Chapter 4:

Susan stood in a memory long forgotten. A memory locked away for it was too happy to bear under the weight of reality. How could she face her life knowing something so beautiful existed? Something she was never supposed to see again.

"Narnia…" she said as though whispering the birth name of a parent. One that is with you your whole life, but so rarely spoken.

It had been more than a lifetime since she had been here. And it felt like even longer since she let her mind remember what it was like.

Forgetting was all she could do to protect herself from the horror of being told she would never return. That her younger siblings would, but that Narnia would never be there for her again.

Her siblings…her family…

Susan shook her head. Her family was why she was here. Christopher, her son, had been brought here somehow. And she had to rescue him. Narnia was not always a safe place, and who knew what dangers waited in the woods.

This area did not look very familiar to Susan. She sat atop the tiniest of islands covered in broken and splintered arrows. It was a very odd sight, even for Narnia. In the distance to the west, beyond a nearby waterfall, were great mountains, and her mind answered the question before she could ask it.

"The western wilds. That must make this the great waterfall…which would mean…the lantern wastes are not far to the east! If I can make my way there, I am sure to recognize more," it was remarkable what the mind could store without one knowing it. All of the memories that were lost moments ago flooded back to her, "If Christopher came here, he surely would have gone in that direction, following the river, rather than scaling jagged cliffs."

Susan picked herself up from the tiny island, her purse in one hand and the arrow she snapped in two still in the other. It had been so long since she held an arrow. There was once a time when she never went anywhere without a quiver full of them.

The last time Susan was in Narnia, she was with her siblings before a great lion whose name she still could not quite recall. They had just aided a prince in returning to the throne, and the lion had told Peter and her…that they would not be allowed to return to Narnia.

The real mystery for her was: how could her older brother remain faithful after hearing that? The thought that she would not be allowed to return devastated Susan. She had done everything to distract herself from that harsh reality, but soon it became too difficult to bear, and she instead began doing everything she could to forget.

At first it was dismissing childish games. And then making new friends who wanted to become more grown-up. And the last thing she turned her back on, the thing that would always remind her most of Narnia, were her siblings.

In the last years of her schooling, Susan distanced herself as much as she could from her brothers and sister. It pained her immensely, but in time, that pain faded away along with the memory of her reign as Queen.

But as she stood there, beneath Narnia's sun, she knew the pain had never gone away. The pain of losing Narnia and her siblings had only been hidden deep in her heart. It erupted forth now, and she fell back to her knees and cried.

Just as the horn had called her back to this place, so too did her tears call out to something in the woods around her.

A sparrow flew down from somewhere within the treetops and landed on a stone an arm's length away from Susan. It greeted her in the traditional way that many animals in Narnia did.

"Good morning!" the sparrow said as though it were a cheery English neighbor, and not a bird who had just finished dining on worms off the forest floor.

Susan greeted the bird as gently and kindly as she could. Beasts had been some of the first to aid Susan and her siblings during their initial visit. Perhaps, just as the beavers had been so kind, this sparrow would help Susan find her son.

But as she listened to the sparrow speak of weather and parties, of what seeds were in season and what chores he had to do that day, Susan couldn't help but find something strange. He spoke, as most beasts in Narnia had always done, but in a different way then she remembered. Something about his words felt…distant. As though they were the last echo in a hollow cave.

As she spoke calmly to the talking beast, many other things became clear. What had seemed like Narnia's yellow sun now looked faded, and the trees which were green when she arrived now seemed dull and gray. This certainly looked like Narnia, but the more she stared at it, the less it reminded her of the country of her childhood.

"This…is Narnia, isn't it?" She asked.

"It is the only Narnia I am aware of," the sparrow, whose name was Timothy, said, "Are there others?"

"I'm not sure. There is so much I don't know. So much I still can't remember." Was this truly the Narnia of her dreams?

This place felt shallow and empty. Every blade of grass and rock looked like they meant less here. The fruit on the trees looked like they would be bland and tasteless. The sunlight provided no warmth, and the darkness no cold. It felt like a world made of paper, as though a pop-up from a children's book.

But there was no time to focus on such things. Susan slapped her thigh to wake her mind up, lest it wander any further from the moment. She was here for a reason.

"I must apologize, but I am here on urgent business. You have not happened to come across another like me?"

"You mean, another daughter of eve?"

"A human, yes, but a son of adam." Susan remembered that was what the Narnians called them.

The sparrow jumped a little in place, a bird's method of scratching one's head when a thought is just out of reach. "I…think so. But it is hard to remember. It was so long ago."

"How long?" Susan's heart sank. If there was one thing she remembered about Narnia, it was that time here ran at its own pace, and served its own design. Her reign as Queen, which had been years for her, had turned out to be mere moments back at the professor's manor.

"Let's see…it was before tea with the badgers last evening…it was before a dwarf had gathered berries by my nest to make mead…it was before I flew to the other end of the woods to visit my friend, Gregory the swan…why, was it truly before the autumn harvest festival at the coast? No, it couldn't have been that long ago!"

"Please, do try and remember. All that I love depends on it!"

"Alright, alright, I'll do my best. A sparrow's mind is very busy, you know. Especially with a social calendar as packed as mine," Timothy the sparrow returned to jumping in place and after a few painful moments he spoke again, "Of course! It was the day before the festival. I remember because I told the child of its whereabouts and invited him if he was free. As it is March now, that would have been five months ago almost to the day."

Five months…Susan's heart sank deeper than she knew it could go. Christopher being alone in this land for a day would worry her, but to be on his own for so long…

Susan thanked the sparrow for his help, and began running towards the coast. If she was to find Christopher, she would need to start where he first went. The running eased her mind, for all it wanted to do was wonder:

What happened to her son?