After Fate Fell

64

2 years, 4 months, and 9 days after it all
•ELLA•

It's landing day.

This is the day I've been thinking of, longing for, dreaming of, staring out the thick plexiglass windows and losing myself in it all, making up scenarios of, every single moment on this ship has led up to today and this moment.

And yet somehow I am still afraid.

•JOHN•

I feel lost.

Today is it, but is it really?

Because I still have my whole life ahead of me. This moment, as significant as it is, isn't the end of it all. Not even close.

But it is the end of certain parts of it.

•SAM•

I prepare myself for my first steps on another world. Another home. One from which I'll never return.

Have I made the right choice in leaving it all behind?

I look to my side and see Maren Elizabeth, smiling, reassuring me, and beyond her, the others. My friends. They don't have to tell me I made the right choice.

But when we land on the dead, barren surface of Lorien, will we be able to bring it back from the dead?

•CODY•

I am not a number anymore.

But as we get our first glimpse of our planet and the chills roll down my spine, why do I feel so much more insignificant than if my name was just a number?

•MAREN ELIZABETH•

Nothing, nothing could have prepared me for the view that has absolutely stunned me, paralyzed me in awe but also in fear, of the world we close in on.

This is Lorien?

I can't close my eyes or turn away because I'm frozen in place, but if I could, I would run down the cold metal hallway into my room and try to make myself believe we'll never land.

•MARINA•

The room is cold and my view through the window in front of me is obscured by the ice that crawls across the glass.

I'm not fearful. I'm not sad. I'm not excited. I don't feel anything. Except ice.

•STANLEY•

The thrusters turn on and the planet grows in my view until it envelopes everything and the sky behind it goes out of view. If Lorien's surface had any detail, I would see it by now. But all that covers it is dust, and so I have nothing to say and nothing to think of but emptiness as we come closer and closer to what feels like a doomed purpose.

•MALCOLM•

In front of me, right in front of me, is a world I could have only hoped to see. I could have only hoped to live to the day when I could gaze upon its surface. Its cold, bleak, lifeless surface. It's hideous in that sense. But it's also oh so beautiful.

Because this is where I'll spend the rest of my life. With my son. With the very people I devoted my life to saving in the hopes of someday returning.

And this is the homecoming. We all knew it would look like this, but nobody wanted to really believe it deep down. We have a lot of work to do.

•REX•

I'm gripping the controls so hard I think my fingers might break. While the others may stare at the planet in wonder, my heart races, my skin perspires, my mind races, knowing that all of this, everything we've dreamed of, lies in Lexa's and my hands. We have to land this ship right, or this has all been for nothing. The last of Lorien dies here if the ship doesn't reach the surface with living, breathing beings inside and ready to emerge.

•ADAM•

I'm in my room. I'm the only one not by the windows or at the controls. I just can't help but feel I don't deserve to see this world, don't deserve to step onto it, live on it alongside the others, because of everything my kind has done to theirs. How did they forgive me so easily, let me be their friend, their ally, despite who I am?

I sit, lights off, door closed, on my bunk, the sheet of my bed no longer soft against my skin as it was when I first slept on it the first night on the ship. My tears fall onto its rough surface, softening the fabric, but the pain of feeling that I shouldn't even be here in this less-than-luxurious ship alongside the Loric overcomes the short-lived luxury of the softness against my skin.

•LEXA•

It's hard to look down upon the world I once called home without remembering that night. The crescent moons hung in opposite sides of the sky, the music blared, and then all of a sudden, the music stopped and was replaced by the sounds of fighting and destruction and death.

As I look down at the planet I called home-- even as much as I didn't like it--all I see is the death.

But there's no turning back I guess. So full speed ahead.