The wardrobe that Geppetto built was not the first such wardrobe created. That wardrobe was made by a craftsman in a small country village for Professor Digory Kirke, through which four young children had gone and had adventures, becoming kings and queens of Narnia.

After the sudden death of her family, her cousin Eustace Scrubb, Jill Pole, Polly Plumber and the Professor, Susan Pevensie unexpectedly inherited the Professor's estate, including the wardrobe that had started everything.

Death can be a brutal, but sure way of altering a persons perspective on things, especially memories. There were many nights that the now elderly Mrs. Macready found Susan in front of the wardrobe crying, and was severely tempted to have the thing removed from the house so that Susan might move on.

It was much later that Susan finally started to talk about what she knew of Narnia. It was to an old student of the Professors, a Clive S. Lewis. He had already heard some of the story from Kirke, and, though he had thought they were the ramblings of an eccentric Professor, he had been quite interested, and had jotted it down. Now as Susan told him further tales of Narnia, for though she had told her siblings she did not believe in that place anymore, they continued to tell her of the adventures people had had there in the hope that she might believe again, Lewis wrote the stories down, and at Susan's urging, had them published in the hope that others would read and learn from the stories.

It was six years after their first meeting that Susan could finally tell Lewis how the stories ended. After several nights of fitful sleeping filled with dreams of Narnia's ending, she invited him back to the estate to finish the story that had started so long ago.

While that was the last she heard of Narnia, she kept the land close to her heart, and continued to practice with her old bow and learned how to wield a sword with Peter's old sword, things she had found lying innocently at the back of the wardrobe along with Lucy's elixir. Her horn was once again missing, and Susan dearly hoped that it was in a place that had far greater need of it than she did.

Although Susan once again grew beautiful and regal, though much wiser for all that she had been through, she never married. This was not to say she was lonely, for she had many friends and visitors to the estate. Susan did however, and rather unexpectedly at that, become the mother of two children.

It was fortunately a day without visitors that the baby Emma and the young child Pinocchio appeared in the wardrobe. It was Emma's crying that alerted Susan that something was going on, Pinocchio having been told to stay still and very quiet until someone came to get him. Susan took things in stride in a manner that only a queen could, and after calming little Emma, who was hungry, feeding both children, as Pinocchio was also hungry though far more quiet about it, and assuring William, Mrs. Macready's grandson, who had taken over after his grandmother's passing, that she could manage, she coaxed the story out of the young boy.

Susan, realising that she couldn't leave these children to an orphanage, adopted both of them, making them Pinocchio, to be called August in public, and Emma Pevensie, son and daughter of the Last Queen of Narnia, and she raised them, teaching them all the things that school did not: Court politics, fencing and archery, strategy, and most importantly, belief.

Hi there.

I hope you enjoyed that little meander.

I have had this sitting in my little folder of ideas for ages now, but am not sure if I'll ever continue this, so I thought I'd just get on and share it with the world.

(If this catches anyone's attention, feel free to keep going with it, but please cite me as your source.)

- Shade.