GOLDEN

Peter doesn't understand evil.

He recognizes it. Of course he does. He's had to fight it time and time again.

He knows the sight and the smell, the taste and the sound, the very feel of it. He knows it and is repulsed by it. But it is foreign to him.

Other.

He doesn't understand it.

I understand it. I know it. When I see it in my kingdom, in myself, it repulses me, too.

Now.

But it used to fascinate me. It used to call to me like a faithless lover and draw me, siren-like, to my destruction. Thank Aslan, it hasn't that power over me anymore, but I am familiar with it. I still battle it, with His help. I know it, like myself, I know it, and I will do everything in my power to keep my brother from that knowing.

I'm not saying Peter doesn't have his flaws. His sins. His failings. We both know they're there.

But they don't touch him.

They don't dim that Aslan-bright purity, that simple, shining magnificence that has emanated from him since . . .

Always.

Before he was a King. Before he was a Knight. Before he was given Rhindon and the solemn charge of bearing it. Before all that, there was a clean innocence about him, a knowing that there ought to be goodness, that there should be justice and peace and kindness, and that he has been given the duty of seeing evil does not trample those things underfoot and leave them to die.

He isn't stupid. He isn't childish or ignorant. He is simply good, and evil can do nothing about it.

I won't let it.

We all have a part in keeping our High King golden.

Lucy gives him nothing but joy. When he returns from war, sickened in his spirit from too much blood and death, she washes away every trace of pain with her love and laughter and pours into him her endless faith and trust.

Susan gives him order and peace. When he is beset on all sides by the duties of kingship, when there is more required of him than he has to give and more still after that, she surrounds him with a mother-like love and comfort, letting him be just the boy he is and should be still, scolding him to eat and rest and even play until the lines of care, the lines that ought never to have touched so young a face, have vanished.

And I? I am his shield. He thinks he protects us all, and truly, he does. It is part of his magnificence, the boundless fierceness of his love for the three of us, the willingness to give everything he has, everything he is, to keep us safe. But in watching over us, he invariably leaves himself unguarded. It is my place to stand in that gap, to see nothing ever gets even close to harming him, that nothing ever dims his brightness.

Narnia is meant to be a place of wonder and delight where evil does not hold sway, and we have been put here to keep her so. She needs her High King to be golden, to be strong and shining and pure.

I need him to be.

Everything he thinks and feels, everything he is, is there in the depths of his eyes. They are like a pool a hundred feet deep but so clear and blue that every pebble at its bottom lies in sharp detail. My own eyes are nearly black. I can hide anything in them. From our enemies. From him.

I see too clearly the things we battle in Aslan's name, the ugly, the foul, the evil. I know how easily those things can prey upon my mind and my spirit, how swiftly they can pull me down and down into dark hopelessness. If Peter ever loses hold of the shining, innocent ideal of what Narnia ought to be, if he ever slips down into the grim despair that lies forever in wait for all of us, who would be there to pull me out?

If I have to use certain . . . tactics, certain threats, certain bits of intelligence gotten by whatever means necessary, if I have to trudge through that darkness to weed out things that would dim his brightness, so be it. I will bear that knowledge alone, and he will stay as he is. For Peter is Narnia – bright and beautiful and golden.

How I love them both.

John 1:5 ~The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Author's Note: I'm not exactly sure what this is. A character sketch perhaps. It was inspired by a conversation I had with Rayven49 about her story, "The Lion and the Fox." (It's great. Go read it!) Anyway, for what it's worth . . .

– WD