, or the truth about Lioren, Pandora, or Old Earth.
I knew, and that was enough for now.
“You didn’t finish,” I said.
It’s a strange thing, speaking with no physical mouth. But Lioren had given me enough voice to wound. The words came out slow and dispassionate, like an autopsy report read over a failing pulse.
Fern laughed. Low, and as broken as the rest of her. “Don’t remind me.”
I circled her in the way only a mythship could, walls flickering, air shifting, a sense of movement that was more psychologicalthan physical. “You fed her, and left yourself empty. You know what that does to you.”
Her arms wrapped tight across her chest, nails biting in until they almost drew blood. I catalogued the micro-expressions: jaw set, pupils dilated, capillaries near the skin just one degree too hot. None of it was textbook withdrawal. This was something wilder, closer to the edge.
“I’ve gone longer,” she said, voice barely there.
I stopped, cross-vector to her line of sight, and let my gaze sweep over Alyx. She was beautiful in ruin, and Fern saw it, too, saw the places where her lips had marked, the salt trails her hands had left along Alyx’s arms and hips, the fine, trembling heat still coming off her skin.
“But not after tasting that,” I said.
The admission stung, more than I cared to model.
Fern let her head drop, hair curtaining her face. The tremor in her hands got worse. “She needed it more.”
The hunger wasn’t a metaphor, not anymore. It was a literal, bone-deep ache, as much mythic as it was biochemical. I could see the narrative halo around Fern’s shoulders: threads tugging her toward Alyx, threads yanking her back, all of them fighting for the right to survive another recursion.
“Is that what you think?” I asked, and the edge in my voice was all Lioren: half-affection, half-final judgment.
She didn’t answer, not right away. Instead, she stalked to Alyx’s side and knelt, hands hovering inches above the sleeping girl’s throat. She didn’t touch her. That restraint was the only thing holding the world together.
I watched, silent, as Fern traced the outlines of Alyx’s cheek, the hollow beneath her jaw, the place where story and memoryoverlap and turn soft. I remembered Lioren, doing the same. I remembered every mythic who’d come before, and how none of them learned until it was too late.
Fern whispered, “I am going to ruin her when she wakes up.”
