IN MY HEAD¹ ━━ Bellamy Blake

𝐈𝐗: Darkness Between Stars

     So many stories and yet just one at the same time.

     Each of them belong to their own narrative, but all across the galaxies, stories bleed together. Stars form constellations without ever meeting each other. They are part of something much greater than themselves. A star alone is just a star, but together they form something beautiful. Alone it could not hope to dent the darkness, but together they swallow it whole. Blazing and cracking and seething in harmonic defiance.

     (But they burn and fade and die out, too.)

     Emerging from the thicket of woods, Lyra finds herself at the edge of a lake.

     Where to begin, where to begin?

     Stories don't seem to have a beginning. Five hundred and seventy seven days in the Skybox will teach you that. Certainly her own doesn't. The day she was born doesn't quite suffice, though it feels natural to start there. Only it ignores the plethora of prologues, epigraphs, summaries, descriptions, and footnotes galore that assess everything that's ever happened at all because really, in the end, things connect more often than you realise. . .

     You could start with her mother, Valeria Franko, whose untimely death was a bittersweet ending to her own tale. Perhaps it was a depressing act in her husband's. But it was just a chapter in Lyra's. A brief mentioning in Chancellor Jaha's. Perhaps a footnote in Mr. Pike's. And though her story ended, theirs all move forward.

     Then there's everyone around her. The guards. The people on the Ark. The one hundred and Bellamy Blake. Millions of new possibilities spiral, each just as compelling a start as the next, and then you have to realise that stories never really have just one beginning ━━ really there is never a good place to start or end. Just an easy one. And then the honest question becomes this: Where does one story end and where does the next begin?

     And which are worth telling?

     So here Lyra hits a conundrum in the plot.

     Is her own arc really more important than Atom's? Than the two boys who died on the dropship? Trina and Pascal? Charlotte's? She doesn't think so.

     And now, as she walks across the pebbled shore, listening to the hymn of gentle waves lapping softly against grainy sands, she cannot answer all her questions. Honestly she's not even sure if they make sense. It's all in her head.

     It's all in your head, Miss. Jupiter!

     "It's all in my head," she agrees softly. "But that doesn't make it any less real."

     Tilting her head up, she looks to the stars. One of them twinkles brighter than the rest; the Ark. Three thousand people. Her dad.

     Then her wrist starts to burn.

     It feels hellfire itself is scorching against her skin. The wristband is like molten lava and she lets out a shriek of pain as tears sting at her eyes. The pain is practically unbearable, like thousands of boiling hot blades sticking into her sensitive flesh all at once, twisting and seething and ━━

     And then it ends.

     The wristband unclasps.