Disclaimer: I do not own any thing recognizable either by C.S. Lewis or from The Chronicles of Narnia.
Prologue: London, 1943
On any other afternoon, the London sky might have been a clear blue with wisps of cloud scattered across the sky. On a normal day, the breeze would have blown coolly through the boulevards as the neighborhood children played hopscotch on the stone sidewalk with a dog barking after them. In a month where fear didn't press in from all sides, I would have been up in my second story room reading, while Lettie, our maid, did laundry out back. A year without war would find my father coming home about now, methodically hanging up his coat in the hall closet and then going to kiss my mother on the cheek.
A tear, for normalcy and what has been, rolls down my cheek, as I look the remains of our house. All 16 years of my life have been spent playing, eating, and sleeping there. After the bombing, only half my room survived, from what I can see through the charred brick. My father—missing in action. We do not know what became of Lettie. I'd like to think that she ran off to become a nurse in service of our country. There she would have met a handsome soldier, valiantly wounded in battle, and fallen in love. One can only hope.
My mother was a few yards down the road talking to Mrs. Pierce, an older lady whose son is stationed over in France and whose granddaughter has been relocated into the country side. She's all I had now.
I look up at the sky, screened by smoke and ashes, in hopes to stall the onslaught of tears threatening to break loose. Why did things have to turn out like this? Why does my life feel like the remains of my house? Only half there with rubble, piping, and glass strewn about. Completely devastated.
"It is just stone. We can rebuild," comes the soft, but firm voice of my mother. A comforting hand squeezes my shoulder, "we have to be strong." I choke back a bitter laugh, recalling a similar statement made a few years earlier.
"Alise Veronica Kemp, come out here! You are making your mother upset," my father huffed through the wood of my door. I didn't want to hear anything he had to say. He couldn't say anything that would justify him enlisting. No words can make up for abandonment. "Have I raised such a selfish daughter?"
The door creaked as he leaned his solid frame up against it and I could here a muffled thunk as he dropped his duffle on the floor. Sighing, he continued, "I don't know if I can make you understand why I am doing this. I know you think I am leaving you and your mother, but that I know if I don't go I would be doing worse than abandoning you. And not just you, even though everything else means nothing without you, I still have an obligation to the rest of our family and our friends and our country.
"Difficult times usually present us with hard choices. Your mom is trying to be strong, but she is not going to be able to do it on her own, once I am gone. I need you to be strong, Alise. Do you think I want to go? No, Alise, I'm scared to go. There is nothing I would rather do than stay here with the two loves of my life. But how can I justify that I love you if I don't do everything in my power to ensure your safety? And if I stay and one of you gets hurt, I will always wonder if I could have been that one person that could have made a difference and stopped anything bad from happening.
"I wish I could say that I am only going to be gone for a short time, but only God knows how long this is really going to last. But no matter how long I am gone, I know you and your mom will be right here waiting for me. I love you, Alise." The bitter resignation in his voice, I couldn't handle. I was selfish to think that was going to be easy for him to just take up and leave for an unexpected shore. I went out into the hallway and let myself be engulfed by his arms. It seemed like the most difficult journeys in life are those far from home.
My mother and I ventured inside the house to see if there was anything we could salvage. This was going to be our last time in London for some while, most of our belongings were already on the way to a distant relative's cottage in the countryside.
I picked up a picture of my dad in his golfing outfit, the edges only a little singed, and let it fall into the basket I carried. "Be careful Alise," my mother called from further inside the house. I made my way to the back yard and was crushed to find the old apple tree toppled over with its roots in the air. I set my basket down on the porch and worked my way through the debris to the fallen tree.
"Poor, poor thing," I couldn't help but feel sorry for the plant, even though it didn't feel or think. I gave a rueful smile at that thought; I actually used to talk to this tree regularly as a child. I would climb high up into the branches, avoiding Lettie and mother, in hopes to escape horrendous tasks such as chores and bathtimes. As I waited for them to forget about me (which they never did to my chagrin), I would quietly whisper my vexation and frustration to the leaves. Of course, I was never very angry for long, and so the ranting would soon turn into a wealth of secrets and random musings. I always like to believe the big old tree heard what I said, and the branches were sighing because they agreed with a conviction of mine or thought some flippant comment funny.
I let my hand trail along gnarled bark as I walked down the girth of the trunk to the centrifugal roots. I was amazed at the size of tangled mass, and it made me wonder how old this tree was. The house was supposedly only 50 or so years old, but if the underside of the tree were anything to go by, I would have guessed at least a hundred.I was in a bit of a daze while thinking about such things, that I didn't pay attention to my footing. My foot hooked in a surfaced root and I fell face first into the disturbed soil. Ugg! Just my luck…but anymore exasperated thought was cut off as I caught a glint of something gold embedded in the dirt between the roots. "Hello, what do we have here?" I murmured as I began to extract what looked to be a ring out of its earthen casing.
I held it up to the hazy light, and decided that it was a piece of fine quality gold, "Mother, mother, come look at what I found." Using the edge of my jumper I wiped off the grime and wondered if this peculiar piece would fit me. I slipped it onto my finger and…vanished.
Mrs. Kemp emerged from the back door, only to find the yard empty, save for the scattered rubble and a fallen tree. "Well, that is strange. I thought I heard Alise calling from out here." She shrugged, bent down to grab her daughter's forgotten basket, and turned to go back inside the wreckage that used to be her house.
( A/N : Fun fact—I like to do a lot with names and their significance to their character so here is what our heroine's name means:
Alise: variant of ALICE - which is the short form of the Old French ADELAIDE - which was composed of the elements adal "noble" and heid "kind, sort, type"
Veronica : Latin form of BERENICE - which is the Macedonian form of the Greek name Pherenike, which meant "bringing victory"
Kemp : Derived from the Middle English kempe meaning "champion, warrior"
Hope you were satisfied with the first insert of the story! Oh, and constructive critisism would be helpful!)
