Sorry this took so long, been a bit busy recently...
Enjoy!
We left a day later, creeping through the countryside like rats, fearful of being discovered by the Church. If we where found, all would be lost. If a platoon from the Church found a single soldier like myself wandering along, back towards Church lines then they would almost certainly declare me a deserter and shoot me on the spot. If they found the Lady with me then I would be declared a traitor and taken to a far, far worse fate.
Thus we moved slowly south, creeping through the weeds and brambles in the dead of night and hiding in the great scars left by artillery during the day. Time after time we lay together, holding our breath as a rekey ambled past, knowing that our trip could end at any moment. We slept in the single sleeping bag that we had brought and lived on minimal rations for fear of running out of food. All the time the world rang with the distant boom of artillery and gunfire, reminding us that the cause which we sought to protect was in daily danger of extinction; by the time we returned it was possible that the war would be over and the Lady would be the last of her kind.
We were heading south, towards a great expanse of marshland from which the little people had detected bizarre radiation bursts a few weeks ago. I had been passing the marshland at the same point, and it was then that I'd first begun to receive my dreams. They still came nightly, but now they were clearer and I had some degree of control over them. They still ended at the same point, however, with the two lovers (Lyra and will, as I had not been informed) parting at the end of the Universe, their love severed at the sweetest moment. I still awoke crying when that dream visited me, such as the anguish of their separation.
As we walked the Lady told me all she knew about the girl who haunted my dreams. She knew little, only the stories that had been relayed to her from fragmented sources; she knew of the trip to the world of the dead, for example, but had little idea of what had been done there. Meanwhile I had all of the experiences and ideas of what they had done but no back-story to it. Together we began to assemble the visions into a coherent narrative; trying to work out exactly where each scene went will we had an idea of the course of Lyras life during that period.
I do not know exactly how long the journey south took, and I could not relay exact moments too you in any way. As I have previously stated I am old now and my memory is fragmented and poor, certain incidents standing in stark relief to others. Besides, I was not well educated at that stage and so any attempt to try and tell you about the higher things the Lady talked to me about would be useless. In return she bid me to tell her about my own life in the Churches service and so I relayed my schedule of mass and evensong, the rising glory that you felt during a great preacher and the way you'd eat your gruel with a happy smile on your face, thanking God for the gift of food. I told her about the exquisite paint that you felt during training and the far more gruesome pain that I had felt during my castration.
I can remember clearly her reaction to that last detail, the way she had blanched and how her face had turned white. She stammered strongly, "Well, we had always suspected..." and then her normally eloquent voice fell silent. We walked in silent before she suddenly fell into a rant of the evils of her church, provoked entirely by my disclosure. We never talked of the matter again, even in the dead of night when she pressed herself closer to me as through seeking some sort of response. I never felt anything.
Finally we reached the marshes and began to pick our way through the wasteland. Once there had been a great battle here and its scars still tore across the landscape. Every so often you would find your foot buried in the rotting corpse of a dead soldier, his body floating just beneath the mist that circled the ground and you would quickly withdraw, trying to remove the incident from your memory. The great dragonflies of the Gallivespians soared across the landscape, the survivors having formed some sort of a colony after the battle. I asked the Lady why she hadn't brought a dragonfly with her and she showed me the little larvae all Galliverspians carried with them, saying that she could rear one within a few hours if needs be.
We blundered on, unsure of what we were looking for and with no real sense of direction. Somewhere in the marsh our route to another world lay and we had no means of finding it, my dreams giving us little guidance as to where this doorway lay. WE spent days looking, trying to notice any minute differences between patches of grass which lay mere inches apart.
In the end we stumbled through it, the lady suddenly noticing that the sun was beaming down from a different angle. The world still looked the same, the marshes still coated the horizon but the sun had moved from the left of our field of vision to the right, moving all the shadows from one angle to another. WE looked back and could see the extraordinarily subtle outside of a doorway in the air, an oval where the shadows ran in different directions. Had it not been for the Lady's observation I have no doubt that we would have simply stumbled onwards for eternity, not noticing that the world had changed.
That night I had the strongest and strangest dream I yet experienced. I was placed in a scene I had never seen before, immobile and facing a large oak door. I watched as it opened and an elderly gentleman walked through, followed by two official looking guards dragging a young woman with them. The gentleman sat himself behind a large, polished desk and they placed the woman in a wooden chair, facing him. She still struggled but was unable to escape their grip.
The wall behind the man was lined with books, indicating to me that he was a scholar of some sort. I then noticed the animals which had followed each of the four people inwards, a black raven seating itself upon the man's shoulder, a pair of wolfhounds following each of the two guards and a bizarre, pine Marten which leapt into the girl's arms as she sat. The old man opened up a large book on his desk and picked up a pen, writing a few notes on the vellum pages. Finally he looked up at the girl.
"Are you Lyra Belaqua?" He asked, his voice deep and laboured.
"Yes." The woman responded, her blond hair glistening in the sun.
"Lyra, I am here to inform you of the charges brought against you by the blessed Church of Jesus Christ. You have been charged with treason, heresy and atheism over the course of several years. As a fellow of Jordon Collage you have requested that you be tried here, rather than in the civil courts as is your right. How do you plead?"
I could not see the girls face as she heard the charges but her defiant voice told me all that i wanted to know. "Not guilty." She said, her voice ringing clear around the stone flagged room.
The old man behind the desk smiled at her and nodded, his pen scratching over the parchment once more. "I thought you might." His face then turned serious again, betraying no expression of sympathy or condemnation, "therefore you will be tried in the scholars court within the next three weeks in front of a jury of your peers. If you are found guilty you will be sent down from Jordon Collage and be liable to prosecution in the civil courts, who may punish you in any way they see fit. I gather that the punishment for your crime in those courts is death. Until then you may remain under house guard in your quarters at Jordon. May god have mercy on your soul." With that he stood and left through a side door, leaving the guards to escort the lady out through the main.
Then something extraordinary happened, an incident which is still etched onto my memory all these years later. AS the woman was turned around and moved towards the exit her eyes met mine. A look a surprise crossed her face, followed by a grin of excitement and she mouthed a couple of words at me; "Help me, Will."
