FROM HER ASHES³ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐗𝐈𝐈: Way Down We Go

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WAY DOWN WE GO

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LYRA HAS NOT left Octavia's side.

Her friend is slumped upon pale, formless sheets, an effigy of herself, crumbling marble. Tubes puncture her scarred palms, slither into her nose like plastic parasites, harrowingly frail. Lank, black hair spills around her skeletal head like a rotting crown. One breath and she would be blown away into the dirt. Life is leaking from her, fluid and fatal, there are no cataclysmic chasing rivers of garnet but it is as if she is bleeding out just the same, bleeding out before they can reach the promise land. Fading faster than ever, fleeting, draining, dying.

Like icicles, Lyra's fingertips flash freezing fire across Octavia's cheeks. Bloodless sticks. She thinks briefly of when they'd gotten to know each other on earth beneath a simmering apricot sky, hand in hand, boots crunching through emerald grass, cheeks glowing like roses, the threat of the Grounder army not enough to stop them. Octavia had laughed then, bright trios of octaves, pealing out across jade-suffocating forests while Lyra grinned with delight.

Octavia hasn't laughed like that in a long time.

None of them have.

"Please." Lyra's voice is a tendril of fading light, a snuffed out flame. Her frozen fingertips harden against Octavia's marble cheeks. Her lips tremble. There is no strength left inside of her. "Please. I can't lose you, too. Please. Please. Please."

Octavia remains motionless. Silent. Unmoving.

Corpse-like.

Something is crushing Lyra into atoms, all her organs, all her veins, tearing up her insides, hellfire consuming her, rabid and lost and sickly pus-yellow. Fallen away. Leaving her forever.

"Please," she croaks. "Please, Via. I can't do this alone. Wake up. Please."

Tears, weak and lifeless and dull tainted silver, dribble from her shuddering eyes, drenching her cheeks. Her eyelashes flutter, ashes against her chalky skin. Hands plummeting. Falling freely now.

It feels like the universe is being torn in two, shards raining like burning stars, leaving Lyra to blister in hellish shadows. It's all a dark, desolate nightmare, a fevered dream that she can't wake up from, a death march through oceans of black shadow, through dead memories and shattered glass, through endless miseries and unbounded agony. Limitless persecution. She is a child all over again, locked in a cold stone cage with nothing but rats for company and flies to wallow in her sorrow; alone in this freezing wasteland, abandoned in her grief.

Lyra wants to raze the heavens. She wants to scream at the sky.

Somehow, just when she thinks she can't lose anything more, she does. Because the people around her are always, always, always leaving and dying. Her mom. Wells. Lincoln. Bellamy. Her dad. Jasper. Everyone.

Soon she's going to have no one left.

The names, bleak and vacant and hideously personal, bounce around her skull at every waking hour, a swarm of dark unfeeling words, unmatchable to the destruction. How much longer is it until Octavia becomes another name on her list? Everyone ends up there at some point or another. Their betrayals claw around Lyra's once-pure heart and rip it from beneath her ribs, spewing corrupted black blood all over the cosmos. Octavia was never supposed to be one of those names. She'd been there all along, hadn't she? Before the beginning. All the way back when they were just two girls, the girl under the floor and the murderer sentenced to death, the ones who met in Earth Skills in the stars and somehow found each other again on the ground. They have been friends since before it all began. It is unthinkable that they will be torn apart now, after everything.