It's Not Worth It
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Chapter 1- Midsummer's Day
"The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool might have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing."
-Iorek Byrnison, The Amber Spyglass
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Lyra Silvertongue was in a hurry.
She darted through the streets and alleyways, around the buildings of Jordan College where she used to play with Roger, and then through a series of streets that had become more familiar in the three years since she had saved humankind.
It was five minutes before noon on Midsummer's Day, and Lyra was headed for the Botanic Garden.
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William Parry had arrived a few minutes early in the Garden in his world, so close to Lyra's world but not quite touching it. He spent the time talking to Kirjava, his beautiful daemon that had been torn out of his heart three years ago.
Three years.
Had it really been that long? It had seemed so much more recently that he and Lyra had parted, by their seaside café in Cittágazze, for the last time. He could still feel Lyra's lips on his, the last kiss they shared together.
Once he had opened the window into his world, and broken the knife, Mary Malone and he had hailed a taxi and headed to Mary's flat. They found it under heavy police guard, along with someMI5 men as well, because what Mary had done-namely feigned identity, then discovered a valuable government secret-was a terrible crime in the government's eyes. If word got out...
So that was why Mary and Will had been immediately told to freeze, and that was why Kirjava hurriedly tried to distract their pursuers while Mary and Will ran away, and that was why they became fugitives, always on the run, determined to protect their right to know what they knew, and to tell others of what they had discovered, in order to create the Republic of Heaven, and keep too much Dust from leaking out through that gap from the world of the dead.
But Will had always done it halfheartedly, missing Lyra, and that was why he always returned to the Botanic Garden at noon on Midsummer's Day, every summer. Will could handle being a fugitive; he was always able to keep inconspicuous. Will could even handle telling others of his experiences; he was strong, he could handle it, sometimes even without bursting into tears when it came time to tell the part about learning of the Dust leakage between windows, and the Specters being created every time a window was made.
And so he had lived for the past three years, with Mary, sometimes sleeping under doorways, sometimes hiding out in bathrooms of buildings, and sleeping there. They were able to sneak food from the covered market of Will's Oxford, which Lyra had remarked looked much more like the "proper Oxford" than they rest of Will's world...
Will was jarred out of his thoughts by his daemon. "She's here," remarked Kirjava, looking at Will's watch.
And Will concentrated hard, and went into the trancelike state that he had used to cut windows with the Subtle Knife, and tried and tried to see Lyra in her world.
But Lyra wasn't quite there yet.
She dashed through the gates of the Garden, hoping that she wasn't too late, and knowing that she was. She felt terrible, like she was letting Will down. She and Pantalaimon jumped onto the bench, and she went into the trancelike state that she tried to use, usually in vain, to read the alethiometer, and tried to picture Will on the bench, and Kirjava next to him...
It wasn't the same, and Lyra felt it wasn't worth it, even to save the worlds, to tear her apart from the love that she had just discovered, and wanted to know for the rest of her life.
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Once the hour on the bench was up, Will returned to the London Underground, where Mary was waiting. Will's mother, Elaine Parry, was staring absentmindedly at the trains all around them.
"Mother!" Will called to her.
She didn't even turn around, as if she didn't hear him at all.
Mary and Will dragged Mrs. Parry along to the apartment where they were living at the time. It had been abandoned by its previous owners for unknown reasons; however, the landlord didn't know it, so Will and Mary and their daemons could stay there until they were either captured by the police or the landlord realized that the apartment's previous owners hadn't paid their rent for seven months.
Elaine Parry sat down on the couch while Will began to tell his story to Mary, about what he had seen and heard on the bench earlier that day, and about the great decision he had to make.
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Lyra rushed back to Jordan College, Pantalaimon scurrying behind her. She had dropped out of Dame Hannah's College two years before, because she could not concentrate on her work, and now lived in Jordan College and studied the alethiometer in her spare time. She quickly ran to her room on the fourth floor of the highest tower in all of Oxford, and began to put together what she had seen. She remembered, after about 10 minutes had passed on the bench with nothing happening at all, suddenly she made a connection, in the same way that she had read the alethiometer. She saw Will's face, and his daemon curled up on his lap, but when she tried to speak, no words came out. So she just looked at Will, and he looked at her, for twenty minutes or more before Pantalaimon tried to reach out to Kirjava, and ended up breaking the connection.
But that connection was all that Lyra needed. For her now, nothing or no one existed but Will, and she would spend the rest of her life trying to get back to him, Republic of Heaven or not.
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Will completed his story, about the connection he made with Lyra, how it was just like searching for a place to cut in the air with the knife, and what he had to do. Immediately after he left Lyra behind, he went searching for the best blacksmith in all of England, to repair the Subtle Knife if ever it was needed. Never before had he thought of using it only to see Lyra again, even though in his mind she was more important than anything else he could use the knife for. He knew that it would make Specters, he knew that it would leak Dust, but none of that mattered anymore. He would have to repair the knife, and use it again to cut windows between his and Lyra's world, closing them quickly afterwards. The Specters-well, he would have to make hundreds of Specters if he continued this for the rest of his life, but the angels could take care of the Specters. They had destroyed hundreds of thousands of them after Will had shown them how to close the windows, why would a hundred more matter?
So Will and his daemon jumped off the couch where they were talking to Mary, who of course disliked the idea, but could do nothing to stop it. They ran to the Underground; they could take the subway to the blacksmith's. Will felt the pieces of the knife in his pocket, and thought of Lyra.
Once they arrived at the blacksmith's, it was almost dusk. Will handed the pieces of the knife to the blacksmith, and asked, "Can you repair this?"
"I don't know," said the blacksmith, "because I have never seen anything like this before. It will take time, I have many other orders in---"
"Please," begged Will. "You don't know, you can't understand, but this knife is the only way that I can ever see my love again."
"How can a knife--"
Will replied, "I will tell you." And so he began to tell the story of His Dark Materials, which pretty much everybody who's reading this has probably heard, so we'll skip over it.
"That is the dumbest crap I have ever heard," said the blacksmith, "but since you took-he checked his watch-three hours out of your schedule to tell me this, I'll repair your knife. Come back in the morning."
Will went home and fell asleep immediately on his bed, dreaming of Lyra.
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The next morning he woke up very early, and it took him a while to realize why he was feeling so good. He rushed to the blacksmith's as soon as he could to see if the knife was mended.
"I got a bad feeling about this knife as I was mending it," said the blacksmith to Will, "but I did nonetheless. Now I don't know what this knife is capable of, but you be careful with it. And even if you do, this knife has its own intentions..."
"Thank you!" cried Will, and ran out of the shop. Once he got into a shadowy corner, he cut a window into Lyra's world. It wasn't that hard, once he regained his confidence in doing it; he felt like had been doing it all his life. He closed the window behind him immediately, so no Dust would leak out, and set off to find Lyra.
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Lyra was sitting in her room, working on reading the alethiometer, which had suddenly become easier for her since that Midsummer's Day on the bench. She could now understand all but the most complex answers, although it took her much longer than it had before.
Where is Will?, she asked.
The alethiometer replied quickly, Heading this way.
She jumped up in joy, then waited on her bed, until finally she could wait no more. She ran down the tower, then climbed up on the roofs of the Jordan College buildings, jumping from roof to roof, just like she had done before her adventures had begun. That was where Will found her, hours later; that was where they shared their first kiss in three years, and that was where they slept, that night, gazing up at the stars. In the morning, Lyra told the Master of Will's coming, and he was received with open arms, because he had, after all, saved the world. So Lyra and Will lived together for six years, some of those spent in Lyra’s world, and some in Will's, so neither Pantalaimon nor Kirjava would ever get sick. They got married in the Botanic Garden in Lyra's world, and in attendance were not only the Master and his raven daemon, but also Iorek Byrnison and some of the armored bears of Svalbard, a few members of Serafina Pekkala's witch clan, including Serafina herself; and Mary Malone, who was happiest of all that Will had finally found his love again.
But Will had left a few windows open in his hurry from world to world, and now a problem had begun.