One does not walk away whole from a body that drank the light of an engine built for gods rather than women.
Carol Danvers learned to live with that fault line inside her, thin as glass, between her own flesh and the energy running through it, ready to burst free at the smallest shock like a star kept too long beneath the skin.
She doesn't always command that light. Some days, it simply carries her instead.
It took the Apostles of Magnus centuries, huddled atop Cloudrest around circles drawn in chalk and blood, to understand that a fleeing god never scatters his light by accident, he sows it the way one buries a secret and prays it stays buried.
Their ritual had yielded nothing but cold ash and broken promises, century after century, until the day it bit, without knowing it, into a rift far vaster than their own, beyond time, beyond their world.
What they pulled from that void was not the docile spark they'd hoped to chain, but a woman made of the very light they had always coveted, already standing at the center of their shattered circle, already reclaiming what they never should have dared to touch.