FROM HER ASHES³ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐈𝐈. Alone

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ALONE

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[ tw: attempted suicide
no actual self-harm happens, but if you are sensitive at all to this type of content,
please don't read this chapter ]

ALONE.

It is a terrible word. Perhaps the most terrible word in any language, Lyra is beginning to think. Certainly in the English tongue. Dead is merely a shadow of it, holding a candle to the ferocity, and hell is a poor synonym. To be so lonely is to have it eat you from the inside out, shredding your arteries, devouring your flesh with sharpened claws. It is painfully human. There is a chill, an awful dread, at feeling like there is no left alive who would care if you lived or not. If no one knows you are alive, then you aren't. Isolation will kill you.

An empire of dead stars is rotting within Lyra's ribs.

Like a phantom, she drifts through the serpentine corridors, the ones that are empty and desolate. Dead white dwarfs flicker inside her organs, colossal red giants crackling in her blood, razing all her cells to ash and rust. Galaxies peeling down her cheeks, stardust simmering beneath her skin, ancient suns and fading moons upon her lips, an entire universe screaming inside her bones, disfigured and dying. And at the heart of it all, at the epicentre of these decaying cosmos, the black hole is ever expanding. Swelling, grief and anger and suffering, decrepit dreams and sleeplessness, abandonment and desolation, all of it is birthing this swirling black vacuum inside of Lyra's body. Bleeding into her agony, marrying her despair in unholy matrimony, so monstrous that the dark matter is gnawing at her every waking thought. Wrapping it's beastly jaws around her brain. Guilt and torment and bereavement. An inhuman parasite. A burning flame that is dark as night.

It's strange, isn't it? How your heart burns. . . and burns. . . and suddenly turns to ice.

It's the void and the dead stars that corrupt Lyra now, that send her spiralling, haunting her with ghosts of Jaha's corpse and Costa's gun and Noah's blood-soaked jacket. Shrieking her into sentience until she's begging to be dead to the darkness, the taste of iron on her lips. Glazed with cold sweat. Swallowing back a scream that burns in her lungs. Thunder rumbling in her ears and lightning growling in her veins. Painting the night red as blood.

     Eyes scarred with ruby tears, Lyra finds herself in the fighting pits.

     Dried blood smears the concrete. Layers upon layers. No one has ever cleaned the pits after a fight; the corpses get dragged out, salting the hellish ground behind them. So much death. . . all that Lyra has witnessed, all that she has not protested, all of this that she has allowed to happen. How could she not? She is stalked by shadow and haunted by sunless skies ━━ it is only fair that the rest of the world is plunged into darkness, too.

    She is standing at the edge of the world. Eyes catching on skin pale as snow, smeared with curdling carmine. There is a gun snared in those fingers. The same one used to shoot Costa, the same one used to take away a man's choice when he refused to become the monster that she already was.