"SEF?" Caspian's voice trembles, betraying his terror as he watches me cross the length of the chamber. He glances back at the White Witch, suspended in the wall of ice. "What have you done to her?" He spits.

She smiles sweetly. "Nothing that has not already been done, son of Adam."

The hag shuffles out of my way as I draw closer to the icy circle in which Caspian stands. From atop his perch on the Stone Table, Nikabrik's eyes follow my progress with a smug expression on his bearded face. But my focus is only on the Telmarine prince — the Adam's blood in his veins. His blood.

"His blood," Jadis declares smoothly. "One drop, and you'll free me..."

Caspian's eyes remain locked on mine, filling with panic when a long, sharp talon replaces my index finger.

"...Then I am yours, my king."

He shakes his head, brown irises filling with watery tears. "No," he says hoarsely, fighting to break free. "Please, Sefi, don't do this. You have to fight it– Ah!"

Growling savagely, the werewolf tightens his clawed grip around the prince's ribs, sinking past the leather armour and into his skin. Caspian's face contorts in pain, his outstretched arm shaking. I grasp his wrist, and he murmurs the same, meaningless words over and over again:

"Please, Sef. Please."

Undeterred, I raise my other hand, bringing the sharpened talon to his open palm and pressing down, cutting a long line across his skin despite his cries of protest. By my hand, Adam's blood will run and give rise to the one true Queen of Narnia. By my hand, Jadis will live again.

It is these words that circulate my mind on and endless loop, drowning out everything else so it's all I hear and all I perceive. And from these words and their deafening notion do my actions come about.

Scarlet blood wells from the fresh incision.

I lower my hand, stepping back to observe my queen's long-awaited return. Finally.

Moistening her fingers with her tongue, Jadis reaches out to the confines of her crystallized prison, the blue ice crackling and shifting as it gives way. Gradually, Caspian's struggling subsides. Utterly enthralled by the display, he stares with wide eyes as her hand, pink with the colour of living flesh, emerges bit by bit from the fluid ice.

His heavy breaths frost in the air, feet carrying him one step toward her. Then two. Jadis smiles wickedly at the prince, the distance between them closing with every second.

"Stop!"

Her fierce eyes lift upward at the new voice and what it brings, surprise crossing her features. Her followers react immediately to confront the threat.

"Arryn!"

I whirl around in search of him, my heart leaping into my throat in horror. Ed–

The thought ends as quickly and abruptly as it begins; the sudden flare of emotion stifled in an instant. Quickly, I reach out across Caspian's body, drawing his sword from its scabbard. By my hand, Jadis's reign will begin again.

Leaving the prince's side, I follow the hag to intercept Peter. In spite of her apparent fragility, she's quick on her feet and manages to block the High King's first blow and disarm him in two, swift movements. Peter, though, locks his fingers securely around the dagger in her hand and a grapple ensues. I shorten my hair to a cropped length and flex my fingers securely around the sword's leather grip, muscles coiled to leap into action at the first opening...there.

I move and so does he, spinning and placing the hag's body between my swinging blade and himself. A shrill, garbled shriek pierces the air, growing further agonized when I wrench the sword from her body. Peter unceremoniously throws the wounded hag off of him and into the side of a stone column, silencing her cries. He meets my gaze and barely has time to roll from my sword's path, breathless as he lifts his fallen weapon to block my next strike.

"Arryn, stop!"

My sword comes down again. And again. I force his back against the Stone Table so he has nowhere to go and no way to escape my relentless barrage of blows. Realizing his predicament, Peter stops blocking and instead parries my blade when it next comes down — exactly what I've been waiting for him to do.

As he shifts his focus and weight just the slightest bit with the movement, I hook the back of his knee with one foot and drag him to the ground. Rhindon slices a long gash down my arm as he falls, but I spare no time concerning myself with the wound and ram the pommel of my sword into his temple, effectively knocking him out of the fight.

"Peter!"

Hearing Lucy's frightened voice in the middle of all this makes me look up in shock. With his sword in one hand, Trumpkin uses his other to hold the young girl back, both of them staring at me with an indescribable blend of emotions on their faces. Behind them, I notice another figure running in the direction of Jadis and Caspian, whose fingertips have naught but three feet of space left between them.

Scooping up the hag's fallen knife from the ground, I draw it back over my shoulder and hurl it forward across the room. Lucy screams Edmund's name as the sharp, obsidian blade flies past his face and into the stone wall with a loud clatter.

Stunned, Edmund skids to a stop and whips his head around. We lock gazes, something so beautifully sad in his eyes pulling at my heartstrings. And my feet are moving again before I can comprehend it; Rhindon is in my hand and I'm climbing over the Stone Table to position myself between Narnia's salvation and those seeking to prevent it.

Shoulders rising and falling with his heavy panting, Edmund brandishes his sword and stalks toward me, his eyes flicking momentarily to his sister and Trumpkin. "Get her out of here and get help."

The dwarf nods tersely and ushers Lucy toward the exit. Edmund doesn't wait any longer.

His sword cuts a deadly arc through the air that I meet with crossed blades, one foot planted firmly behind me. Trapped under his weight, his eyes burn into mine like glowing amber coals.

"Don't make me do this," he pleads.

A quick transformation prickles my skin, the muscles in my body growing larger and stronger until I can break his hold and push him away. The king is swift to retaliate, exchanging several quick blows as we block and parry and slash. A symphony of clashing metal echoes through the circular chamber and rings in my ears.

"Fight her!"

The force behind his swing sends vibrations through my swords and up my arms. Quelling the whispering urge to shift into an overpowering form, I continue to hammer the king with unrelenting attacks, searching for any exploitable weaknesses in his technique. But he barely gives me any time to breathe in between analyzing his form and fending off his attempts to advance.

Finally, I manage to sneak past his careful defence and land a quick slash across his shoulder. The leather pauldron of his jerkin takes most of the damage but a stroke of red blooms from beneath a clean cut on the arm of his shirt.

The sight of his blood causes my limbs to freeze; and with a heavy pang in my chest, I realize all at once what I've done. What I've allowed her to make me do.

The fresh gash on my forearm burns.

Taking advantage of my obvious shock, Edmund disarms me with an expert twist of his blade so I'm left only with Peter's sword. A surge of ice rushes through my veins and before he can get the upper hand again, my body leaps back into action. Rhindon is nothing more than a metallic blur in the air before me, my body acting on the instinctive urge to defend the queen at all costs.

By my hand, Jadis will see no harm.

There is no pain, no thought, and no mercy. There is nothing but the sword in my hands and the boy at the other end, weaponless and with anguish in his eyes.

"Ryn."

My breath clouds in the air, the edge of my blade hovering against his throat. His own sword lay discarded on the floor following a successfully-executed disarming method on my part.

He swallows thickly. "You're stronger than this."

I stiffen, the muscles in my arm quivering against two starkly different impulses that roar through me.

Words echo in my ears. Remember where your strength lies.

"Caspian needs you," he continues urgently.

Silver eyes.

You're stronger than you know.

"...Your best friend, Arryn."

Do well to remember that.

My heart pulls torturously at the pain in his voice. The blood on his face darker and redder against his pale freckled skin and all the fear and desperation in his russet eyes drowning me under a crashing wave of sorrow.

It's me, I realize with a start. I'm the one doing this to him. I'm hurting him.

My throat constricts around his name, wondering how I could possibly have let it slip from my grasp on reality only a moment ago. Ed...

"Please," he chokes. Unshed tears glisten in his beautiful eyes. "Don't let her win."

My weakened fingers cramp around the sword's hilt. Exhaustion wracks my body, burning and aching with cuts and bruises. But my heart...it beats for the boy at the end of my sword and it shares his pain and agony and all the strength he can afford to lend. My anchor. My rock.

It pulls me from the cold and back to him, that thread between us that's always been there, never once wavering over distance or time — the link I've been so afraid to realize.

My gravity.

Edmund stares into my eyes with the weight of everything in him, his voice hoarse with despair. "Don't let her win," he murmurs faintly. "Please."

I still feel the glacial fingers wrapped around my bones, still fighting for purchase and freezing my blood. But now, I can feel him — an invisible tether — tangible and real, holding my senses fixed to the only clear point in this storm. Far enough from her grasp that I have some control over myself and can recognize what I've done.

Peter. My stomach drops. I hurt Peter. And Caspian. And now Edmund.

Lucy...

I can feel myself beginning to fall apart right where I stand. But the opportunity to lose myself in a maelstrom of remorse and hate is swept up in a whirlwind of sudden occurrences.

Edmund notices them first and turns his head toward the chamber entrance. Armed to the teeth, Susan has answered her brother's call for help with a group of battle-ready Narnians at her back. Much like I'd been, they're paralyzed where they stand. Each of them too shocked by the sight before them to do much more than stare.

Feeling sick with worry, I spin away from Edmund to assess the progress of Jadis's resurrection. The tainted influence the White Witch holds over me protests the movement, but holding strong to my blessed anchor, I manage it.

Caspian — my best, damned friend — has his attention trained wholly on the woman within the ice. He stands at the edge of the ritual's circle, his hand strained as far upward as he can manage. Red rivulets trickle down the length of his arm but in his enchanted state, all he can do is offer his bleeding palm to her as the distance between them vanishes.

Now within her reach, Jadis lowers her fingers to the prince's cut — the mark I made. And with Adam's blood coating her ivory fingertips at last, she raises her hand to her smiling lips and licks her fingers clean.

Echoing across the entirety of Narnia, the ice cracks.

▬▬ι══════༻❁༺══════ι▬▬

author's note

yeehoo! i hope that's an actually cliffhanging-cliffhanger because I tried so hard to make it work and get the chapter long enough to cut it off at this part and if it doesn't make y'all scream i'm gonna need to fix it so uh...lemme know lmao

also, this chapter turned out surprisingly well and i'm actually hella proud of it. at this point tho, i've read it half a million times (and obviously i know exactly what's going on) and so i can't really imagine how a first-time reader would take it all in. basically, if y'all didn't get the drift that jadis, for an unknown reason, has complete control over arryn and arryn's supposedly magical connection to edmund is allowing her some resistance to the witch's spell, that means i have failed lol. so if it's too confusing please please let me know so i can fix it!

i'm running out of fun facts so i'll drop one or two about me!

1. i started writing when i was 10 years old. i'd stay up all night writing on my generation 4 ipod lmao i kept it and all the stories i've ever written on it. which add up to 42! and including all the stories i've created since switching to my computer, the count is currently 65. almost all of them are uncompleted haha

2. my favourite freaking book in the world hands down is Zero Repeat Forever by G.S. Prendergast. had me screaming & crying at 4am.

3. i hate potatoes.

quick reminder that if y'all have any interview questions, recommendations, or prompts for bloopers / behind the scenes you'd like to see from the cast of chimæra, just let me know!

i hope the suspense of wondering what happens next torments you guys

i'm playing lmao

mostly

ahah i love you all !