Long before she became Celeste, she was just Lira Voss, daughter of a dying woman and a dead language.
She was born in a derelict space station drifting above Earth's orbit—one of the first private orbital colonies ever built, later decommissioned and forgotten after the funding dried up. They called it Eris Echo Station, and to most, it was a tomb of metal and silence. But to Lira, it was home.
Her mother was the last remaining linguist from the "Starborn Initiative"—a failed project that believed some cosmic frequencies could be translated into language. A theory built on insanity, most said. But her mother didn't care. Every day, she played long-forgotten tones across the comm channels. She taught Lira how to listen—not with ears, but with awareness.
"Language is more than words," she'd whisper. "It's vibration. It's resonance. The stars are speaking. We just stopped listening."
Lira believed her.
Until the night her mother's voice stopped.
It happened quietly, like everything did aboard Eris Echo. Lira found her body still strapped to her console, eyes wide, fingers clenched around a frequency dial. On-screen, a waveform still pulsed—steady, rhythmic.
Not a random signal.
A pattern.
Lira was twelve when she heard the stars speak back.
She didn't understand it, not at first. But over time, the sound became a pulse in her mind. A melody. A code. She began mimicking it—first with her voice, then with her mind. Lights flickered when she hummed. Gravity adjusted when she whispered. And when she screamed… she shattered every window on the station.
Her body became a conduit. A tuning fork for the cosmos.
By fifteen, she was no longer Lira Voss.
She was Celeste—named not by herself, but by the signal. A name encoded in the vibrations, as if her destiny had been etched across constellations long before her birth.
When Earth's governments re-established a recon team to investigate the long-dead station, they found her floating outside the hull, unsuited, breathing in a vacuum. The footage was buried. So was the team.
They never figured out how she survived.
But Sentinel Solutions did. And they wanted her.
They took her in, wrapped her in silver restraints that suppressed her ability to resonate with ambient frequency. They studied her, poked her, and made her "sing" in isolated chambers to measure spatial disruption. Her voice became a weapon. Her silence, even more deadly.
She escaped two years later.
Some say she liquified her guards by speaking a single syllable backwards. Others believe she simply vanished into the vacuum between notes.
Whatever happened, she didn't leave alone.
When she returned to Earth, it wasn't to find peace.
It was to synchronize the planet to the signal that had birthed her.
That's when Lucas Vance found her.
He didn't speak when they met—just played a recorded tone she hadn't heard since her mother's death. It vibrated through her bones, resonating with something ancient inside her.
And that was enough.
She joined the Harbingers that same day.
To them, she is more than a metahuman.
She is their siren—the one who can turn ambient frequency into devastating force, who can unravel sonic barriers, who can reduce a city block to ash by humming a forgotten celestial tone.
But her most terrifying power isn't what she destroys.
It's what she awakens.
Because when Celeste speaks in that impossible language… something out there speaks back.
And it's getting closer.