Chapter Four The Realm of Lost Memories
"They're us," Lyra breathed. "Aren't they? All of them."
"Echoes," Cassian said. "Every life we have ever lived leaves one behind, here, when the memory of it fades from the living world. They are not ghosts. They are not truly alive either. They are memories, given just enough shape to be seen and heard."
Lyra walked closer to the nearest figure — a woman in a long blue dress, her dark hair braided with small silver bells, standing perfectly still with her eyes closed.
"Is she me?"
"She was you. In a life a very long time ago."
"Can I wake her?"
Cassian's expression tightened. "You can. But I would ask you to be careful which ones you wake, Lyra. Some memories are gentle. Others are not."
Lyra thought of the dream from the night before — her own face, whispering that Cassian was hiding something. She looked at the still, silent figure in front of her, and felt a pull she could not explain, like gravity, like recognition.
She reached out and touched the woman's hand.
The world shifted.
For a moment, Lyra was not standing on a stone path in a golden kingdom.
She was somewhere else entirely — a small stone house by the sea, waves crashing against rocks outside a window, and a much younger version of Cassian standing across the room, laughing at something she — this other her — had just said.
"You always did make jokes at the worst moments," the young Cassian said, and his laugh was so full of joy that Lyra's chest ached with a longing she did not understand.
Then the vision ended, and Lyra was back on the stone path, breathing hard, tears on her face she had not felt fall.
"What was that?" she whispered.
"Her name was Mira," Cassian said softly, and Lyra realized he was watching her with something like grief in his eyes. "She lived in a fishing village, four hundred years ago. She was happy. For a while."
"What happened to her?"
Cassian was quiet for a long moment.
"The same thing that always happens," he finally said. "The world found us. And it ended."
Lyra looked back at the still, silent figure of Mira, standing frozen among a hundred other versions of herself, each one a life she had lived and lost and forgotten.
"How many are there?" she asked. "How many times have we done this, Cassian? Fallen in love, and lost each other?"
He looked down the endless stone path, at the endless rows of still, golden figures stretching further than Lyra's eyes could follow.
"I stopped counting a long time ago," he said. "It hurt less that way."