Chapter 1: Elliot
Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen or Narnia.
-C.S Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the wardrobe
The rulers of Fillory can only be from Earth
-Quentin Coldwater, Have You Brought Me Little Cakes
Fillory. A land of magic and wonder. The inhabitants of Fillory will never know loss, or hunger, or sorrow, or heartbreak so long as a High King or Queen rules the lands. To rule and be ruled is an honour that is only given to the Children of Earth, for magic runs in their blood that calls to the magic of Fillory. Once a king or queen of Fillory, always a king or queen of Fillory.
Eliot has always dreamt of Fillory. He doesn't know it of course. How could he? His father already had a low opinion of his son: he would have never let Eliot get away with filling his head with made up nonsense when he could be out helping his brothers look after the crops and making himself a man.
But from childhood, every night as he collapses exhausted into bed, his dreams are filled with wide green fields, flying forests, and air that smells so sweet that he can hardly bear it when he wakes in the morning.
Eliot…Eliot has always been strange. Never quite fit. Nothing like his father, who despaired of making anything of this strange, fey child. Noting like his mother who stood to one side and whose silences spoke volumes. Nothing like his elder brothers, sturdy and grounded like the earth that they work.
Eliot dreams. He imagines doors opening where there should be no doors, a sweet smell and laughter drifting out. When he looks into the mirror, sometimes out of the corner of his eye he spots a ram's horns, powerful and strange, curling upward like the branches of an old oak. Sometimes when he's so angry that he's fit to scream, things start to shake.
If Eliot had been born even a few hundred years earlier, he might have been burnt as a witch. And he knows it. Feels it every day.
The other children can feel it too. Especially Logan Kinear. Athletic, and casually cruel as all children are, Logan Kinear is the bane of Eliot's childhood. Neither smart nor stupid, Logan is defined only by his ability to run fast, and his innocent eyes. Green, and when shining with soft tears (please I don't know why Waugh's upset, I just wanted to help him, he pushed me you saw him didn't you? He's mocking me again, you'll never be anything, you think that you're better than me, but you're exactly like us, you're nothing special) he waits for Eliot on the way back from school, up the dirt trail from where the bus drops him off. He waits for Eliot whenever he walks into town. He waits for him before school, and after school, until it feels like everywhere he turns he can see Logan's innocent green eyes sneering down at him. Eliot takes it. He takes the bruises and his father's quiet disapproval and his brothers' incomprehension. Until one day, he doesn't.
CRASH
After…IT…happens, after the blood has been cleaned up, and the ambulance has been sent screaming back down the road, the dreams change.
Come to us Child of Earth. Come meet your destiny.
His dreams are still of paradise. But there's an additional longing, the knowledge that if he could just find a way through the door then everything would be ok. The first time he's allowed a lie-in, once he's finally left himself behind and embraced his new self, he lies in bed for hours, chasing the elusive feeling of warmth and safety. Alcohol helps, it allows him to drift through his days peacefully, it dulls the longing.
Doors open around him, but no matter how hard Eliot runs he can never reach them before they slam shut. He'll be sitting on his bed, staring vacantly down at some test that he has to revise for, when he'll smell it. The bewitching scent of freedom and he'll know that if he just looks up then he'll see a light glowing from behind his cupboard door and hear the sound of laughter. He'll run over and think maybe this time. He never makes it.
Eventually he stops looking up. Eventually he gives up. He gets on a plane and leaves. He brings one suitcase of clothes, perfectly pressed, things that would get him thrown into the dumpster behind his school, cries of 'faggot' echoing behind him. The product of years of savings, carefully retrieved from dark space underneath his bed where he pushed them down only taking them out when he's sure he's alone, running his hands down the soft fabrics and wondering.
In his darker days he wonders if his family know that he's left. In his darkest he knows that they're wondering why he didn't leave sooner.
He reinvents himself. He was never allowed to take art at school (what damned sissy are they trying to make out of the boy) but if he had he knows that he would have had top marks for his project. Becoming him is the greatest creative project of his life.
Alcohol. Drugs. Sex. They're not nothing. They're not everything.
Until… he steps through the door of some skeezy club and trips into one of his dreams. There's a breeze, and the sun is hurting his eyes. There's a wide expanse of green grass, unnaturally green, and quiet. The kind of quiet he hasn't heard since he left home, the kind of quiet that feels wrong after the bustle of New York. The air though, the air smells wrong.
"Hey, fuckface."
Eliot blinks. That had definitely not been in any of his dreams.
"Yeah you, Huckleberry Finn's country hick of a brother. Some of us have places to be, so shut your fucking mouth and get moving."
There's a goddess standing before him, real and present and solid the way that no one, himself included, has been for the last year or so.
Eliot draws himself up, smugly noting that he has a good seven inches on her at least despite the threateningly pointy stilettoes that she's wearing.
"I'm sorry Bambi," he purrs looking down into her wide brown eyes (deceptively innocent like Lo-NO) and licking his lower lip provocatively. "I hadn't realised that my mouth was so," he pauses for a second relishing the thick tension, the sense of drama in the air, "distracting."
He breathes the final word into her ear languidly, waiting to see how she'll respond.
"Oh my god guys, just bang already!" someone yells from across the lawn, and the moment's gone as she furiously turns and starts stalking toward the imbecile, ready to destroy them utterly.
But when they find each other after the exam, after magic (after Eliot sees doors opening around him, taunting him even here) and she (Margo, whose name should be Regina, or she-who-destroys, or goddess) lets him drape himself over her, Eliot knows that something momentous has happened.
Magic comes to him instinctually, and he drinks and forgets and tries not to think. Magic has always come to him instinctually (glasses rattling, a crash, screams, the sound of crying): the real trick is getting it to fuck off and leave him in peace.
Life passes in a haze, and that's just the way he likes it. Only occasionally do things break through his carefully cultivated distance (margo, the sound of a door opening in the hall, cute freshmen with unfortunately annoying friends) until Mike.
Mike.
Eliot has had many, many lovers. So many that they blend into one another in a haze of sweat and drugs and primal need. But Mike is different. Eliot looks at Mike and he feels the longing in his heart that is echoed in his dreams, that makes him think of sweet air and rolling fields.
It's hard to care, because things aren't usually worth caring about. Things disappoint you. People disappoint you. You live and then you die. But Mike…
So of course he stabs Quentin. Of course he's some part of a godly plot to kill Julia, who's way over her head summoning gods as if any higher powers would ever give a fuck. Why else would he be interested in Eliot, if not to use him.
When Mike breaks out of the clean room, Eliot is waiting in the hallway. And when magic bursts out of him, shockingly easy, Mike collapsing to the floor like a rag doll…
A door opens. And Eliot steps through it into the sweet air of his dreams.
You must be wondering why they set it up that aliens must rule Fillory, and I'm sure there is a great reason, and nobody has any clue what that is. Ember and Umber set it up, and they're not that into explaining their big ideas.
-Quentin Coldwater, Have You Brought Me Little Cakes