Lucy was stunned at how silent the house was once everyone left. She had never really been left there alone before, but her book had been more inviting than a day shopping for storage boxes with her mother and grandmother. She closed the book and turned it over in her hands. It was one of her favourites of all the books. High King Peter and the Giants. She had them ranked in her head, but the first story of the set would always be her favourite, her copy of Narnia was so well read now that she could tell you which pages were loose. And which corners had worn away. She knew the lives of High King Peter, King Edmund, Queen Helen and Queen Lucy better than she knew anyone. She loved that this was how her grandmother had chosen to remember her siblings through these characters. Showing their best qualities and traits, and making them relatable by revealing their faults. They had all been so young when they died that Lucy found it tragically romantic that they would live on forever like this. She knew she would have loved them had she met them. The proud and fearless Peter, the erudite and straight talking Edmund and the gentle loving Lucy. Queen Helen though was something else entirely. Lucy felt like she did know here, from her name she had always presumed that she was an ode to Susan's mother, but her personality was so like Susan herself that it made Lucy wonder. It would make sense for the character to be based on her, the stories of the four siblings. Maybe she had just felt it would be vain to call herself a queen too.

She shivered as a chill made its way up her spine. The room had gotten colder while she was reading. Uncurling from her chair she put the book down and slipping back on her slippers, made her way up to her room in search of warmth.

The walls of the stairs were lines with all the drawings of Narnia, sketches of the forests and sea sides. Castles and lots of different creatures all framed and mounted along the walls. Her favourite was a tiny drawing of a fawn and a lamppost, or Mr Tumnus. She stopped on the second to top step to look at it, as she normally did. Smiling at the sketch her eye wandered to the one next to it. it was a painting of a ship on the sea, The Dawn Treader, but it wasn't the subject that caught her eye, but a tiny scribble down the bottom corner.

Lucy.

She could barely make out the light pencil mark but it definitely said her name. She looked down the stairs to confirm that every sketch and picture was the same style. She'd always thought an illustrator had done the images. Just presumed. But now it seemed that her namesake had been the one to draw them all. Which meant they'd all come from before the books were written.

A cool breeze washed over her again and it made her loose her train of thought. Running the last tens steps to her room she grabbed a baggy jumper and pulled it on, she was pulling her hair through the neck when she heard a loud bang above her. She was out the door in a second looking up the stairs to the loft, unaware of how cautious she should probably be.

She climbed the narrow stairs slowly, ears listening carefully. When she got to the landing she saw a top window banging gently on its frame. She relaxed slightly and locked it up, glad to know what had caused the noise. The loft consisted of a few small rooms that her Gran used as storage. She looked around to check all the doors were closed and nothing else would slam, that was when her eyes locked on the door farthest away from her. The odd door which had a corner cut off to accommodate the roof. The room was full of boxes, books and trunks of clothing. She'd been in there many times before. Yet she found herself drawn towards it, opening the door she let it swing back to open wide.

"Wha.." she gasped as it opened to reveal an empty room. The light streamed in the window lighting up the empty room showing the dust dancing in the draft she'd created. Everything was gone except a tall sheet covered object at the far side of the room. Her eyes latched onto it and she moved quickly into the room. A corner of the sheet had fallen down showing her the smallest bit of dark wood. As she walked across the room she felt a little bump under her foot. Looking down she shook her foot, only for what looked like a bluebottle falling from the bottom of her slipper. She barely gave it a second's notice though and continued on her way.

Her hand reached up and gripped the thick sheet tightly, giving it a single mighty tug she stood back as it dropped like a snow from a mountain to the floor revealing a tall dark wardrobe. A very old wardrobe from the look of it, from the over decorative edging to the spotted looking glass on its door. She reached up again, her hand heading for the latch

"Lucy?" the voice cut through the haze she'd entered unknowingly.

She dropped her hand and turning she almost fled from the room, barely remembering to close the door behind her.

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Cassidy placed the last box down by the table in the office and sighed, her age was beginning to show through an ache in her lower back. It was as she was stretching it out that she noticed the lowest shelf of her mother's bookcase. Tattered and worn sat the first editions of Susan Pevensie's early books. Cassidy's original collection. Back pain forgotten she crouched down onto the floor and ran her fingers over them. Ten books in total, all published before she left for university. All in hardback and all drenched in memories. Moving back, almost automatically, to her most visited book.

Prince Caspian: Return to Narnia

It had been her favourite story when she was growing up. She had asked for snippets of it countless nights growing up. In fact she nearly knew it by heart. She never really questioned her love of it, yet the second she had been shown the only two photographs in existence of her father, she'd put the pieces together. The dark haired, olive skinned Telmarine prince with the foreign accent and boyish smirk was based on her father. This book was her mother's memorial to him, like the first was to her siblings. When she saw her own brown eyes staring up at her from someone else's face as her mother handed her a photograph with shaking hands everything changed. Everyone made pictures of characters in their head as they read, but it was terrifying how accurate she'd been in her imaginings of the King of Narnia.

It had taken her a while to accept that the faceless man who still held a large part of her mother's heart had actually had a face all along. In fact, it was something that she was only now considering telling her own daughter.

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