FROM HER ASHES³ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐈𝐈𝐈. Dead Stars

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DEAD STARS

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WHERE HAVE THE stars gone?

Lyra Jupiter's tragedy is all-consuming. Her reflection was once a ghost in grizzled grey glass and she was nothing more than her father's parallel, a ghost in every sense of the word. Drifting lifelessly through the serpentine corridors of the Second Dawn's bunker.

Where have the stars gone?

Until the sea swallowed her whole and spat her out all over again. Until she no longer bore the burden of her father's curse. Until darkness bled through the stone, liquid tar, until it killed her and birthed something new.

Where have the stars gone?

Nobody wants to look like a dead man. The remnants of the unknowing and the loss and the abandonment still cling to her like a second skin, but she is not the mirror image of a man who bled out. She is ice frozen snarls and a bone-shattering reminder of everything her father could never be. Carrying humanity's wretched legacy. Her very veins are corrupted and she is sure that she bleeds shadow.

Where have the stars gone?

Six years in the bunker.

     An ocean of misery swallowed her and a wretched monster spat her back out. She wears the face of a failure and has the eyes of a ghost. Raw, untempered chaos.

Six years without the stars.

"Each of these four combatants have committed crimes against Wonkru."

Lyra's voice echoes in the silence of the fighting pits.

Hundreds of eyes are on her. Dried blood glints in the fluorescents and shatters swarthy red across her pale face, pulsing waves, a sea of scarlet highlighting her too-soft cheekbones, the subtle curve of her chin, her plump, roseate lips that had once shivered with stars and song. Now they move precisely, thinly, not lingering on a single word, ringing with brief certainty. These are words she has said over and over and over again. They are nothing new to her.

"They are our enemies," she continues. "Traitors to our people, traitors to our code of strength, unity, and honor."

     And here, briefly, her gaze combs over the chain-link fence that houses the spectators, the ones whose eyes glitter like wolves, hungry for blood and hungry for death. Twitching knots of hands. Ready to roar to gods that face them here in the chamber, the ones that have not abandoned them, their gods of flesh and blood.

"But today, one of you will be given the chance to once again be called brother or sister." Her eyes slant to the fighting pits where the four stand. Four silhouettes outlined in red, stained with the blood of the fallen, sullied with sin. "However, first, you must survive. The only rule in this arena is, be the last."

     As they always do, her eyes shift to the throne just behind her.

     The throne Octavia sits upon.