Susan
It was a dreary day in mid-autumn, and a tall, dark haired girl was sat by her bedroom window in a Large Edwardian stone house, looking out at the rooftops and mills and grey cobbled streets of London.
A tear was rolling down her cheek, but as she felt more welling in her eyes she blinked them back determinedly, not allowing herself to think about her parents… her brothers and sister… that train crash.
But she couldn't stop herself from seeing, as though she had been there, the rush of grey as the train came off the rails, hearing the screech of wheels, and picturing how the looks of horror on her sibling's faces would become frozen as the life left them.
All three of them –even Peter- were still so naive. They had never really grown up.
Edmund… he was so strong. So brave, but also so caring. She remembered how vile and mocking he used to be, and how quickly this had changed. Almost overnight while they had been staying at the Proffessor Kirke's home during the war, he had become such a different person.
Lucy. The youngest. No matter how Lucy grew, Susan would always see her as a seven year old little girl playing in that wardrobe. However much older she got, there were always moments when she would say or do something that pertained her old childish air.
Peter. He was the eldest; the protector. He was the one that would look out for the others, and who bore the weight if responsibility. Although he was the eldest, and in many ways the most adult of the four, he, like Lucy and Edmund, had a strange tendency to go on about those silly games that they used to play. All three of them talked about Narnia rather too much for Susan's liking, and stranger still, they would speak as though they still believed that this magical land really existed.
Sometimes, if she thought hard about it, she could almost see the miles of fields and hills and valleys stretching away in every direction from Beaversdam, blanketed by snow, or hear the gulls crying as they soared over the castle at Cair Paravel towards the sea, or smell the strange Narnian flowers that grow there in the summer.
She shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. What vivid imaginations they had once had! She could scarcely blame them, really, for believing in a world that even now could feel so real.
What a strange coincidence, thought Susan, that all those who she associated with this old game had been involved in the accident. Lucy, Edmund and Peter, of course, but also four others.
There was Eustace, her cousin. He, like Edmund had seemingly changed overnight from being an ass and a bully into someone barely recognisable. He had mocked Narnia, at first, but had somehow become rather caught up in the idea of Aslan, and his land beyond the Eastern Ocean.
As well as Eustace, there was his friend Jill, who she had met only once before, and not particularly liked. The others had spent much time with her, but Susan thought her to be an extremely queer child. It was strange enough that Lucy, Peter, Edmund and Eustace still played games about Narnia, but it surpassed Susan's understanding that this girl, who was far too old to be playing such games (as, of course, were the others) and who had seemed otherwise very sensible, had involved herself in Narnia, despite having so little to do with the others.
Then there was Proffessor Kirke and Mrs Plummer. It was while staying at Professor Kirke's home as evacuees that the four of them had first dreamed up the land of Narnia, and for some unknown reason –perhaps to humour them- he had told them that he himself had once visited Narnia.
Susan had never met Polly, but the others had, and they made extraordinary claims about her. Apparently, she said that she too had been to Narnia, with Proffessor, at the very beginning of that world, and had ridden to the West of the world on a winged horse. Why on earth would anyone claim such nonsense?
As she was thinking this, she was staring at the dark clouds that were looming over London without really knowing why.
She leapt away from the window with a sudden cry of horror. She found that she was shivering, and crying intensely. She was being ridiculous, she told herself. There was nothing whatsoever to be afraid of. But she couldn't shake the feeling that, for one short moment, she had seen the familiar shape of a great lion amongst the clouds, and that it had been trying to speak to her.