Chapter Two: What She Found There

Snow; icy, thick and white. Lucy sat up shivering in her little summer dress, not at all appropriate for the middle of winter. And what a winter it was.

She gasped. All around her, in every direction one could imagine lay only one color save for a few black dots punctuating the landscape where the ubiquitous drifts would allow it. Stumps, she thought. Those black dots are stumps.

"And where in the world…am I?" Her eye caught on something else then. A reminder of a different time altogether. There, a few yards off, lay a shallows in the snow, a place where drifts either could not or would not form. And standing in that shallows, nobly as though it would not admit defeat to the weather, stood a very familiar lamp post.

"Oh my," she said. "Really?" She was not at all certain that she was not dreaming. Oh, she had had such dreams before, certainly, and usually knew the difference between fantasy and reality. Usually. However, in this situation there was nothing whatsoever dreamy about the landscape or otherwise unreal about her predicament. Her brain told her true: she was awake.

Lucy, quite beside herself now, managed to get to her feet, and shivering though she was, dusted the snow off of her dress and walked over to the post in steps like someone who is trying very hard not to get wet. It was a hopeless affair she quickly discovered once her poor foot fell through the thin crust of ice and into the layers downy snow below.

"Darn it! I'll catch my death out here!" she said aloud to no one and, now decided, trudged through it.

She was relieved to, at last, stand beneath the lamppost because, though the ground was frozen solid, here the snow simply had not gathered. She gazed up and was filled with a terrible sense of sadness, for this lamp post was not as she remembered it.

It was unlit.

The glass of the lamp was smudged and sooty with a yellow singe where Lucy guessed the wick had finally burnt itself out. "Oh. Mr. Tumnus, where have you gone?" It was a terrible question and Lucy feared the worst.

This spot, this lamp was more than just an old relic. It was the place where she had come to believe in her little girl's fantasies. What did it say now that it should be extinguished?

She inhaled sharply at the memories that now flooded her mind and in one profound moment understood the significance.

Narnia had been destroyed.

Everything. Which would include this lamp post, yet here it stood, even if it had fallen from its former glory.

Oh yes, she remembered it quite clearly now standing before this object which had been the start of all her adventures. She had been called back then too, called back by the Great Aslan and she had witnessed His…well, destruction of the world.

And then what, Lucy Pevensie? What did you do then, hmmm? "Oh, bother," she said, looking down at her poor frozen feet. She sighed. "If it is true, then why did I ever leave? Shouldn't I still be living in the wonderful Real Narnia?" She couldn't even remember what the Real Narnia looked like. If it was like the Old Narnia or something else entirely. It meant something so stupidly simple that she almost couldn't bear to think it: none of this was ever real.

And in this dismal state of mind she sat down quite reluctantly on the cold, cold ground and waited for her little nightmare to end, because certainly it would.

"Only the foolish fancy of a very foolish girl," she said and closed her eyes to further prove to herself that this world of snow and familiar lamp posts was indeed not real at all, despite being sorely cold and sitting with her back to the lamp post whose existence she denied.

It was not the call of her sweet former nanny, nor her owlish editor, but the clomping of hoof beats that she heard through the howling wind. She refused to open her eyes until the very last moment when it was rather impossible to keep them shut. And when she did, she screamed.

Huge hands clad in thick moleskin grabbed around her arms, stood her up and turned her around. She peered, panicked, into a suede cowl and saw inside the muslin of a turban wrapped above a swarthy face.

She gasped.

"Daughter of Eve, eh?" he said.

Lucy could not speak; such was her distress. The Calormene soldier squeezed her wrists together and pulled her to his horse. "You'll need this, just to make it to the fortress," he barked and shoved a heap of fabric into her hands. The wind gusted up at that moment and blew the soldier's cowl back, baring his face to her for the first time. His beard was not very long at all.

"You're young!" she declared without thinking and the glare that earned her made her bite her tongue.

She let the tightly rolled bundle unfurl and was relieved to see a cloak much like the Colromene's, despite it being redolent of spices she could not place. Quickly she pulled it on and gathered its thick folds around her shoulders.

The figure pointed to his horse and with a grin as devilish as any Lucy had ever seen said, "You'll go willingly or unwillingly, but you'll go! Which will it be?"

"How dare you?" she said, despite herself. "Do you know who I am? I am Queen Lucy."And then because she had almost forgotten, added, "The Valiant."

The Calormene soldier eyed her dubiously and shook his head. "You can't be serious."

"I am!" she said. "Very."

He laughed and drew a deep breath. "Oh there, now Queenie, it's not that I don't believe ya, but there's been a few changes since you been crowned, capiche?"

Then the vile young man did something that Lucy, while not expecting it, couldn't say surprised her. He pulled a very sharp and very curved knife from his belt. It winked in the gray light of winter. "Up," he commanded, "Or down." He ran the knife under his throat in a mock gesture to indicate slitting it. "Your choice, princess."

She did not believe he would do it, but nonetheless, looked around to survey her options. Knife or no knife, she had none. She stepped forward and without the help of the soldier mounted the beast. He climbed on in front of her and slapped the reins. The great warhorse broke into an instant gallop and she had no choice at all but to wrap her arms around the young Tarkaan's waist.

His beast plowed through the deep snow in the manner of a locomotive

The landscape was a haze of white and gray and, it seemed, in a state of perpetual blizzard.

"How did you find me?" she shouted above the wind.

"I'm on watch!" he called before kicking his horse in the flanks and powering onward.

"And where are you taking me?" she called.

"Don't worry, its better than freezing to death!"

The rest of the journey was spent in silence and she vowed right then and there that somehow, someway she would get free of this detestable Tarkaan.

Though quite truthfully, she had no idea how. Running away could only be classified as willful suicide, but capture? She had heard some awful tales of Calormene cruelty, but to that end, she had also heard stories of their civility. They were an old and well established race, which, she knew from research as an adult, their customs would be rigidly set. That could be a boon for a prisoner. Especially in time of war where such customs were likely to be stringently adhered to. But was this a time of war?

Hadn't Narnia been destroyed?

Soon after, previously veiled by the endless curtain of snow, shapes appeared without warning. Huge, bulky silhouettes of frightening proportion. They vaulted into the sky. Spires and domes of a Calormene castle topped with red flags that snapped in the wind. The horse galloped at breakneck speed toward a draw bridge that opened like the yawn of some great and terrible dragon. Lucy tensed, but it was not because of the keep that threatened to swallow her up. It was for the another shape entirely apart from the cyclopean architecture.

It was also made of black stone, but this stone gleamed like polished glass as though a contingent of a hundred soldiers were assigned to buff it hourly. It glowered down at her as the horse strode underneath it and she was certain that the horse galloped as fast as it did so that it might evade the terrible gaze of that sculpture.

She shivered and for the first time not from cold.

There above her, presiding over the grounds as certainly as though it lived, stood an enormous statue with a vulture's head and four taloned arms. Below, at the base, in script as large as a Shetland pony, it read: Tash the Inexorable, the Irresistible.

"Where are we?" she called over the young man's shoulder, her voice quavering.

She could hear his laugh even over the wind. "It has been awhile, eh princess?" he shouted back.

"Answer my question!" she demanded, as the horse trampled violently over the wooden bridge.

"This is Castle Tashbaan and-"

"What land!" she all but screamed it.

He laughed, this time louder and longer, before shouting, "We call it Dark Land!"