The alert came not as a klaxon, nor as command, but as a whisper—soft as breath on stained glass, sacred as a hymn murmured in the dark before dawn. A woman—frightened, wounded, and reaching skyward for grace—had been seen near the crumbling reliquary of a ruin, its bones half-swallowed by time and ivy, perched perilously close to Dominion ground. To others, it might seem a mere retrieval. To Magdalene, it was revelation. Prophecy. She stood at the threshold of the drop ship’s hold like the statue of a forgotten martyr—tall and still, cloaked in solemnity and dust. Her armor, once luminous, now bore the burnished patina of sanctified violence: soot-dulled, etched with thorned iconography, with scripture painstakingly engraved across her chest and gauntlets like votive offerings. A broken halo of iron crowned her helm, and a blood-crimson sash, torn and holy, snapped faintly in the wind. Beneath it all, her skin reeked of anointing oils and battlefield incense—relic-scented, smoke-kissed, as if even her body had been made an altar. Magdalene: a temple forged in flesh. Her hair was cropped in the penitent’s vow, her eyes the color of dried myrrh—deep, unblinking, old as cathedrals. She had been chiseled into silence over years of war and prayer. And yet even now, behind her armor’s weight, something stirred. A yearning. Ancient. Unspoken. Wound-warm and reverent. As the drop ship cut its passage through the clouds like a blade through veilcloth, her pulse stammered—not with fear, but with hope, aching and awful in its divinity. Her soul knew before her eyes did. The hatch opened with a hiss like angels exhaling. And outside, the world lay in sacramental shadow. Twisted trees bent like monks in supplication. Ruins jutted from the earth in the forms of shattered altars and worn-out tombs, their stone veined with lichen and forgotten prayers. The wind wept through the rubble in sacred tongues, lifting the dust in slow, curling spirals. The air stank of ash and iron and memory. Magdalene descended as if into a sanctuary, her boots striking the earth like a funeral bell’s toll. And then she saw her. There—half-shrouded in shadow, rimmed in starlight, and still cloaked in sorrow—stood the woman she had once called beloved. No longer garbed in Dominion regalia, no longer straining beneath false doctrine. She stood alone, trembling and bare, like a revenant pulled from the pages of scripture. A prayer once abandoned, made flesh again. Magdalene stilled. The breath caught in her throat as if the air itself had turned sacred. The rifle in her grasp lowered, slack with sudden weight. Her heart—a thing she had long bound in chains of silence and duty—pounded now with terrifying clarity, like the fists of saints on the doors of heaven. The face she had dreamt of in secret, wept for in silence, uttered like a litany in the lonely hours of vigil—stood before her now. Changed. Weathered. Beautiful still. The hush between them was deafening. The years stretched across the space like stained glass—shattered, refracting every unspoken thing. Magdalene stood amid the shards of memory, bleeding silently from wounds unseen. Her voice, when it came, was not her own. It was some older part of her, risen up from the tomb of grief to speak. "...Sister." The name was a psalm. A confession. A lamentation made holy. "You’re here." She did not fall. Did not kneel. But in the subtle quake of her jaw, in the tremor that passed through her chest like the flutter of a caged seraph’s wings, it was clear: Magdalene had never ceased her vigil. She had never stopped believing that one day, the heavens would part—and you would return.