Eustace Clarence Scrubb felt himself to be quite pleased, when he thought about it.

Through a combination of insistence, wheedling, logical argument and not a little minor bribery, he had managed to get approval from both his parents and his aunt and uncle for him and his older (and supposedly thereby more responsible) cousins, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, to take themselves camping in the highlands of Scotland for a week. Uncle had been quite pleased with his nephew's idea, declaring it to be a sign he was "toughening up", and making him "the sort of man the Empire needs".

Eustace wasn't sure of that at all, if he was truly honest with himself; though he rarely thought of it and only more rarely admitted it to himself, his king wasn't on a throne in a palace, at least not all the time.

The King he truly respected was the one who had saved his life, bled for him, and been willing to die for him and any one of his people.

He found it still harder to remember that, by the laws of that strange land of Narnia, his cousins were all kings and queens, all four (though how that worked was beyond him – could you have two kings at once, let alone three?) but he grudgingly admitted that he would probably follow them as well, if it really mattered.

But that was another matter, for another time. For now, he had to make sure he made it to their first stop.

"I do wish that my pack weighed less, is all." He grumbled, though a connoisseur of Grumbles of the Eustace variety would detect a note of good nature in there. In truth, he could barely restrain himself from attempting to run – or at least jog – all the way to their campsite.

But that would do him no favours at all, so he did not.

"Why, oh cousin my cousin, what's the problem?" Lucy asked him sweetly. "I rather thought this was your idea, after all."

"For your information, your majesty," he smirked briefly, "It makes little sense to me that I, as the youngest, must carry more than my share of the pack."

Edmund chuckled. "Feel free to leave your sleeping bag and tent behind, dear cousin. Just don't blame us when you end up sleeping on the hard ground under the rain!"

Eustace smiled sourly. "Point made and taken, your very, very highness. Might Irecommend you become something more of a lowness instead? I hear the branches ahead are particularly low, and someone of your inflated height might well get hung up by the chin."

Lucy laughed delightedly. "Ed, Ed! Did you hear? He made an actual joke!"

That boy did a double take. "Why, so he did. Do you think we brought the right Eustace back from Narnia with us?"

"Oh, go jump in a lake. Maybe you'll end up back there to go and look."


"Eustace? Where are you going?"

Eustace winced. He'd hoped to have managed to sneak out every night, yet here he was, caught on the very first day.

Edmund sleepily opened the front of his own tent. "What is it, Lu?"

"Ed, I think Eustace was trying to go somewhere without our seeing or hearing him!"

The younger boy sighed. Ah well, he supposed they at least could find out. "Follow me, you two. I may as well show you."

Curiously blinking sleep from their eyes, Lucy and Edmund threw on coats over their night things.

The two Pevensies followed the Scrubb through the gathering gloom, carefully picking their way over tree branches and past trunks.

Lucy squinted. "Do we have to go much farther? It's getting dark, and we only have one torch to make our way back."

"Just a little further…" Eustace reassured them. "I think it's over the next rise."

The siblings topped the small uplift in the ground, and were confronted by an astonishingly beautiful vista, the red sunlight shining over the mountains at one end of a large Loch – perhaps five or six miles in length.

Eustace smiled gently. "Loch Cluanie. When it was decided where we were going, I read rather a lot about it."

Edmund and Lucy both looked around them in wonder.

"This… this is beautiful, Eustace. Is this what…"

He shook his head, then wobbled a hand. "Almost. But it's not quite why I came out here tonight. Here."

He passed over his notebook. Both Pevensies recognized it as the one that had been through the most with him, from Cambridge to the seas of Narnia, and even to the eastern end of that world. It was mostly full of sour comments about themselves that seemed to have been written before or early in the voyage.

"Last page with any writing on it." He said, softly.

Lucy turned to it, and her eyes widened. "It's beautifully written."

"Not my words. I only copied it down, but I took great care about it."

"I don't understand, though. Why…" Edmund tailed off.

The Scrubb boy unbuttoned the long shirt he was wearing, and shrugged it off his shoulders. "I never really lost it, you know. It just… went away for a while."

Then he looked to the sky, breathed in deeply, closed his eyes – and a bronze-coloured dragon leapt into the air from the hillside, as Eustace Clarence Scrubb, the Un-Dragoned, once more flew on wings of finespun gold.

Eyes shining, Lucy caressed the words in Eustace' book, written out in his best hand.


Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager form through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark, or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.


Edmund, meanwhile, looked on as his cousin joyfully threw himself back into the ocean of air that had borne him for a time in Narnia, and smiled himself.

"Truly," he whispered, "you make a better dragon than you ever do a boy."


So, I saw this film, see, and then a Plot Bunny looking very scaly and with large wings struck...

Basically, since Eustace seemed to mind being a dragon a lot less in the film, and I have something of an... interest... in dragons, I wondered: what would he perhaps come to miss about his experience? And would he want to go back to being human all the time?

The poem is called "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. I actually started with the title of the piece and couldn't remember where I got it from, but as soon as I saw the whole poem I knew I had to include it. One change made: instead of "form", the original talks about the author's "craft", but of course Eustace doesn't need one...
The Loch also exists - it is, however, one that didn't look the same before 1957. I assume that as a fairly remote location it would be the sort of place one might go to not be seen.

I'm currently looking into doing a sort of running tour of Silver Chair with this alteration to Eustace. Should be fun.