I will find you
In a burning sky
Where the ashes rain in your mind
—- sacrifice, zella day
.
The Professor lives a few miles out from London, an hour or two by rail. It has been years since any of them have seen him, but Narnia is known for making family out of strangers, and so when he extends an invitation to the Pevensie family at the beginning of the summer holidays, sans Susan they accept. The sky that morning is masked in clouds as grey as the platform they wait on for an hour late train, the same dull colour of Peter and Edmund's shared case. They board, find an empty carriage, wave to Susan through the grimy window as she exits the station and moves out of view. The sky continues to darken, teeming clouds gathering all morning and teetering on the precipice of a deluge, but it does not come until long after even Lucy has given up staring out of the window.
They have been travelling fifty minutes by their father's watch when the train breaks, sudden and short, throwing them all forward. The ugly screech made as it slows lasts too long and it hangs there, tangibly heavy in the air. The door to their carriage unlatches itself with the impact and slams with a crash against the frame; automatically Peter rises to shut it, but the train lurches again and pitches him through the gap. Lucy's scream is loud in his ears as his head hits the wall of the corridor, and he closes his eyes.
(Peter turns sixteen on a Sunday in the middle of a London winter. January is by definition a month that freezes awnings and doorsteps, ices breaths and chills bones, but, inexplicably, the day is washed in sunshine. It glances off his back in the morning as he goes to retrieve the post, and though it is warm, Peter shivers: the sunlight pales in comparison to the intensity he's known in foreign suns a lifetime away, weak and faded and washed out many times over; but it is a reminder, and it feels like a gift.
He thinks of Narnia, then, of the billowing sails of the Splendour Hyaline and the spires rising like slim plumes of smoke from the top of the castle at Cair Paravel, of kingship and duty and the way you shall not return felt, like a final judgement, a bite from a lion tinted golden by the sunrise.
The mail is the usual jumble of bills and letters. There are the staples, two plain brown business ones for his father, another stamped with an airmail mark from a distant cousin, a single eggshell blue envelope with a stylised lion scrawled in the corner that he pretended not to notice Lucy buying at the post office a week ago. But at the bottom of the pile is a curiosity: a small parcel, wrapped simply in brown paper and tied with string. Interested, he ghosts a fingertip over it, then tugs free the attached note. It is a birthday wish— left unsigned, but the Professor's neat writing marks in dark ink the card that accompanies it. Hosea 11:10, it reads, and in brackets beneath, Aslan.
And later, when Peter opens the book, he discovers that it is true.)
What must be the last breath shudders out of his lungs, but he does not feel it.
.
Lucy hears her scream when Peter falls in a remote way, as if it has been shocked from another pair of lungs. Her father tries to rise but his back has been bothering him for years now and he is painfully slow. When Edmund stands — belatedly, but he's always been that way — it is just in time for a case to slide from the luggage rack above them to neatly clip the side of his head. He falls like a tree felled: slowly, in a smooth arc, mouth open slightly in shock and then pain. It would hurt, she supposes distantly, so she moves, maybe to lift it; and then there is a bright spark of pain at the low dip where her neck meets the back of her head.
("He is called Aslan," the beaver tells them all, bright-eyed, and Lucy thrills with the word, somehow, feels it as a keen ache, like it has been drawn out of some place deep inside her. She feels it lift, like a butterfly, then settle softly down as if it has always been there. And then there is no more to her believing, after that; the word is forever in its most tangible form, an inextricable link to something she can only dream of, and of all her siblings, Lucy knows of the inevitability of faith best.)
She's not sure of the exact points where her world blurs to dreams and then back to reality, but it does not matter, not really. Lucy closes her eyes and sees bright gold laced with sunshine — a lion's mane, she hopes; no, knows. Even when her vision fades entirely to black, it does not feel any way she'd ever imagined death to; somehow, some way, she has always known.
.
As a general rule, Edmund does not daydream. There are good memories there, sunlit days spent ruling alongside his siblings, but of them all his demons are the most real. But, dozing, he dreams now: sees a witch-queen, hair white as the snow she claims her kingdom with and silvered all over with not-quite-sane determination. Following the queen comes a faun frozen in time, a boy practising swordsmanship alone in a courtyard, a lion haloed in light. The myriad of images ache more than the pain of the heavy case that has somehow landed on his back, pressing down into a hard spearpoint of nostalgia, and for that, at least, he is grateful.
(The first time Edmund is mortally wounded, he is ten years old and has betrayed a queen. His blood stains the flagstones beneath him a dark russet, the same shade of the broken wand that lies in two pieces beside his right hand. His head is cloudy with pain and it blurs his thoughts, but he was holding the wand, he remembers, before Jadis' stone knife slid smoothly between his ribs, a slick revenge that his hands moved too slowly to prevent. He tugs it out, feels a bright flash of agony and hisses with the pain. Too late he recalls lessons from books, tales read in a schoolroom setting that now feels so far away, that feature phrases like do not attempt to remove the implement and staunch bleeding, but the blade is heavy as a life and his hands are weighed down holding it.
"Ed?" Peter calls, and then a lion is looking down on him and it's getting darker, but he can feel that Lucy's hands are shaking as she tries to force liquid into his mouth. He swallows, a reflex action, chokes and blinks with stinging eyes, then watches as colour bleeds back into the world.
Aslan knights him, later, a boy turned traitor turned hero, and the sunset covers them all as the land shakes off eternal winter. Even when they return to war-torn England, the memory of a hard-won second chance sticks with Edmund, and it kind of feels something like hope.)
The light behind his eyes is blinding, now. The train jerks and, somewhere, dimly, a lion roars.
.
The morning after it occurs, news of the train wreck is emblazoned dark across London's newspapers. The city buzzes with it, but it distorts rumours and manipulates the truth in the way Susan is used to, and she is uncurious, ignoring the words as they wash around her and occupying her mind instead with the text she's studying at the university. London streams to work that morning as it has always done, and Susan goes with it, buying a paper as she reaches the train station, but leaving it folded in her bag until she finds a seat on the train and is able to properly spread it over her lap to read. Scores dead in freak crash, proclaims the headline. The thick bars of print blur as she stares at them, disbelieving. Dizziness hits her like a blow, shocks the breath from her lungs; she clutches desperately at the worn leather beneath her and digs her nails in until she feels it give way as she continues to read.
(The holidays in which Susan turns fifteen are cold and soaked through with rain — Lucy imagines out loud that they must shake and shiver as she does when caught in a downpour; Susan shakes her head at the though of days feeling like she does, laughs — and they've all spent most of their time cooped up inside. The others occupy themselves in various ways. They play hide-and-seek in the halls, sometimes, when Peter can be convinced to tear himself from his homework and Edmund to deign to remember his littlest sister, but Susan does not join them very often. Tonight she can hear Lucy's shrieks of delight when she is found from where she sits in her room. The noise grows increasingly louder, a crescendo that bursts when the door opens and her siblings spill inside. Susan closes her eyes a moment, then sighs, resigned, and shuts her textbook, assuming that as usual this will be a night she gets no work done.
She pushes her chair back from her desk and regards them as they crowd into her room. Lucy slides onto her bed and flops there, laughing still. One of her front teeth is slightly crooked. Edmund leans against her headboard, smiling slightly at the book Peter is holding out to her.
"Hm?"
"We found something," Peter tells her. His eyes are alight, almost uncharacteristically so, and Susan wonders. At Edmund's quiet cough, Peter amends, "Well, the Professor did. He sent it to me, look."
She stares at the lines of text, eyes a little unfocused from all the reading she's done already tonight, blinks. "What is it?"
Peter frowns at her, then points to a section of the page. "Susan, it's him. Aslan."
And. No.
She accepts this sort of pointless rambling from Lucy without complaining, memories — a little girl who looked up to her as a mother, her cheeks a dusky pink as she smiled like soft sunshine — still too clear to allow Susan to snap back the way she would sometimes like to; but not Peter. Not Peter, a boy who works half as hard as she and receives twice the opportunities. He was her High King in Narnia, but no longer, and she will not bow to him.
Susan furrows her brow, sweeps a cursory glance over the page and shakes her head. It is harsh and sharp and sour but more than anything else it feels final, like an ending, a farewell. "I have no idea what you're talking about.")
There is an official telegram sent out to all the families who lost members in the crash, but it is confirmation she does not need. They have gone — returned — and she is alone. Susan thinks of Peter scowling over his kingship and Lucy's face twisting in grief after a failed healing and Edmund's grave accounts of war as he sharpens his sword, and she wonders whether paradise burns as much as the absence of it.
.
(For the record, the reference I sort of quoted in Peter's section:
'They shall follow the Lord;
he shall roar like a lion.
For he shall roar
and his children shall come trembling from the west.'
Hosea 11:10)