Page 155 of She Who Devours the Stars
Thread Modulation: HoloNet
Axis Alignment: Who even knows anymore?
The communal lounge was half-lit, sticky, and full of dead noodles. I was not Aenna, but I lived with her, which meant most of my life was spent trying to parse mythprint emergencies over the low drone of instant food and disaster memes.
Tonight, the HoloNet was a dumpster fire.
I surfed feeds with one hand, the other shoveling cold ramen into my face while the world tried to decide if it was ending orjust in its fun new midlife crisis. The main news desk was already down a host—she’d started screaming about narrative recursion mid-broadcast and had to be replaced with a substandard meat puppet who didn’t even blink in sync.
On the big screen, the mythic theorists were at war. One, a classic Accord analyst in a suit that cost more than my tuition, was openly weeping and muttering “it’s not possible” on loop. The next, a posthuman with hair like blue fire, was live-annotating a death spiral diagram and arguing with himself in three voices. The third—my favorite—looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, eyes wide and yellow, shirt spattered with what I hoped was pizza sauce.
He was shouting.
“She’s done it! THREE mythships in-system! Three! Eventide can’t survive that! Vireleth alone could erase the entire galactic core, and you’re telling me they’re all in play? What is the Accord supposed to do, PRAY?!”
The Accord rep, a paper-thin woman with the smile of a lapsed cultist, tried to restore order. “Let’s remember, these are just rumors—”
He cut her off with a hoarse laugh. “Oh, rumors? Did you miss the part where the South Tower’s clocks are all running backward? Or the part where the mythic containment grid just fucking gave up? Or do you want to talk about the raw event footage, where Fern Trivane eats a god and smiles for the cameras?”
She looked to camera three, dead-eyed. “We encourage all citizens to remain indoors and limit their mythic exposure. The Accord is deploying specialists to—”
That’s when the other analyst, the weeper, detonated.
No, really. He just exploded—body went from solid to meat pinata in under a frame. The feed jumped, cut to black, then came back with a new host, who looked exactly like the last but with more hair and slightly less fear in his eyes.
No one even paused. The chat stream below the feed was already full of memes: #MeatPinata, #NullarchBae, #PrayForEventide.
Someone in the lounge howled with laughter.
My compad vibrated. I ignored it.
The death-spiral guy was now in full rant. “It’s over, you get it? There’s no baseline anymore. She’s the narrative now. If you think the Accord can just staple this back together with a new meme or a ‘corrective protocol,’ you’re—” His voice glitched out, but the intent was clear.
I finished my ramen, slurped the last broth, and wiped my mouth on my sleeve.
In the side panel, the trending clip was a raw feed from outside South Tower: Fern’s mythprint lighting up the sky, Zevelune’s silhouette beside her, the world bending around their argument. Underneath, the hot take: “Nullarchs gone wild.”
In the private feed, someone messaged: “Aenna’s not answering. Should we call her?”
I typed, “She’ll surface eventually. If not, the world won’t matter anyway.”
The news desk fell into a weird, beautiful silence. Nobody wanted to speak. On screen, the three mythships hovered, their silhouettes like teeth marks in the sky.
The cult leader, patched in from who-knows-where, started to pray: “Pray for the Nullarch. Pray for the one true myth—”
Someone off camera yelled, “Which one? Lioren or Fern?!”
For a second, the whole feed hung.
The host looked straight into camera, the smile gone.
“I… don’t know,” he said.
And then the world kept spinning, and we all kept watching, because what else was there to do?
Chapter 21: Deeper
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane
