Hi, welcome to the story! This has been cross-posted from AO3, where it's already forty-one chapters long. I'll update this every day that I can until it's caught up to the AO3 version. Hope you like the story and please review!
Marisa was falling. That was nothing new about that, of course. Marisa had been falling for what felt like eternity, but as she was still alive, couldn't have been more than a few days.
Metatron had finally disintegrated into Dust a while back thanks to the golden monkey's efforts. Now it was just Marisa and the monkey and her lover's ghost.
Falling, falling, falling.
There was nothing to say: they'd said it all already. Everything had been done, it was just waiting to die and then waiting for something that would never come.
"We're doing it for Lyra," she murmered, but Lyra seemed awfully far away and they would never see her again.
And it was far too late to go back now. They had chosen this fate, they had accepted it.
They just hadn't realised quite how bad it would be.
Falling, falling, falling.
Because there was nothing to see around them, she peered down into the darkness, and there saw something that she could never have dreamed would exist.
It wasn't that exciting in ordinary terms – just a piece of grey flat featureless land – but it was the bottom of the bottomless abyss, and it was getting closer every second.
Suddenly Marisa realised what this meant. She clutched the monkey closer, and hugged him tightly, because she knew this meant he would be gone.
"Goodbye," she whispered. There was no need to say anything else.
And then they had hit the ground and Marisa was dead.
It was sudden, shocking. For one brief moment it had hurt, but now all that remained was a dull ache, a longing for her dæmon.
Marisa stood up and looked down at her body. Beside her, Lord Asriel was doing the same.
"Well," Marisa said, and then stopped because there was nothing more to say.
They looked around, staring for something other than grey nothingness, and saw that there was indeed something: an old, old creature, older than anything Marisa had ever seen.
They went up to it, for lack of anything else, and greeted it respectfully.
"You have come from the abyss?" asked the creature in a gravelly, cracked voice.
Marisa and Lord Asriel nodded.
"It is many ages since anyone has come from there… like all who fall, you are faced with a choice. Stay here, grow old like me, have immortality but never body or dæmon – or go back, have a second chance to right what you did wrong. You will start afresh, but you can never return here."
There was almost no need to speak. "We'll go back," they said at the same time.
"But if you go back it will be at the cost of your memories."
Marisa was horrified at that. Lose Lyra forever, lose everything she had ever worked towards… or stay here, in this bleak nothingness.
"Very well," she said, and so did Lord Asriel.
Then they felt themselves being drawn away by some mysterious force, to some place they knew nothing of, to begin again.