A/N: Happy Halloween my Narnian friends! I can't believe we're already at the end of October (and very nearly at the end of Ruination)!

This chapter is especially dedicated to Abby (abbisarts), for being my loyal beta reader, as well as one of my best friends. Thank you for all your thoughtful encouragement, for staying up to 3am while I frantically finish chapters, for your amazing reviews that FFN just isn't built to handle, for understanding the details and themes that most people don't notice, and for all the other lovely things you do that make my writer heart feel very very loved. You're the Jewel to my Tirian and I love you the mostest!

NOW THAT WE'VE GOTTEN THAT GUSH FEST OUT OF THE WAY, it's further up and further in (to the chapter)!

xXx

CHAPTER SIX: DEATH ITSELF

Hysterical sobs echoed off cruel tunnel walls, hitching and gasping as Lucy's voice twisted and the chamber threw her anguished cries back at her.

Bones and sinew of skeletal corpses lay mangled on the floor, damp stone leeching the last of the heat from her body, but she didn't care. If anything had still been shambling through these halls, she would have been dead a long time ago.

Instead there was only the bang and rattle of the cell door as Edmund's body crashed into it, hands outstretched, grasping, dripping, fingernails chipped and split from carving at the iron rods, the face that had once belonged to her brother snarling pale behind its cage.

Nothing mattered anymore.

Edmund was gone.

The world had ended.

And yet her cries hitched on, stomach churning, throat tightening, lungs burning.

She was still here.

And that was worse.

Time had long since abandoned all meaning, the shadowy flickering caves and the gurgling screeches that were almost words dug so deeply into Lucy's skin that she almost forgot how she'd come here in the first place. There was nothing before this. Nothing after. Until hurried footsteps echoed in the hall above, and a shadow blocked out the dim light from the stairwell.

A sob caught in her throat.

"Lucy?"

Peter's clear voice brought a fresh wave of numbness washing through her.

The footsteps quickened.

"Lu?"

She tried to form words, but only another cry escaped her, and then his figure rushed into the torchlight and pulled up short.

A horrible silence engulfed the hollow chamber; all except for Edmund's teeth on iron bars as he smashed into them again and drove a sharp inhuman squeal from his lungs.

"What— what—" Peter's voice caught, and he stammered incoherently for several moments before he tried again, voice thick. "What happened here? Lu, what's going…?"

She wanted to scream, she wanted to shout at him, white hot fury burst inside her chest she hadn't even realized had been bubbling all this time; we should have brought the cordial, you should have let me take it! I could have healed him, I should have healed him!

But even as she dragged herself to her feet, the vengeance drained out of her, leaving only the cold and the smallness and the emptiness, and she stumbled blindly into Peter's arms.

Warm, strong hands clutched at her back as if somehow to protect her, but the heartbeat pounding under her salty cheek was about to explode.

"I'm sorry," she choked out, "I'm sorry, I— I couldn't stop it— I tried, I tried, I—"

"Shhhh," he breathed, but his voice shook, and another bang from the cell made him clutch her tighter.

"What…" Lucy tried after several long minutes, tried to suck in a breath, tried to stifle her sobs, "What are you doing here?"

He swallowed hard. "I found something."

The words almost didn't make sense. What could he possibly have found that would matter now?

"In the study… it might be nothing, I don't know…"

His voice broke, and she looked up into his face.

Silent tears streamed down his cheeks in the torchlight, catching at the corners of his mouth, the pain almost tangible in his eyes; the eyes in which she always found her strength, now infected with the same helplessness that gored her to her core.

"Okay," was all she could say, barely audible.

But she didn't want to move.

Her heart lurched as Peter tugged her gently, arm around her shoulders, guiding her even as her feet wanted to root themselves to the spot.

Edmund was gone, but still she couldn't bear to leave him alone.

That would be like admitting it was true.

She glanced back one last time as they mounted the stone steps, bloody hands still grasping out for her, garbled growls bouncing off the walls, and she bit her lip to stifle the cry that burned in her throat, hot saltwater stinging her already-raw face as they came up into the strange light of the tower.

She'd almost forgotten what it looked like.

The air itself had been nearly suffocating when they first began their adventure, but Lucy's senses were so dulled by now that she didn't even notice as Peter led her wordlessly up level after level, his jaw working as they climbed, until at last they reached the final landing where the door to the study stood open, daylight washing out over the shiny black tile.

The shocking brilliance of a room full of windows pierced her eyes like daggers, and she rubbed away the glare as she followed Peter into the study, corpse still melting into the desk, dust still hanging thick in the air, papers still strewn over the ground.

Only now, she realized, the mess of papers lay assembled in some kind of order, straightened out and heaped together in piles.

She squinted down at them, and Peter let out a shaky breath before drawing in a steadier one.

"I think this is the spell."

Lucy sniffed. "What?"

Her voice was thick, the stranglehold of unspent tears still tightening her throat.

"The spell. The one that started all of this. I think these are his notes." He motioned to the vaguely human shaped disaster in the middle of the room.

Lucy rubbed her eyes again and peered around at the scattered parchment, scribbly handwriting and scratchy images littering the pages in thick black ink.

Then her breath caught and she almost stumbled backward.

It was them.

Those were their names, their images, four crowned figures, the thrones at Cair Paravel. It was them.

"What— Peter what is… how…?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. But it's all… based on us, I think. Somehow."

Lucy sank to the floor, fingers trembling as she reached to turn one of the pages toward her.

"He thought we had some kind of power. The power to destroy the witch, I suppose. He talks about that a lot."

Yellowed parchment crinkled under Lucy's fingers, the scrawling lines upon it depicting a giantish, cruel woman with a jagged crown. "He was one of her followers," she mumbled, recalling the hag's words as if from a distant dream. "Is this revenge? Did he really sacrifice his own land just to hurt us?"

"I don't think so," said Peter.

She looked up at him.

"I mean, who ever heard of an evil sorcerer who didn't want to live forever? I don't think he meant to die."

Lucy furrowed her brow. "Then, what?"

"I think his experiment failed."

Peter crossed to the corpse, keeping his distance, but pointing from his position at the table to the trail of dried blood on the floor.

"The door was barricaded from the outside, when… when Edmund found it, right?"

Lucy swallowed. "Yes… I think so."

"Well, then…" Peter spun, scooting stacks of paper out of the way with his boot to reveal even more bloodstains, streaking in scuffed patterns across the floor, and Lucy recognized the look on his face. She'd seen it on many occasions, when he took her out hunting, or when they went adventuring in the western woods. He was tracking his prey.

"He does the spell," said Peter, "Whatever it was, on this table here." He motioned to a cauldron knocked onto its side, some black congealed substance spilling out onto the dark wood of the desk. "But it goes wrong, he turns into one of those things, and attacks the next person to come into the room."

"How do you know?"

He pointed to the scuff marks on the floor. "Well, there was a struggle, for one. And they cut him." He pointed to the corpse's neck, and Lucy realized it had been slit, the damage still evident through the rot. "It must not have killed him at once, though, because they still barricaded the door from the outside, so that's why I think he must have been infected."

Lucy nodded.

"Judging from the amount of blood, he wasn't the only one hurt. So whoever got out must have turned, and spread it to the rest of the tower."

"And then, to the rest of the country."

"Exactly."

They looked at each other for a moment, the rest of their horrible reality falling into place before Lucy cleared her throat.

"Well, if this was all a mistake, then what was he trying to do?"

"I don't know," Peter sighed. "What are they ever trying to do? Gain power?"

"If he wanted power so badly, why would he even want to be human? If I was a werewolf, I jolly well think I would stay that way."

Peter shot her an incredulous look.

"I mean if I was evil," she amended sardonically, and a flicker of amusement crossed Peter's face at her annoyance.

Then he blinked, and his eyes lit up.

"That's it!" He rushed back to Lucy's side and shuffled furiously through his stacks of parchment, until at last he pulled out a page with their image on it. "This power he seems to think we have… it's because we're human. Of course he wouldn't give up his own power unless he thought humans had something better."

Lucy took the page from him, scanning the scratchy words. Adam's blood… blessed creation… "But… we don't have any power. It was Aslan who defeated the witch, not us."

"I know that," said Peter, "But maybe he didn't. And even Jadis herself was always a sight too keen on appearing human. It makes perfect sense that he would think it held some kind of power."

Lucy swelled for a moment with the thrill of the realization, but then deflated almost at once as reality struck again, hard and cold. Even if they figured out exactly what had happened, what would it help? It was already too late.

Then the scrawl at the bottom of the parchment caught her eye. She did a double-take and clutched it tighter.

"Peter?"

"What is it?"

"Have you read all of this?"

"Not yet," he said, and shifted to read over her shoulder.

The text scratched over this page was in the form of a journal entry, listed with a date on the top and other information Lucy didn't understand. But then came the entry itself.

On this, the third month of our slow campaign against the forest borders of that accursed land, the final ingredient has at long last been procured. The blood of the second king, taken by force at the edge of a blade, spoiled by no other. The ritual will now soon be complete, Adam's blood once again to free our stolen land from its bonds.

"The blood of the second king?" asked Peter.

Lucy pinched the blotchy image of four monarchs. "It… it must mean Edmund… but…"

"But how would they get Edmund's—"

They looked at each other, realization striking them both at the same instant.

"The hag!" cried Lucy, "That horrid beast that stabbed him and got away, oh he was moaning about that for weeks—"

"How long ago was that?"

Lucy's heart pounded as she counted on her fingers. "Well, Dancing Lawn must have been… um… four days ago, and it was about two weeks before that, or a little longer—"

"And the hag on the way in here said the death spread from the tower two weeks ago," said Peter. "If it took the first hag a few days to travel on foot back to the valley…"

"It lines up perfectly," gasped Lucy. Then she paused and furrowed her brow. "Do you suppose it was the same hag?"

Peter's eyes blazed with discovery, almost too distracted to answer her question, but he shook his head absently. "No, I think Ed would have recognized it. Not that I've any idea how he tells those things apart."

Lucy didn't correct his use of present tense. As if Edmund was still…

She shook her head. "I do hope the little beast was the first thing to die."

But the fire behind Peter's eyes burned on; it didn't even seem like he'd heard her this time. "So… he wasn't just trying to replicate some abstract power. He used our blood."

Lucy's insides went cold as it sank in.

They both sat in stunned silence for several minutes, Peter eventually taking up stacks of the sorcerer's notes to thumb through, until at last he spoke again. "We could do it…"

"Do what?"

"Look. This is the ritual. There aren't many elements to it, it's all about joining the human blood with… well, with his own. And clearly, it didn't join properly."

"What are you saying?" Lucy almost didn't want to acknowledge the strange hunger in her brother's face. "You want to try the ritual again?"

"I'm saying… well… yes," he admitted.

"Peter!"

"Lucy, think about it, what other option do we have? If his own wolfish blood corrupted it, maybe ours could fix it. Like… like an antidote. An anti-spell."

"How could you put your own blood into that thing?"

"Edmund's is already in there!"

Lucy shut her mouth and looked down at the parchment in her hands, vision blurring for a moment before she blinked the tears away. The blood of the second king… Her eyes fixed on those words, reading them over and over until they began to lose meaning.

And then something clicked in her head. "Wait a second."

"Hm?"

"Their blood…"

"What about their blood?" asked Peter.

Lucy motioned to the list he was holding. "You said it was all about joining Edmund's blood with his. But, well, we know he wasn't a man, at least not really. I think the witch learned well enough that no amount of black magic can really make you human."

Peter nodded. "I was thinking the same."

"So then, the spell couldn't have joined their blood, no matter what he so arrogantly intended. He may have thought he was a man—or nearly one—but inside he was still the wolf. In his blood."

Peter nodded again, urging her on.

"If they had really joined, wouldn't Edmund have turned into one of those things, too?" There was a short silence, and then she swallowed. "I mean… before? They couldn't have just joined wrongly. I think… I think the wolf's blood ate Edmund's."

Peter blinked. "I— Lu, you're brilliant!" He clasped her shoulder and squeezed it. "That's exactly it, it has to be. That's what it's been doing all along, consuming blood, taking power, it's been the wolf from the beginning!"

A smile tugged on Lucy's lips at the praise, in spite of the circumstances. "Do… do you really think an anti-spell would work, then?"

"Unless one of us has werewolf blood swimming around in there somewhere," Peter grinned back at her. "I think it's worth a shot."

Lucy held onto that look in his eyes. That fire. That hope.

"Okay."

Peter stood at once.

The remnants of the ritual were still lying around in the rot on the table as Lucy followed him. Some vials had crashed off and shattered on the floor during the initial struggle, but their contents lay in scattered piles, and Peter set the cauldron aright, gathering up various strange substances Lucy didn't even want to guess the identity of.

"Well, that's everything accounted for," he said, checking it against the parchment. "Everything except…"

Lucy's eyes flicked sharply to his.

"I mean, if it's going to be exactly the same spell, then…"

She already knew.

They would have to get Edmund's blood again.

In that moment the idea seemed to become real to Peter, too, and he went white under the layer of grime that likely clung to her skin too.

"Well, let's go, if we're going to," said Lucy, surprising herself despite the weight that hung like a stone in her stomach, and Peter nodded, hand on the hilt of his sword as he moved resolutely out of the room and led the way downstairs.

It was a silent trudge, but something churned under Lucy's skin now. Even the slightest chance to fix this—or at least to die trying—was more than she'd dared to hope for, and it was only with this hope that she pulled the dungeon's door open again.

Edmund's echoing growls struck her like a blow to the chest.

For a moment she hesitated before the gaping chasm of faintly flickering darkness, and Peter pushed past her to descend first, his steps stiff and mechanical, the soldier inside him taking over as Lucy followed a few paces behind.

The torch still lay burning among the heap of bodies, illuminating Edmund's haggard face through the bars, and Lucy almost gasped.

Even the memory of thirty minutes ago couldn't compare to the reality before her eyes, blood dribbling from his gaping mouth, eyes reflecting orange like two bulbous moons in the torchlight, skin deathly white and translucent as a days-old corpse.

Lucy bit down hard on her lower lip to stifle a small choking noise, and she almost ran into Peter when he stopped in the middle of the walkway, hands flying up to steady herself against his back.

She felt him take a deep breath, and then he drew his sword, the metal rasping out of its sheath as Edmund slammed into the iron rods separating his teeth from their throats.

Both of Peter's hands shifted on the hilt, as if holding a sword for the very first time, one half-slipping off the golden lion's head, and the blade trembled as he raised it, glinting, toward his brother.

He hesitated.

Lucy imagined he was waiting for the right angle, the right moment.

Edmund's hands shot out every few seconds to snatch at them, though they stood a pace beyond his grasp, and every time she thought Peter would strike. His blade inched closer or shuddered with restraint each time the bloody fingers made their grab, but he never struck, and at last he deflated and lowered his sword.

"I can't," he breathed, "I keep feeling I'll cut his hand clean off if I take a sweep now." His knuckles clenched white around the hilt, trembling.

Lucy let out the breath she'd been holding.

She looked around, and then stepped past Peter to the heap of bodies, stooping to pull her dagger out of the eye socket of some twisted creature, the one that had tripped Edmund.

She jumped as Edmund slammed into the cell next to her.

Fist tightening around the small hilt of her dagger, she took a handful of her tunic and wiped the blade clean, then turned back to the raven-haired corpse gnashing its teeth blindly through the bars, horrible split nails grasping inches from her face.

"Lucy—" Peter started, but she wasn't listening. She steeled her nerves, shut out the world, shut out the screaming in her own mind.

And she swung.

Her dagger caught Edmund across the palm just as he lashed out, and he reeled back with a screech she'd never imagined him capable of making, utterly inhuman.

Blood ran thick down the blade.

She turned away just as another bang exploded behind her and a clawed hand closed around her arm, yanking her back with a cry, dagger flying up and nearly stabbing her in the face as her muscles contracted to resist.

There was a flash of gold and Peter threw himself between her and the gurgling beast, breaking its grip, jagged nails tearing at her tunic as they ripped away. But before she could even think, that same hand grabbed Peter's collar and slammed him up against the bars, knocking the air from his lungs with bone chilling screech as teeth connected with his chin.

Peter yanked himself back, dragging Lucy crashing to the floor and scrambling away over the rough stone.

His hand flew to his face, dark liquid dripping between his fingers.

"Peter!"

The realization came over both of them at once as he shakily brought his hand away and Lucy saw the arch of deep tooth marks in his jaw.

Idiot, Lucy screamed at herself, you should have been more careful.

"Peter— I—"

"Lucy, you have to go," Peter gasped.

"But—" A sob bubbled up in her throat. She couldn't do this, she couldn't leave Peter, too.

"Take it, go!" He grabbed her wrist, the dagger already forgotten in her hand, and his fingers left a sticky red trail as they dropped away and he leaned heavily on the rail of a cell door.

Lucy clapped a hand over her mouth, heat rushing to her eyes.

"Hurry, Lu," he gasped, "You have to do it now, I'm sorry."

She wanted to cry "I'm sorry" too, but her throat closed up, heart hammering painfully against her ribcage as she stumbled backward, clambering blindly to her feet.

The stone stairs rushed up to her as Peter coughed. She nearly tripped, vision blurring, scrambling up with her free hand on the steps ahead just as a snarl erupted below, and she burst through the door and ran.

She was halfway up the first flight when the door banged open behind her, and she thought distantly that she should have closed it, but there wasn't time to think now. There was only the blur of strange carvings rushing past her, the jolt of pain through her heels with every jarring footfall, the voice she trusted most in the world echoing off the walls in slavering, tortured growls.

Lucy didn't look back even when boots skidded and hands slapped the stairs, her legs burning as she charged up the third, fourth, fifth flight, pulse pounding in her skull.

Movement caught the corner of her eye, haggard forms shambling out of dark hallways, the last dregs of half-life pouring from every hidden corner of the tower, joining in with the haunting chorus as she clenched her dagger tight and Edmund's blood trickled down over the hilt into her fingers.

Finally the top floor opened around her and she bolted to the study door, slamming it shut just as something crashed into it, then another, then another, a scrabbling mess scratching at the wood, squealing on the tile, gasping and gurgling as she glanced desperately around for a key, pressing her full weight against the door.

But though the doorknob rattled, it never turned.

They didn't know how to open it.

She stepped away.

The tears streaming down her cheeks didn't even feel like they belonged to her, mind racing, nerves buzzing.

She rushed to the table, paying no heed to the corpse she would once have shrank from, shoving its decomposing hand out of the way and smearing Peter's yellowed parchment with burgundy as she straightened it out and rubbed her sleeve over her eyes to read

Shakily, hurriedly, she opened stoppers and checked bottles for ingredients the scratchy notes listed, pouring them out into trembling hands before dumping them in order into the cauldron, the remnants of the last ritual still sloshing at the bottom.

One last splash of a black liquid sent a heavy perfume billowing into the air, filling the room, the cauldron smoking even without a fire under it, clouds pressing in around Lucy as she lifted the parchment to peer at the words.

"Adam's blood," she coughed, lungs filling with heavy purple cloud as she stumbled through the words, "Rent asunder from the veins of the accursed, imbued with spring's fatal breath and the birthright of kings, grant dominion over beast blood-born, that mind and soul bow wholly to thy command."

A terrible pressure built in her chest as she spoke, and then she took up her dagger and knocked it against the rim of the cauldron, a single drop of crimson running from the blade into the swirling, frothing mixture below.

The moment it rippled in the inky depths, an icy grip took hold of her, clawing its way into her eyes and throat as a realm of blind terror overpowered her.

The room still curled smoky in her vision, but something else rose in her mind, carving it's way into her skull.

All at once she wasn't alone.

"You," boomed a voice from everywhere and nowhere at once, loud and terrible as the deepest rumble of the sea, singing in her blood, "What are you?"

"I—" she choked, but couldn't speak, suffocated by tangible darkness, as if trapped in a starless sky.

And then into her mind rose a presence, so intense that she almost thought she saw it with her waking eyes, gleaming teeth, bared in a monstrous, bloody snarl, neither animal nor human, eyes flashing white, the coarseness of thick, blood-soaked fur swelling inside her, she could taste it on her tongue as it gripped her bodily.

"You are a Daughter of Eve," it snarled, "That treacherous so-called Queen of stolen land. How have you entered my domain?"

"Your— your domain—" gasped Lucy, "How— why, you're— you're the wolf!"

A roar shocked her senses, so violent she thought it would bring the whole tower down.

"I am no wolf! I am your undoing, you and all your kind!"

The pressure tightened around Lucy's throat. "But— you're dead," she coughed.

"I am beyond life and death," it growled, "Such mortal things no longer bind me. I am hunger. I am thirst."

Hunger.

Peridan's words rushed back into her head as if he were standing before her, his haunted eyes coming back to her memory. Falling. Drowning. Losing yourself. Until there's nothing left but hunger. It's like death itself.

This was it.

This was death.

"You killed them!" she cried, the words tearing from her lips before she had time to think.

"I rule them," rumbled the wolfish visage of death.

"You lead them to the slaughter! They kill without thought, without heed for anything but the taste of blood!"

"That is what they do anyway. You have seen war. You have seen fields upon fields of bodies, blood, death in numbers unimaginable. That is what all life comes to, in the end, and it is all my domain."

"If you were ever really a man," spat Lucy, "You would know that wasn't true."

"Wretch!" The ear-shattering roar shook the very ground she stood on.

"But you're not a man!" Her voice rose in strength. "You never were! You were only ever a wolf, a ravenous brute feeding upon the blood of others to satisfy your own appetite. That's why your spell failed, that's why your only fate is to starve for eternity, in power and misery!"

"Change it, then," it snarled. "You have the power. You have the blood."

Lucy became freshly aware that the dagger was still in her hand.

She had not yet finished the spell.

The scratchings on the parchment called for the blood of the caster to bestow power. Her blood.

"If you are so pure, Eve's Daughter, let us see you shed your own mortal form. Let us see real human blood! Or are you too cowardly to save your people from their natural state, oh honorable witch-slayer? Show me what your blood can do that mine cannot!"

Lucy trembled with rage, her hand moving to clasp the blade, hovering only an inch from its gleaming crimson edge.

"I would die a thousand deaths before giving another Narnian life to you," she growled, and almost closed her hand around the dagger, but something inside made her stop.

A still, small voice, echoing in the void.

And then her mind cleared.

"But you're wrong about one thing."

There was a hiss like a sharp intake of breath. "And what, pray, am I wrong about?"

Lucy's hand dropped to her side.

"We never killed the witch."

A horrible silence fell upon the chamber, an emptiness, a waiting, incorporeal eyes burning into her.

"No power in our blood brought your mistress down," said Lucy. "It was Aslan, the great Lion the witch feared above all else, who dealt her death. That was your fatal mistake. And nearly mine," she added, lowering the knife. "We have both forgotten the true power that rules these lands."

Suddenly the air was buzzing, thickening, choking, and Lucy stumbled back, away from the table through the fog.

"Faugh!" it cried, redoubling its intensity, "Whose blood drenches your forests? Whose power drives your kinsmen to each other's throats?"

"You have no power here!" cried Lucy, "Not anymore! Get out!"

The door behind her erupted with a bang and she jumped, the creatures on the other side throwing themselves against the wood even harder than before.

Then there was a sound like the desk scraping across the floor, and she stumbled, swatting at the smoke, drunk on its perfume as she tried to regain her bearings.

Only a rasping dry shriek gave any warning before something crashed into her and she cried out, dagger clattering out of her hand as her elbows smacked the marble and the huge, misshapen thing cracked against the wall, crumpling just out of view.

She scrambled up, feeling frantically for her blade as the thing whirled, and the skeletal remains of a rotten face snapped inches from her own.

The sorcerer.

Lucy lashed out on reflex, shoved it away, fingers sinking into the deep grooves between its ribs as she kicked it off and backpedaled over the floor.

The pounding on the door intensified, growing to a roar, as if every long-rotted corpse in the entire fortress were rushing up to batter against it, and at last Lucy caught hold of her dagger and scrambled to her feet.

Out of the mist rose the corpse after her, thoroughly dead, eyes already rotted out of their empty sockets, but it lunged all the same, jaw dislocated in a roar that reverberated through her bones, echoing from everywhere at once as she turned and ran for the only hint of light in a midnight sea.

Her fumbling hands found a handle, and she banged out into blinding cold sunlight, open air striking her face like the first breath she'd taken in years.

A moment later she realized she was on top of the tower—or more accurately one of four huge prongs that gave it such an unusual shape—hanging out over the distant grey valley below.

Even freed of the intoxicating smoke, blaring white eyes still burned into her soul, the wolf still clung to her, as if trying to permanently inhabit her skin, and his skeletal excuse for a body shambled out after her, cast into harsh and unflattering relief by the pale sun.

"You dare to question my authority over this land?" he boomed in her head. "I will show you what power I hold!"

A grip like an ice sank into her ribcage, invisible claws tearing at her lungs as the corpse stumbled forward and her reflexes just barely kicked in in time to pull her out of the way, gasping and clutching at her midsection as she teetered at the edge of the shining stone.

"Get out!" she screamed again, and the taste of raw copper flooded her mouth.

She stepped numbly away from the black precipice, trying to suck breath into razor-torn lungs, but the corpse made another dive and this time it clipped one of her legs and sent her crashing into the stone, head snapping back and hands flying up to ward off gnashing teeth.

"Aslan!" she choked out, before the monster drove a knee hard into her stomach and the air rushed from her body. The rest of her prayer hung on the tip of her tongue, help me.

All at once a strange warmth flooded her chest—in spite of the cold breeze, in spite of the icy fingers clutching her insides—and she threw the beast off, fresh strength flowing into her arms as she flipped over and gripped the body's shoulders with her own hands, pinning it down against the stone.

"I, Lucy, Queen of Narnia," she spat, blood dripping down her lips, clutching its bony shoulders as flesh slipped and tore beneath her, "Cast you out of my people in the name of Aslan, the Great Lion, son of the Emperor over the Sea! You will leave us and never come back!"

The decomposing heap lashed out and knocked her onto her side, but the momentum of Lucy's struggle drove it straight over her, and with one last wild screech, it pitched over the ledge into the air below.

She stared, watching it shrink into the distance for a moment, until a shriek rent the sky and the study door burst open with an explosion of shattering wood, bodies pouring over each other and flooding out onto the balcony.

Lucy pushed herself back up to her feet, sucking in a sharp breath, dagger drawn in her hand.

The gurgling mass surged toward her, Peter at the front, paper white save for the darkness dribbling down his chin.

But she didn't move.

The wolf laughed in her head, his bone-chilling cackle ringing between her ears.

But she wasn't listening.

She extended her empty hand, fingers stretching toward her brother.

She drew the deepest breath she could muster, against the tightening claws, against death's grip.

And she screamed.

"Get OUT!"

A sound like a thunderclap split the air, everything flashed white, and for a moment the world disappeared.

Lucy plunged into darkness, an icy breeze raking through her body before vanishing into the void, leaving only a lingering golden feeling; a familiar, warm breath wafting over her face.

And very gradually, the world came back to her.