A new universe.

  A new world.

  A new child, born with red hair and a gap-toothed smile, on a planet that had never heard the name Eliz or Lyra or Lira. She grew up by a river, collecting stones, feeling a warmth in her chest that she could not explain.

  One day, when she was seven years old, she found a stone unlike any other.

  It was smooth and warm, pulsing with a faint light that seemed to beat like a heart. She picked it up and held it to her chest, and for a moment—just a moment—she saw things. Faces. Names. A woman dying a thousand times. Another woman writing in a journal. A garden full of flowers. A dark place full of hunger and forgetting.

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  Then the vision faded, and she was just a girl by a river, holding a warm stone.

  "Mama!" she called, running toward the small house where her family lived. "Mama, look what I found!"

  Her mother met her at the door, wiping flour from her hands. She looked at the stone, at its faint glow, at the wonder in her daughter's eyes.

  "Where did you get this?" she asked.

  "By the river. It was warm." The girl clutched it tighter. "It called to me."

  Her mother knelt and looked into her daughter's eyes. They were grey—grey as the sea before a storm, grey as eyes she had seen in dreams she could not remember.

  "What's your name, child?" she asked softly.

  The girl smiled. It was a gap-toothed smile, bright and full of joy.

  "Lira," she said. "My name is Lira."

  Her mother gathered her into her arms, the warm stone pressed between them.

  "Welcome home," she whispered. "Welcome home."

  ---

  (The Beginning)