After Fate Fell

68 • MARINA

Sorry for the very long wait! Thanks for everything. This story has meant so much to me.
-Braden

MARINA
The new Lorien is as I remember the old one to be in many ways. It is a place of peace, happiness, and beauty, and it's my home...our home. But sometimes I look across the landscape and I don't even recognize it. The grass that sprouts out of the ground in the springtime knows nothing of the war, of the dark day that everything here ended, of what had to be done, the time it took, and the blood and ash that had to be spilled just for it to peek its little green sprouts out of the fertile, no longer dusty and dead ground.

The peace that this place has is something that we don't take for granted, but are all the same thankful for. It's not a foreign feeling, being in peace, but it's also something that I've had to get used to again. Every time I hear a loud noise, everytime I hear a door open or close, see a flash of light I don't recognize, I have to re-teach myself that this is how things are, how things should be, that there's no threat to me, and that the war is long over. But things like these take time, even years after the war has ended, I'll still never fully shake that feeling of being hunted.

Lorien is no longer a cold, barren landscape, and instead, is blooming with life. Very lacking on the human side, though there is a new arrival for Lorien to celebrate, a child, the first in a long, long time that wasn't born to be a warrior, a protector. Instead, they will be simply a citizen of the new Lorien, with no enemy to train for, they won't be cast into a war before they even find out who they truly are, and instead their personality will be shaped by their own experiences here, on their home planet, instead of a world far away, where they are being hunted and have to be wary of any person they may meet. I envy the baby, but I also know that the freedom they have is mine as well, and just because I wasn't born into it, I can still come to know it.                                                      
This home feels different without my best friend though. In the flesh, she's no longer here, no longer a shoulder to cry on, no longer a warm body to cuddle up to in the cold of the Himalayan highlands, no longer a friendly face to joke with and grow up with. But she's still here with me. There haven't been many tears on Lorien, but any that I've cried would be on her shoulder, the nights are nowhere near as cold here as they were in those mountains, but even on the warmest night I would give anything to spend it with her, and she was no longer the little girl that I met at the convent. She gave herself fearlessly to Lorien.

But she didn't die, not in the slightest. She's still here, beneath me, all around me, sprouting deep into the earth and encompassing everything that makes this world what it is. I don't know exactly how it works, I don't know if this whole time, she was her. Their connection had always been strong. Ella and Legacy had been able to communicate to each other. I'd have to guess that Ella's powers had been stemming from this connection, her telepathy, the visions of future and past, and everything else built up to something powerful, something distinctly Loric. I had simply brushed it off as a legacy, not as Legacy herself. They were one and the same, and Ella didn't even know that. But once we came here, somehow she knew.

And that night, when we landed, and I was asleep, wistfully, fearfully in my bunk, she made the connection. And it cost her her physical being, but it brought this place back from the dead and turned it into the world that I can now call home.

Legacy is back...we brought her back without even knowing it, and so now, Lorien is our home again...not Earth. After so much time on Earth, it was starting to feel like a home to me, somehow. And it was starting to physically become Lorien too, which I still don't fully understand. But Legacy was reaching its grasps into the ground there, building something Loric out of something very...not Loric. Ella had been there on Earth long enough for Legacy's power to start taking root.

But just as quickly as it had happened, it ended, as we left Earth, bringing Legacy, Ella, and the power of Lorien back to where it belongs. Earth never really needed it. Well, they needed our protection, the type of guardians only Lorien herself could provide, but they didn't need their planet to become ours, not indefinitely at least.

Lorien needed a spark of Loric life to bring it back from the dead, and that's exactly what it got. From Ella and from our return.
Each of us have come to feel a new sense of purpose in the world, one that doesn't revolve around a war.

For some, it's been a tougher (not in a bad way) transition for others. Stanley and Maren Elizabeth, the most physically strong of us, don't fully understand life without war. Because, just as me, even before the day that everything changed and we were thrust into a war and a life of hiding, we were being trained for what was to come. But now, in a peaceful world, they've found new purpose. Seeing Stanley out taking a nap in the grass, the sun tanning his toned body and a line of drool on his face is something I never thought I'd see.

Maren Elizabeth and Sam have grown even closer than they had been during the war, and their baby will grow up knowing both parents and with a loving grandfather, all who are just as happy to see the morning light as the baby is, although they could all use a little more sleep, and some nights, I take care of the baby when they need it most.

Lexa, Malcolm, Adam, and Rex have been working on huge upgrades to the ship we brought here, making it even better than it was before, with new additions that make us all jealous. Sometimes Lexa is gracious enough to give us a spin around Lorien in it...and I may have tried to steal it for a quick ride once or twice.

John is feeling more free than ever, and has come to know a version of himself that is more dependent on others, and not in a war setting. We all have become one big family, and we all have grown together, even closer than before, in a way that I never would have thought possible.

This place isn't perfect, we all knew that it never really was, but it isn't meant to be. It's just meant to be our home.