A smoke cloud drifted out from the downed craft, stinking of scorched oil and off-world chemicals. The ship’s hull was viciously avian, a raptor’s body of cobalt blue and dull gold. Its underbelly gleamed orange, bright with the hissing heat of orbital descent.

Cyrene Valantion was one of the gathered crowd, and three weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. Whispers started up around her – whispers that became chants, chants that became prayers.

Jagged thunder echoed from nearby streets and plazas – the grumble of great engines and wheezing boosters. More of the stars-that-were-not-stars came raining down from heaven. The very air rattled with the hum of so many engines. Each breath tasted of exhaust.

The dark-hulled emissary from the sky was emblazoned with the symbol of the Holy Eagle, fire-blackened from its dive through the atmosphere. Cyrene’s vision twinned, blurring between what she was seeing now and what she’d seen in artistic renderings in childhood. She was far from being one of the faithful, but she knew this craft, elaborately brought to life in pictures of vibrant inks on scrolls of parchment. Such imagery was scattered throughout the scriptures.

And she knew why the elders in the crowd were weeping and chanting. They recognised it too, but not merely from the holy codices. Decades ago, they’d borne witness to the same vehicles arriving from heaven.

Cyrene watched as people fell to their knees, lifting their hands to the starry skies and weeping in prayer.

‘They have returned,’ one old woman was murmuring. She spared a moment from her obeisance to claw at Cyrene’s flowing shuhl robe. ‘On your knees, ignorant whore!’

By now, the whole crowd was chanting. When the old woman reached for her leg again, Cyrene shook herself free of the hag’s wrinkled talon.

‘Please don’t touch me,’ Cyrene said. It was tradition never to touch those who wore red shuhl robes without first gaining the maiden’s permission. In her fervency, the old woman ignored the ancient custom. Her fingernails raked the younger woman’s skin through the street dress’s thin silk.