And the Walls Crumble

By Morpherkidvb

Prologue

Shadows… falling over the bedroom where the subtle knife lay broken in pieces inside a small worn paper bag. Falling over the finger marks where the boy and the man had fondled the paper, wearing it down to the pulp. Shadows falling over Will, as he opened the closet door, letting sunlight in to battle with the darkness.

The light emphasized the bag as Will knelt by it, reminiscing of the year in which he had used its contents. It was now quarter to twelve, he noticed, so he gently shut the closet door behind him and left the flat. He strolled down the street, Kirjava at his heels and, using the trick of slinking into shadows (he used this more often now, Kirjava noted,) walked unnoticed down the sidewalk to the Botanic Gardens of Oxford.

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Across the ever-crumbling barrier between worlds, Lyra sat, Pan curled up beside her, fiddling with the alethiometer. She had regained the workings of the simpler symbols perfectly, recalling the memories that sparked the interpretation of this sign or that one. Her ecstatic joy when figuring out what the Mother symbol meant, or the Bee, kept the translations flowing in her mind. But the harder or more vague characters came as a struggle, and called for countless hours of studying and demonstration. She had absolutely no patience for this, and when asked to do so in her classes, she skimmed through the text book pages looking for an illustration or word that would spark such a latter described reminiscence.

As a result, she had a half education, much like the one she had gotten as a child in Oxford. She could get a handful of meanings and was able to get the correct mind set- something others had trouble with- but when translating the pictures into real phrases and meaningful answers to questions, what used to pop into her head as now a struggle.

She liked the struggle, however. It was a bit like the Latin Scholar had described changing something from Latin into English- there was always more than one way to achieve the same result.

A wind blew her golden hair, and for a moment, she wondered if Will was feeling the same wind millions of miles but no distance away in his world…

And, with a sudden impulse, she reached out to touch a rosemary bush that was next to the bench…

As Will did the same across the bridge to the stars…

And for a moment, each of the two people and their daemons could feel the other inside themselves, and during that fleeting second, the walls between worlds collapsed.

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Inside Will's closet, the tip of the broken knife began to glow an icy blue, and, as the worlds collided, levitated for that moment before falling back with its brothers with a clatter.

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Sergeant Kenil's spurs dug again and again into the man's chest as the tortured person screamed in pain.

"There," spat the Gallivespian "That's what happens to those of your kind who call me a little one! I am Kenil!"

Seeing the fear in the man's eyes, the fear of death that haunted the man's species, the Sergeant explained, " Oh, no, I won't kill you. Go home to your people and tell them what you will. In fact, tell them everything! " He laughed, a wild, high pitched screech that seemed to spilt the rock the little man was standing on.

"Tell them to never again underestimate a Gallivespian! "

And Kenil whistled and his lightning striped dragonfly zoomed to his side, and in less than a minute, the rouge Gallivespian had disappeared.