The monastery bells hadn’t rung for seventeen years. Sister Marguerite knew this because she’d counted every silent dawn since the day the metal in them turned to salt. Now, as she adjusted her telescope on the tower’s highest parapet, she heard them—clear as spring water, impossible as rain in the desert.
Below, the other sisters emerged from their cells, habits rustling like moth wings. They’d all taken vows of silence after the bells transformed, but Marguerite could read their thoughts in the trembling of their hands. The bells meant the quantum saints were returning.
She turned back to her telescope, an ancient brass instrument that the monastery’s founder had blessed with myrrh and starlight. Through its lens, Kepler-442b hung like a jade eye in the darkness, pulsing with a light that shouldn’t exist—not at that distance, not with that spectrum. The planet had been sending messages for months now, but only Marguerite could decode them. They came as recipes.
First, instructions for bread that could feed thousands. Then, a formula for wine that healed wounds. Last week, directions for growing roses that bloomed backwards through time, their petals falling up toward heaven. Each recipe arrived with the same signature: a pattern of light that resembled the monastery’s bells.
Sister Marguerite had tried them all. The bread tasted of memories. The wine sparkled with unborn stars. The roses—well, the roses had made her remember things that hadn’t happened yet, including this moment, standing here, as the bells rang their impossible song.
The newest transmission was different. It came not as light but as sound, traveling faster than physics allowed, carrying the voice of someone she’d known in another life—before the vows, before the bells turned to salt, before she understood that some prayers were answered by distant worlds.
“Marguerite,” the voice said, crackling through space and time like fire through paper. “We found your sister. She’s here, on the third moon. She says the bells were just the beginning.”
Her sister Catherine had disappeared the day the bells transformed, walked straight into the desert with nothing but a compass and a book of psalms. The search parties found only her footprints, leading to a circle of glass in the sand where lightning had struck—or something had landed.
Marguerite wrote down the final recipe as it arrived: instructions for turning salt back into metal, metal into music, music into a bridge between worlds. The ingredients were simple—faith, quantum entanglement, and the tears of someone who’d been waiting seventeen years.
As she descended the tower stairs, recipe clutched in her hand, she found the other sisters already gathering in the courtyard. They’d heard it too, the last signal from Kepler-442b. Without speaking, they began to form a circle around the salt bells, each woman pulling from her pocket the small vial of tears they’d collected over the years of silence.
The youngest sister, who’d arrived only last winter, looked at Marguerite with eyes full of questions. Marguerite simply handed her the recipe and pointed to the sky, where Kepler-442b blazed green and impossible, a lighthouse for the lost, a kitchen for the divine, a place where her sister Catherine now lived among the quantum saints, teaching them Earth songs and waiting.
They began the ritual as the recipe instructed, pouring their tears onto the salt bells in a pattern that matched the constellation above. The salt hissed and sang, transforming note by note back into bronze, then into something else—a metal that existed in two places at once, here and there, Earth and Kepler-442b.
When the bells rang again, truly rang, their sound carried across space itself, a bridge of resonance and longing. And in the echo that returned, Marguerite heard her sister’s laughter, mixed with the voices of beings who had learned to cook with starlight and pray in mathematical equations.
The portal opened gently, like a door between rooms in a house where love lived. Through it, Marguerite could see the jade forests of Kepler-442b, where Catherine stood waiting, older now but radiant, holding a basket of those backwards-blooming roses.
“The quantum saints want to learn our recipes too,” Catherine called across the impossible distance. “They say Earth food is the only thing that makes eternity bearable.”
Sister Marguerite looked at her fellow sisters, their faces illuminated by the green light spilling through the portal. Together, without breaking their vow of silence, they began to gather their cookbooks, their pressed flowers, their hand-written prayers. The bells continued to ring, calling them to a kitchen beyond the stars, where exile ended and a new kind of communion began.
The last signal from Kepler-442b hadn’t been a message at all. It had been an invitation to dinner.
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