FROM HER ASHES³ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐗𝐕𝐈𝐈: Spacewalker

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SPACEWALKER

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AT WORLD'S END, Lyra thinks back upon the artistry of her own destruction.

     At fifteen, she watched her mother get floated. At fifteen, she was sentenced to death. At seventeen, she was thrown onto a radioactive planet and ordered to survive with little more than her wits. That ashen planet destroyed her hope, faith fading into hell-computed skies, heart dissolving to ash, no longer a synonym of love, but a curse. Not yet grown but she already knew the sound of a lie, the way it melts into your skin like smoke. She knew what it was like to be betrayed, to have a blade twisted into the small of your back. She knew death; she was it's enemy and it's closest friend. Now she is twenty-three and chaos is all she knows; she is the Commander of the Blood. She has spilt so much blood and caused so much ruination.

     As if she were born a disaster. A shadow.

     A monster before she was a girl.

     Only the world is what put this darkness in her.

And now the world is dying.

Again.

It feels like some ridiculous joke that the universe is pulling on Lyra. We can destroy your world over and over and over again and what can you do but burn with it? Rocks wreathed in boiling, white light. An azure sky seething. Thunder slashing the silence in two. The devastation of anything and everything.

How many times will Lyra be forced to watch everything she knows fade to nothing?

She sprints, half-believing she can out-distance death itself, ignoring the stray bullets glittering in the sickening sunbeams, leaping over festering bodies, and the running of the rover, the creaking of the woods though the day is windless; through grounds that seemed themselves to have risen in rebellion, she runs faster than she has ever moved in her life, and it is her who sees the great village first, the springy grass and the trees that protect its secrets with whiplike, slashing branches.

     The rest of the human race boards the transport. Lyra is one of the last left in the woods.

Her. Octavia. Abby. Kane.

Sirens shriek through the death-clogged sky. Setting every one of Lyra's nerves alight, goosebumps breaking out along her arms, the hairs on the back of her neck standing straight as a blade-edge. Cursing under her breath, she forces herself to move faster through the houses. It's not until she hears a few venomous words that she knows she's found them:

"We've been here before. This is not a choice."

"Yes, it is."

Octavia. Abby.

Shooting through the village, taking in more and more of the quaint cottages, Lyra briefly realizes how mundane it all is. No flickering holograms and sleek lounges and portals to the stars or anything she has grown up surrounded by. No shabby tents, no bleeding bunkers built to withstand nuclear assaults, nothing she has become accustomed to, either. Not in her line of work. Just airy curtains that drift along with the evening breeze, the lingering smell of animals, the earthy scent of dirt, flowers perfuming the air. There are a few tools scattered here and there, all in places they don't belong. Everything's boring and cluttered and homemade and peaceful.