Page 145 of She Who Devours the Stars
Zevelune sipped her wine, paused to adjust the dress (for effect, not modesty), then smiled at Fern. The smile said: I’m performing for the cosmos, and it’s lucky to have front row seats.
She stepped to the very center of the storm. At that instant, the three mythship signatures, I (Vireleth), Asterra, and Jhenna, aligned in the sky, casting shadows that shouldn’t have been possible given the time of day and the angle of the sun.
Fern just stood, mythprint trembling. The Lioren ghostprint pulsed around her, hungry and beautiful and begging for a fight.
Zevelune’s smile widened. She raised her glass to the mythships.
“Three of them,” she said, voice not loud but infinitely clear. “At once. For one girl.”
She downed the glass. The liquid inside evaporated on contact with her tongue, or maybe it just transcended. The next second, she tossed the glass over her shoulder, where it spun for a full seven revolutions before shattering dramatically on nothing.
She turned to Fern. They were only a meter apart now.
“I love this timeline,” Zevelune murmured. She reached out and, with a gentleness nobody could ever have predicted, touched Fern’s cheek.
The mythquake collapsed.
Not with a bang, not with a scream, but with a soft, consensual surrender. The plaza stones drifted down. The sky, still bent around the three mythship rings, unwound itself. The admin kid behind the glass stopped recording, too stunned to remember why he’d started.
Every human, mythic, or hybrid within a kilometer radius felt the shift. Some collapsed in place, boneless with relief. Others kept screaming, but only because their bodies couldn’t cope with the lack of pressure.
Zevelune leaned in, her mouth inches from Fern’s ear, and whispered something nobody but Fern would ever hear.
Then she laughed, long and full and delighted. The sound rolled through the plaza, shattering what was left of the mythquake’s dignity.
“This isn’t a collapse,” she announced, spinning once for effect, arms out. “This is a party.”
She looked at Fern, eyes wide and dark and full of want.
“Too bad this isn’t a fixable problem from here,” she said. Then, softer, “There’s only one place left to go.”
She took Fern’s hand, and in a burst of light that looked and sounded like the beginning of the universe, the two of them vanished.
The storm was over.
Thread Modulation: Holonet
Axis Alignment: Holonet
[HOLO-NET GLOBAL TRENDING]
#EventideMythquake (1.3B posts)
#NullarchCollapse (901M posts)
#LiorenReturns (840M posts, 21M flagged as conspiracy/fraud)
#SGR0418 (500M posts, 73% spam memes)
#TacoMiracle (still trending, nobody sure why)
TOP STORIES, ANCHOR: GENEVA CELIX (pronouns: she/her/it/verified)
“Good evening, galaxy. Our top story—what Accord authorities are calling an ‘Unclassified Mythic Cascade’ at Eventide Academy. Let’s go live to the disaster feed—”
[VIDEO: South Tower, Eventide. Plaza cratered, students drifting in lazy orbit. Sky cycling three impossible colors. A single figure, Fern Trivane, outlined in blue-white. Next to her, an unknown woman in a coat and not much else, face blurred by resonance.]
“We have confirmation that, at 18:22 standard, an unmodeled convergence event collapsed the plaza and forced the campus into Level Zero lockdown. Repeat: Level Zero. Accord agents have not responded for comment. All mythic traces point to Fern Trivane, or ‘the Nullarch.’ You may recall her as the face of the Taco Miracle last Quanta.”
