Myself 
|• this isn't you being selfish •|

Whoever came up with the cretinous suggestion that white was innocent had forgotten that white was made from the reflection of an intense rainbow. White is nothing but a mirage of innocence that humans  believed in and Lyra had seen too much to know the truth and to know, nothing was ever innocent. It was all just a concoction of hues, sucked in and gone to fade white. It made her wonder why black holes weren't called white instead. But who was she to dictate what things outside her extant were called?

She stumbled through the white solid doors with a limp by her side. It hurt her fiercely, as though a three headed knife that snaked its way in; coming out when she breathed out and jabbing in, harder every time, when she breathed in. She sniffed in sharply as she felt her whole body shake. Her breath became shaky as she plummeted down to her knees. Whatever he had done to her was taking affect and it was killing her, slowly sucking life out of her, like a white hole amidst her heart.

Deception costs you a great deal of pain but for Lyra it left her mutated into a beast. He let the monster out, gave it a direction and permission to take revenge but not against him but against the woman who created it.

The Hunter was out.

The Hunter was free.

The Hunter was hungry.

And I am lost.

Lyra had lost to the Hunter. After years and years of fighting and torment, she had lost but she truly didn't care anymore because what hurt her most was him. His cunning self had sinuously wrapped around her neck and she was too late to realise. Lyra let her last tear spill. She refused to cry anymore over a pathetic boy.

I taught you better. She thought incandescently. We are not weak to engage a feud but to wage in war.

Lyra picked herself up and fixed her determination in reaching the end of the room, regardless how much it pained her. She made a promise to her and she would keep it. She curved in to enter the heart of the room.

"Affirmative." A sudden wave of a brittle familiar voice made her agitated. She had forgotten that she had asked something and it scared her, to feel distorted.

"Copy." She croaked as loud as her debilitated stature allowed her.

"Lyra..."

"Yes?" Lyra knew that if she spoke another syllable she'd cry.

"You will always have a piece of me with—" he was cut of just as her emerald gaze settled on a still body in the centre of the room. She took a moment to gawk around her.

The room was painted in a shade of poignant and dazzling white. In the nucleus of the chamber was what looked like younger Lyra's model of an operation table.

She was seven when she built the same model with fine cardboard from the attic. Tyme had announced a scholarship reward for the winner of the next best creation. She remembered growing up with their lavish money but at the end she went to work for Cortex, the competition. The enemy. She was a traitor.

We don't always make the right choices.

Lyra would have touched it and gushed over her creation, marvelled over the smooth curves, but her body was lying there.

Her body was covered with white silk. Her pulpy, pasty-white face would have blended quite well with the silk if she didn't have those blood red lips. She looked dead, but Lyra knew she wasn't. Candace Specimen doesn't die. She never will.

A bolt of lightning stuck her thoughts. She was instantaneously fuelled with an ingenious covin. Lyra's fingers slipped into the patch on her left side, right below her ribs. It was where home was to her daggers.

Let me in. It whispered. Let me in, Lyra. 

She shivered to it's command and knew that even a day ago, she'd fight it but now, it's exactly what she needed, wanted.

"I let you in." She whispered inaudibly. "I'm sorry for not letting you in earlier."

Its fine sweet, Lyra. It felt strange to be called sweet by such a hideous being but she was the hideous being and so she believed it didn't matter. You'll be doing right by you. By me. By Duncan.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she guzzled a handful of oxygen.

"We only live, only suspire consumed by either fire or fire." She repeated her childhood mantra one last time before lashing out a scream and screwing two daggers in the body's upper left chest.

The sickening squelching of flesh made her gag but she kept jabbing in the knives, madly, till she could see the surface beneath the body.

Lyra thought it was the end of Candace Specimen.

But she kept living. Breathing the very air in which the stench of her own blood was suffocating.

"You tried, Lyra. But you forget, the dead can't die."

—

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH *screams for eternity*

Well, what did you think?!! I'm dying to know!

Like always, I've kept a the he's and she's a secret and if you've read HW you'd know there's always a twist but go ahead and guess, you might just be right ;)

See you on the next page!