FROM HER ASHES³ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐗𝐕𝐈𝐈𝐈: Let the Sky Fall

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LET THE SKY FALL

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          WHILE LYRA SPENT years dreaming of space, dreamers are unlucky, and reality is cruel.

     A dark, desolate nightmare. A fever dream that Lyra cannot wake up from. A death march through seas of black shadow, through dead memories and shattered glass, all endless misery and boundless agony. Infinite persecution. An eternity incarcerated by darkness, barred by despair, and it all happens within hours. Cheeks razed with tears. Saltwater scarring her skin crimson as her blood once was. Eyes never running dry. Infinite downpours. Until there is nothing left. Until she is barren. Nothing more than that little girl locked in the stone cold cage with nothing but the rabbit Berlioz for company; alone in a freezing room of steel; abandoned, locked away in her grief.

     Lyra feels like she's back in the SkyBox.

     Isn't that funny? Lyra has never been more free in her life. She has felt rain upon her skin, she is back in the stars again, she is the Commander, and yet she has never felt more isolated.

     Every last nail of energy she had left had been hammered into one final cause: saving Wonkru. Every last scrap of hope, of dignity, it was all slammed into her ambition, the desire to help her people, to deliver them to the ground. To ensure they saw daylight again. They had, briefly. Now they are back in the stars and Lyra has never felt so lost.

     Lost.

     That is a good way to describe what she is. Forget what she feels ━━ Lyra is lost.

Really, what did she expect? To leave a hemorrhage of stardust wherever she walked? No, no, no. It is the lost son who is the prodigal. A lost daughter is just called lost.

(And yet. . . can you even be a daughter without the mother? It seems unnatural to be born with someone and then to die apart. Can you be a daughter without a father? All that is left of your bloodline is you. There is no one else.)

     And Lyra feels completely alone, as if she was the last one to survive on Earth. There is no way to describe this feeling of total loneliness.

    The rage she used to lift herself up, the rage she used to make herself stand, the rage she used to make herself walk, in the bunker. . . it's gone. Back is that empty, eternal void of nothingness.

     Perhaps the best way to describe it is like being hungry; being starving. Starving, and, when you look through a thick, soundless, oil-smeared window, you see everyone else devouring a feast. It is shameful and alarming and Lyra is increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts the same way any other feeling does and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body, spreading the way viruses do. It advances upon her, thickening her blood, cold as ice, clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing,

     "I'm all alone," she says aloud, and the silence of the corridor absorbs the words like blood soaking into skin.

     Once upon a time, her eyelashes guarded a universe. Now they barely hold back an apocalyptic wasteland. They reflect the earth as she gazes down upon it.