The Nova Sanctum hung in the void above the dead world, a stark, metallic intruder in a sky of swirling, impossible colors. It had torn its way through the Nexus Point not with grace, but with brute force, its hull groaning in protest at the laws of reality being bent around it.
Below, on a shattered plain of black glass that stretched to a horizon of jagged, purple mountains, two figures stood watching its descent.
Lucy's new eyes saw the ship not as a mere collection of metal and wiring, but as a dense knot of ordered matter, a defiant little pocket of something in the overwhelming everything of the Veil. And within that knot, she felt a familiar, blazing signature. A sunflare of stubborn will and protective fury she would know anywhere.
A smile, genuine and relieved, touched her lips for the first time since her transformation. "Lucian," she breathed, the name a sigh of gratitude. "He's here."
