Madrigal Ayuba

Madrigal "Maddie" Ayuba was a woman of the failing colony on Ganymede and the sister of the journalist Emmeline Ayuba. She left her family to join the Church of Unitology, and after her death she returned to her sister as a hallucination produced by the Red Marker buried beneath Ganymede.

Family on Ganymede#

Madrigal and her younger sister Emmeline lived with their mother in the outer crater of the city of Enki Catena on Ganymede. As EarthGov appeared to abandon the colony, the family fell into hardship along with the declining settlement, and Maddie often looked after her sister. In their teenage years she began to vanish for days at a stretch, saying she needed to do so to support the family, which set her against their mother, who suspected she was involved in crime. One day she disappeared for good. When Emmeline and their mother searched her room, they found a Unitologist book and a Marker replica and understood that she had joined the Church. Their mother died soon after, leaving Emmeline alone.

The Church and her death#

Maddie's purpose in joining the Unitologists was to reach a rank high enough to move her family safely off-world under the Church's protection, amid rumors that Ganymede's atmospheric domes and radiation shields would be shut down. She rose to a Vested membership of Silver rank in good standing at the Marius Landing chapter, where she worked as a language specialist translating Church literature. Around 2509 she was sent on missionary work to the settlement of Epigeus, where the Church was raising a chapel. During the construction the scaffolding collapsed, killing Maddie and three other Unitologists. It was eighteen months later that Emmeline finally went looking for her by infiltrating the Church, unaware that her sister was already dead.

The Marker's apparition#

When Emmeline went undercover in the Church, she was haunted by an apparition of her sister, a hallucination produced by the Red Marker buried beneath Marius Landing. The vision of Maddie begged her to stop running from the truth and to accept the universe for what it was. Emmeline, who did not believe in Unitology, was skeptical until she discovered that Maddie had died months earlier and came to accept that some real force behind the Church was letting her sister speak to her. After she was captured trying to escape and taken to the Red Marker chamber, Emmeline understood the apparition's meaning, that the truth she sought lay at the heart of the Church. Placed in contact with the Marker, she saw a vivid vision of Maddie on Aegis VII, where the apparition showed her the battle between Isaac Clarke and the Hive Mind and set out the Church's doctrine of Convergence as a brief, painful step toward a new future for humanity.