A/N: Okay, so here's my first story! I am trying to make Amethyst as non-Mary-Sue-ish as possible by making her very arrogant and vain and melodramatic; so, hopefully that swings with all of you.
Disclaimer: I'm not C.S. Lewis. And this actually not how C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia; I own no one except Amethyst, Susanna, and Lucy-June.
A middle-aged man, an academic, evidenced by his glasses and the way he hunched over the papers and books he was reading, was sitting at his cluttered desk in his study. He ran his ink-stained fingers through what was left of his balding gray hair and let out a weary sigh. He glanced around the bookshelves of his chaotic study, his eyes traveling over the maps of imaginary places and drawings of fictional people to books on the theories of Christianity and other Abrahamic religions. His eyes rested on a stack of dirty teacups when he had a sudden stroke of inspiration, and began hurriedly scribbling something onto a slightly dirty napkin.
There was a tapping noise at the door; someone was knocking. The man didn't look up from his writing; perhaps he didn't even hear the knock. The door to his study opened, and a fair-haired girl stepped into the room good-naturedly. She looked like she was about to say something, but forgot it when she went to examine a map of some place she'd never heard of with genuine interest. The man looked up, appearing to just notice her. He removed his spectacles with annoyance at her interruption.
"Can I help you?" He asked in a tone that suggested he only wanted to help her to the door.
"No," said the girl, whose hair was red gold and tied in braids down to her waist, "Don't stop on my account."
"What do you want?" He asked, more than a little annoyed with her. She looked over at him, surprised by his strident tone. Her eyes widened as she remembered her intended purpose in coming here.
"You're Professor Lewis?" She asked. "I came here to Oxford to talk to you-"
"Who are you?" Professor Lewis asked.
"I'm Lucy-June Flewett. But no one calls me Lucy or June or Lucy-June. Call me what you want."
"What do you want, exactly?" He asked again, eager to return to his work.
"You like magical worlds, right?" She asked, her blue eyes now focused.
"Well, I-"
"What if I told you one was real? What if I had a story to tell you, a true one? Would you listen?" Lucy-June Flewett stated.
"Well-"
"It's about a Great Lion and a boy and a girl who found these rings and then-"
"I didn't say I'd take your story!" He shouted, interrupting her. She looked taken aback, but shook it off and glared at him.
"Look, I will tell you this story, and you will listen. You really should want to hear this, though. You won't regret it," she told him matter-of-factly, her expression and tone of voice differing from her earlier one, which resembled that of an eager child. Now, she seemed an adult reprimanding a small child for insolence.
"Well, I suppose- I mean," he faltered slightly under the disconcerting stare of her icy blue eyes, forgetting that she was some strange girl of sixteen whilst he was a professor at Oxford University, nearing... well, it didn't matter how old he was. Age was but a number, right?
He noticed, with increasing discomfort, that she didn't seem to blink. He began, with some reluctance, to gather paper and a pen.
"Why not?" He sighed, and set the pen to his paper, his eyes traveling over his spectacles to the fair-haired girl.
She looked happy, and sat down on a chair cleared of clutter.
"A long time ago, when your grandfather was a small child, when Sherlock Holmes still lived in Baker Street and the Bastables were still looking for treasure on Lewisham road, a girl called Polly Plummer lived in London. She..."
"And so, they all ended up in true Narnia." Lucy-June finished. Professor Lewis finished scribbling the story that would become the Chronicles of Narnia onto a stack of written papers with a flourish. They had many empty cups of tea littered around them; the fire was little more than a few embers, for Lucy-June's visit had extended for hours. Not that the professor minded, or anything. He was enthralled with girl who had given him Aslan, to say the least.
"Miss Flewett, I must say, I'm impressed." Professor Lewis told her sincerely. Lucy-June beamed at him, showing her freckled and dimpled cheeks.
"Aslan Himself told me this story," she said proudly. "He told me to spread the story of Narnia; He told me to come see you. You will tell this story, right? Of Narnia and its English friends?"
"It is my honor to do so," Professor Lewis said with a smile. "Good day, Miss June."
"Lion watch over you, Professor Jack," she replied with a wink. She was gone in a flip of red-gold curl, out the door.
Professor C.S. Lewis at Oxford University never saw her again after that, but he was forever grateful for the strange Lucy-June Flewett who had brought him Narnia.
It was not until he was very nearly done revising the story of Narnia some months later that he had a very strange sense of déja vu.
He was working at his cluttered desk, hunched over his Narnia when there was a firm knock on the door, and a girl of around sixteen walked in. Her hair was dark; her skin pale and freckled, her eyes a shade of chocolate brown. She looked rather agitated and impatient.
"Hello? Are you the professor that my sister keeps going on about?" The girl demanded, her dark eyebrows traveling up her pale forehead in skepticism.
"I don't know. You tell me." Professor Lewis said, sitting back into his chair and looking up at her quizzically. She huffed impatiently and rolled her eyes, tapping her foot restlessly against the carpeted floor.
"Lucy-June Flewett. She's my twin." The girl said, and the professor smiled.
"Ah, yes, Miss June. Yes, we have met."
"My name is Susanna Flewett, and I need to tell you the truth." Now the professor was confused.
"What?"
"My sister told you-" she stopped, seemingly on the edge of telling him something secret, something forbidden. She glanced at the door and windows as if marking an escape route before fixing her brown eyes nervously on his. "My sister... told you... about... Narnia?"
She spat out the last bit as if it were poisonous and bitter, and she wanted it off her tongue as soon as possible. The professor stared at her in surprise at her varying attitude towards the secret kingdom of her sister's.
He nodded, slowly. She closed her eyes as if dealing with a very troublesome and stressful problem, and glared at him like he was causing her a lot of personal stress.
"The version she believes in is not the truth. It is very nearly the truth, but it isn't. She left out some important details, and I need to set you straight, good sir. She isn't... always, you know, right, in her mind. She has... had some, uh, issues, in the past, with her health."
"So, you think Miss June's Narnia is false?" Jack asked.
"It is. She sees things through rose-colored lenses, if you know what I mean, good sir."
"I'm afraid I don't, Miss Susanna," Professor Lewis said bemusedly.
Susanna looked greatly uncomfortable at this point, her dark eyes resting on anywhere in the cluttered study other than Professor Lewis. "Lucia- I mean, Lucy-June, has a... well, she... has a unique way of looking at things. She likes to believe the good in people, and unfortunately, that really isn't the case. Sometimes bad things happen to good people for reasons we can't understand, and Lucy-June has always had trouble accepting that. Every act, every 'coincidence', means something; nothing is without purpose in the eyes of the Lion; He does what He has to do, and sometimes we suffer for it. But the suffering makes us stronger; it has taken me a very long time to understand this, and I'm afraid my sister will never understand. She does not like to believe suffering exists if there is nothing she can do to end it; if there is unresolved suffering and woe in the past, she denies it, for the past is the past, and she cannot undo the wrongs committed then, and cannot erase the past pain of those she loves.
"Therefore, Lucy-June does not accept suffering and pain she cannot resolve for those she loves. So, in telling you the story of Narnia, she has left out some of the darker details of its History. And I've come to tell you the truth, although I ask that you don't tell anyone else this story. It's best kept to oneself," Susanna explained.
"Why?"
"Lucy-June's Narnia is much better than the Narnia that existed in actuality; that Narnia she has created is much more akin to the one that is Aslan's country, although not nearly as perfect and wonderful."
"Uh huh..." Was all he said, but he got out his pen and paper and looked up at Susanna Flewett over his spectacles and waited for her to begin. She sighed, although the ends of her mouth threatened to turn up into a smile, and swept some paperwork off a chair onto the floor.
The real Narnia, and by real Narnia I don't mean the real Real Narnia, as in the one that exists in Aslan's Country, but the Narnia that actually existed, wasn't a place of exact fairy tales. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't. So don't get any ideas about happy endings. They don't exist in this life.
I won't tell you the story of Polly and Digory and the beginning of Narnia, because Lucy-June tells that part best, probably because she never really knew or loved Digory or Polly, and what happened to them by her account is mostly true.
When Aslan created Narnia, He created the sky, which unlike our sky here in England. No, the Narnian sky is like a dome surrounding the flat land of Narnia, the surrounding countries, and the Eastern Sea. The stars that inhabit the sky are actually beings of light, capable of coming down to the ground. The constellations are dances of the stars, and sometimes- and centaurs in particular are good at this- the stars can rearrange themselves into shapes that foretell the future, and some people (mostly centaurs) can read these messages in the sky. And so, it was foretold in the stars that a being of fire would consume Narnia, from the ashes of which, a New Age of Narnia would be born.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. When Aslan created the Sun, he didn't create some big ball of gas floating in the cosmos, or whatever they say here in England. No, the sun is an environment were certain living things thrive. Some fire-flowers, particularly those grown in the mountains of the sun, possess healing properties, and are able to cure any injury or illness. A breed of fire-bird sings the sunrise, and a fire-berry reverses the effects of age upon a certain star. There are, also, fire-nymphs.
Fire-nymphs differ greatly from the earthbound nymphs. They are actually immortal, alive until the sun itself is consumed in darkness, which will happen at the end of the world, whilst a normal nymph, such as a dryad or a naiad, is bound to the lifetime of their source- their tree or stream or whatever. A fire-nymph has a certain aura called a 'life-fire'. This life-fire is their source as a tree is to a dryad, but it exists inside them. A fire-nymph's life-fire can only be extinguished by extreme emotional turmoil; luckily, fire-nymphs rarely ever get emotionally attached, so the extinguishing of a life-fire was little more than a fable.
It is one of their shames that in their extreme arrogance and vanity at being immortal and living upon the sun versus being 'grounded', they called themselves greater than the other nymphs, calling them and the other creatures of Narnia 'imperfect creations', which is an indirect insult to Aslan.
As punishment, they were removed from their heavenly positions upon the sun, and brought to live upon the earth with the creatures they had ridiculed. Closing themselves off from the other Narnians, for they still believed themselves better than the others, the fire-nymphs renounced love and feeling in favor of immortal all-being.
No one but Aslan is allowed immortal all-being, and as punishment for that act, Aslan made it so that the fire-nymphs' life-fires could be extinguished by extreme emotional turmoil; He made them so that each one of them was doomed to fall hopelessly in love with another for all eternity, and that they were bound from His Country until they repented their sins. When they were parted from their lover by death or rejection, the fire-nymph's life-fire, after being unable to ever rejoin their lover in His Country, would be extinguished. Eventually, rapid aging, insanity, and deteriorating health would overtake the half-nymph (as they were called when their life-fire is snuffed out) until they simply... fade from existence, a shell of who they once were. Since a fire-nymph can never go to Aslan's Country until repentance, when they die, their bodies become ash and their souls fade out of the
Thus was the fate of the fire-nymphs of the Sun, and this tale tells of a particularly little fire-nymph, who appeared physically to be only ten or eleven years old. This nymph was called Amethyst, and was as haughty and vain as a fire-nymph could be.
The time when the White Witch took Narnia as her own and ruled as a tyrant was not a good time for fire-nymphs. They were the natural-born enemies of the Queen of Charn, pitted against her simply because they were fire and she was ice. This fire-nymph called Amethyst was arrogant, and she spoke out against the White Witch; and she was captured, brought before the White Lady for her treachery. The Witch liked the idea of holding so powerful a being hostage; it was demonstration of power for a fire nymph to be imprisoned in ice.
Over time, the ice increased the humanity within the fire-nymph; she glowed less, her fires less heated. Her fiery, forbidding heart eventually gained the capacity for compassion and pity as she watched countless anti-Witch protestors die at the hands of the White Lady. Some were killed for no reason other than that they stood in her way; some were turned to stone for standing against her. It was more than a little disconcerting to see a family of innocent squirrels turned into statues because their nest happened to be in the Witch's line of vision during one of her frequent fits of torrential rage.
Jadis was always a bit of a sadist, and nothing cause Amethyst more pain to her pride and ego than to be little more than a slave. It was, perhaps, made worse by the fact that Jadis clothed her as a privileged guest, and mocked her with titles like "baby princess" and "little queen", when really she was a slave. The Witch threw Amethyst's conceited, haughty formality and mannerism back into the fire-nymph's face at every opportunity. It seemed that the former queen of Charn got a sick high from tormenting Amethyst with feigned reverence and mocking unctuousness and obsequiousness before ordering her to do back-breaking and degrading labor.
The inconvenient fact of her slavery was forever made clear by the chains of ice on her wrists and ankles. She was able to escape the ice prison, but was under a certain kind of "house arrest" which gave her an illusion of freedom until she couldn't venture further than the gates.
For nearly fifty years, the small fire-nymph was a slave for the false Queen of Narnia in the ice palace with nothing but finding new ways to avoid Jadis's wrath to amuse her. She was doing nothing but counting the scratches in the ice wall when Maugrim, the nasty captain of the Witch's 'killing team', padded past her. He paid no more attention to her than if she had been made of ice herself. She supposed it was just as well, but it still annoyed her that the wolf did not stop to honor her fieriness in this ice world, just as it always bothered her when she felt she had not received proper reverence.
She ignored him, as well; she was above stooping to the level of actually holding a conversation with an animal, Talking Beast or no. She didn't think much of his urgency (she didn't really like to think that Maugrim was a being with feelings and rational thought) until she heard the rustle of furs on Jadis's throne. She turned around with a twinge of curiosity- if a person of her standing could be viewed as something as lowly as curious.
What she saw surprised her, which was surprising in itself because she was so rarely surprised: a boy, a human boy of ten or possibly even twelve with dark hair was sitting on the throne of the White Witch. The first thought that went through her mind was, Where did he come from? The second: A human? What, by the Sun, is he doing here? The third: Eh, humans. I had forgotten how ugly they are.
She stared, her blue eyes wide, one golden eyebrow traveling up her forehead and her mouth forming a slightly disbelieving circle, and saw him just sitting on Jadis's throne with such a smug, superior look upon his pale, freckled face that Amethyst momentarily battled the urge to slap the expression clean off his stupid, mortal face.
"Who are you?" She asked, her delicate nose crinkling in distaste and contempt for having to reduce to addressing a human boy.
He looked around, surprised to see that he wasn't alone. She couldn't help but notice that his eyes were the brown color of firewood as he did so. She saw his brown eyes widen as he took in her appearance; and was slightly impatient for his doing so.
He stared, his own mouth forming an 'O', staring at the beautiful girl before him, for beautiful Amethyst was. Her hair was the color of the noon-day sun, plaited around her head like a crown, the tip of the braid brushing the icy floor. Her eyes, she knew, and he noticed, were the piercing white-hot blue of the center of the hottest flame. Her nose, a delicate, button nose set into a face of porcelain, unblemished skin and soft, pink lips with a perfectly curved Cupid's Bow. She was bedecked in white furs of Ice Bears (she did not like to think if they'd been Talking or not) and white muslin and velvet. I must look a lady, she thought with sullenly.
When the human boy made no motion to stop staring and answer her question (it appeared all rational thought had been wiped clean from his weak mind), Amethyst grew steadily more annoyed. Was he going to make her repeat herself?
"Who are you?" She persisted, leaning to the side as she studied him. What odd clothes he wears, she noticed. She narrowed her eyes at him in suspicion.
"I'm Edmund," he shivered, his eyes locked on hers, but he still looked arrogant and smug, and Amethyst was still reluctant to approach him. "I'm a S-son of Adam. The Queen's g-going to m-m-make me a king."
Amethyst's previously pursed pink lips fell into an undignified circle of surprise as she stared at this human boy with more stupid, mislead audacity than she'd ever seen in a mortal soul.
Who is he?
"And that's how it started, Professor." Susanna said, and she got up to leave. Professor Lewis stood up quickly, knocking over his chair in his haste.
"What? You can't leave now! You've barely just started!" He exclaimed as she reached the door. When she made no move to stop, he shouted: "Lucy-June gave the whole story to me in one night!"
"I think, Professor Lewis, you'll find that my sister and I do things very differently." She said, smiling sadly at something he couldn't see. She looked up at him, her brown eyes sad. "I'll be here tomorrow. Same time."
He opened his mouth to reply, but she was out the door in a swish of waist-length dark hair.
He sighed, and righted his chair. This Susanna Flewett was not like sweet Lucy-June, and for that, he was grateful. There would be no exaggerations or alterations in her story; he could be sure of that, at least.
A/N: Review, if you don't mind. And, also, I think I will alter Lucy's appearance so that she is a mix of book-Lucy and Georgie Henley-Lucy, but when Peter, Susan, and Edmund appear, I think they will be more or less modeled after the actors (or maybe Susan won't look like Anna Popplewell- I haven't decided, so review and let me know your preference!)