Page 97 of She Who Devours the Stars
I smiled, not cruel but honest, the way I did when I knew there was no point pretending I was any different from the legend they’d made me.
“She’s going to wake up soon,” I said, voice soft. “And when she does… everything changes again.”
For a second, nobody said anything.
I raised my glass, let the rim catch the distorted light, and wondered whether the taste would ever be enough. The pool spun a little faster, reflecting the city in a million fractured pieces, all of them more real than the last.
I didn’t drink. I just held the glass, watching the spiral, and waited for the world to catch up.
Eventually, it would.
It always did.
Thread Modulation: Aenna Caith
Axis Alignment: Eventide Athenaeum
I spent my first week in the Vitrine with blue ink under every fingernail.
The Astral Archive Overflow had a humidity problem, a secret society of admin-bots, and a smell that reminded you every artifact in here was dying by degrees. My borrowed lab coat belonged to a graduate two years gone. It was pale blue, fraying at the sleeves, one shoulder stained with what I decided was a hero’s blood. It fit too loosely, but the badge worked on the doors, and no one in the Convergence program could be bothered to remember anyone below postdoc.
I pulled the sleeves tight, blinked twice to recalibrate my AR overlays, and stood half-immersed in a mist of projection light. Twelve independent thread windows flickered across my left eye, every one a fresh attempt at explaining what the hell I’d witnessed in the resonance chamber last night. The other eye was reserved for the real stuff: the charts I’d drawn, the equations I’d scrawled across the edge of the desk, the exact curl of Fern Trivane’s mythic waveform, which I’d copied and pasted and copied again, just to make sure it wasn’t a hallucination.
I muttered, “It’s recursive… but sympathetic, not harmonic.” The projection didn’t respond, which was rude, but at least it didn’t judge.
“She shouldn’t exist in this tier,” I said, testing the phrase. “But I heard it.” A pause. “I heard her call back.”
I adjusted the glasses on my nose, tapped the side to bring up the audio overlay, and let the captured waveform repeat, slow and clear, through the bones of my jaw. It was a perfect spiral of want, the kind of signal you didn’t get in baseline physics.It wasn’t even mythic, not by any Accord definition. It was something else. It was her.
A passing admin-bot trundled up, its tray balanced with little vials of synth tea. “You are exceeding the wellness protocol for post-resonance observation,” it said in the polite monotone of the permanently unfazed. “Would you like a beverage?”
“No,” I said, waving it off. “Just leave the tray.”
It complied. I barely registered it. The main monitor behind me had begun to hum in time with my pulse, which was either a hardware bug or another anomaly worth writing up. I scribbled a note in the margin of my chart: CORRELATION VS. CAUSATION, and underlined it twice, even though I already knew the answer.
Every surface in my cubicle was covered in printouts, most of them obsolete before they finished rendering. I’d started drawing Fern’s resonance signature freehand, just to see if I could, and discovered I liked the feel of the stylus, the way the blue ink stuck to my skin and didn’t fade for hours. I retraced the waveform, the steep angle where she’d shattered the mythic buffer, the strange, impossible echo that followed, as if she’d left a shadow of herself in the world.
On the biggest screen, the pattern pulsed: raw, corrupted, but beautiful. It was not public. It was not legal to access. But I had it, and I wasn’t going to let go.
“I’m going to Converge,” I whispered, not as a dare but as a fact. “And she’s the only proof I need that it’s possible.”
A shadow flickered at the edge of the projection field, a student, unfamiliar, maybe just as lost as me. He hesitated, then sidled up, hands in pockets.
“Hey,” he said, eyes darting from me to the screen, “isn’t that—?”
I didn’t look at him. “Yes. And no. It’s what’s left of her, folded between event signatures.”
He blinked. “That’s… okay, you’re obsessed.”
I considered this, then nodded. “Obviously. What else would I be?”
He made a sound, half a laugh, half a question, then backed away, like he’d already learned it was safer not to get too close to mythics-in-progress.
I adjusted my glasses, stared at the waveform, and thought about what it meant to exist at the edge of your own recursion. Fern had done it. She’d shattered the tier ceiling, broken every simulation, and still found a way to call back.
I wanted that. Needed it.
My overlays went to static, every window closing at once. The projection mist thickened. My pulse spiked, just a hair, and every screen in the cubicle flashed the same pattern:
