Lyra POV

“I didn’t need words to know you weren’t really her.”

The figure standing before me did not react. She only smiled, soft and patient, the way my mother used to smile when I was small and afraid of the dark.

The Dead Lands stretched endlessly around us, a wasteland of cracked stone and drifting ash, the sky bruised purple and black, unmoving, as though time itself had been nailed in place. The wind carried no warmth, no scent of life, only the dry taste of old bone and forgotten ...