narnia / year 900

word count: 989

trigger warning: pov character death

xXx

Scarlet droplets spattered over a fresh white wintery blanket and the young King choked out a stuttered cry as his sword flew from his hand and the White Queen's second blade plunged into his chest.

His head slammed back against the freezing stone of Cair Paravel's eastern balcony, auburn hair splayed like a bloody halo as deep red droplets trickled over his pale face and the witch pulled her sword free, her own jaw spattered and dripping, grinning.

He coughed, squeaking from the effort and the paralyzing pain, grasping pointlessly for his sword now out of reach.

Jadis only laughed. "Who will help you now, O King of Narnia, last of Frank's line? You have no heir, your country dies with you, you have failed."

King Durand drew a rattling breath, his young body shuddering with the effort. "Yes," he coughed, breath catching with a sharp groan, feeling blindly up his chest, fingers ghosting the steady pump of hot blood between his ribs. His eyelids fluttered, and he rasped another breath. "Yes… I have failed… but… so will you… in time."

Jadis sneered. "And how, pray tell, do you dare to presume I will fail? Is it not I who even now lead my forces against your most sacred strongholds? Is it not I who hold the beating heart of Narnia in my hand?"

The King blinked slowly, gazing up half-unseeing into the White Queen's face, head spinning, snowflakes catching in his eyelashes. "You think me very foolish," he breathed.

"Only a fool clings to hope where there is none," spat the witch, black hair hanging limp into her ghost-white face like a drowned spirit of the sea, cold and sharp as the most treacherous of mountains, garish red lips curling cruelly and dripping with blood. "Your exalted city of four thrones falls to ruin, your brother and sisters lay dead in your streets, the accursed Lion gives no answer to your pleas. Tell me, where is your all-powerful one now?"

"Doubtless he weeps for the blood of his children," breathed Durand, choking again as Jadis leered over him.

"How pitiful a god that he must weep in lieu of saving you."

"He did save us," gasped the King, clinging desperately to the last ounce of strength in his chest, gritting his teeth against the paralyzing snap of pain through his ribcage as his eyes fixed steadily on the witch. "He planted salvation in the form of the holy tree you have detested for centuries. You think I do not know who tore it down? You think I do not know what lies you have whispered into the ears of my own people? Traitorous wolves, poisonous vines, once-noble dwarfs scheming below the earth against their own brethren. You think I do not know whose axes rent those holy boughs and sent their apples scattering like lifeblood through my own sacred forests?"

"I think you know too late, foolish boy, what manner of poison has crept into your land unseen. This, O Son of Adam, is the power of the Queen of Charn." Her cruel smile flashed white. "This, O noble Durand—fatherless, childless, crownless—is the power that has brought about your undoing."

"Maybe so," breathed the King as snow flurried thicker around them, dusting the bodies of the fallen scattered over Cair Paravel's towers and turrets. He swallowed hard even as his rasping voice weakened. "Your power has undoubtedly brought down my home… my family… but it did not bring down the tree of protection, guilty though you may be for the actions of those who did. One does not wield trickery unless they cannot wield force. Jadis Queen of Charn has never once prevailed against the power of Aslan, and I do not believe she knows the Golden Lion nearly so well as she thinks she does."

Fury flashed in the witch's apple-green eyes and her sword flashed through the air, plunging with a brilliant spray of red through the King's throat.

Nothing but grey sky reflected in the glassy eyes gazing blindly up at her, red hair collecting snow, pale complexion statuesque as the life went out of the last Frankian King.

Jadis breathed a shuddering sigh in unspent rage, staring murderously down at him for several moments as if daring him to move, before straightening and yanking her sword free, the click, click, of claws on stone pacing up behind her.

"Victory is ours," she spat, and wheeled on the Wolf.

"Yes, my Queen," it growled, canine eyes flicking up from the exceptionally child-like figure of the dead King, though his years numbered nearly four and twenty. "Their portents have failed, just as your Majesty predicted, and the last of Adam's race flee south of the mountains."

"Into Archenland?" asked the witch, her sharp demeanor not assuaged by the captain's report.

"Yes, your Majesty."

"Seal it up. Let not a single creature slip back through my borders alive."

"Yes… your Majesty… though, if I may ask, why would—"

"Let our spies keep vigilant watch. Any human caught wandering in Narnia will be instantly turned over to my authority, upon pain of death."

Her eyes flashed with a poisonous hunger like sinister desperation, and the Wolf bowed its head, biting back its questions as to why such an order should be given.

The four thrones lay empty, the royal bloodline broken with no hope of renewal, the prophecies unfulfilled. Yet Jadis Queen of Narnia tightened her grip on her sword as if preparing for a fight, even after victory.

Narnia's childhood had ended, purity defiled in blood stained snow.

Yet Jadis Queen of Narnia stiffened with the faintest hint of flickering doubt, and the Wolf wondered long afterward what exactly the King had spoken in his last moments to haunt her eyes with such an icy vigilance—a ghost that never truly vanished, even as her winter deepened, and snapped in her tone at the barest mention of Lions.