Work Text:
Pressed between Her palm and heart
are monarch’s made of children.
Narnia is a world
crafted of ice and tears and dying things and blood.
She blazes that She will not be something despicable and dreary,
and curls Her Kings and Queens close to Her polar course.
They trail along her path, unbalanced in their course,
the oldest holds, still warm with ichor and bared to the air, a wolf’s heart.
He keens like the creature he holds, hoarse with grief and dreary.
‘My siblings,’ he begs, ‘spare them this fear, this all-consuming wild.’ He pleas, ‘They are nothing but children,
spare them this savage force and this brutal blood.’
He prays again, ‘Spare them this world.’
When Lucy ventured forth through the wardrobe she had paused, this new world
so extraordinary she had been frozen, ice coating her coat and she was stuck, unable to continue her course.
When Lucy stepped through the wardrobe she did not expect blood
and fear and the Lion cradling in his maw a gorey heart.
Lucy did not expect trees that were children
as much as she was. She did not expect a nation crumbling and ice and hate, so dreary.
Susan murmurs in steady trepidation about mournful souls and infant-snatchers that hide in the trees, her tone dreary.
Susan shakes and begs and curses this strange, unwanted world
for taking her brother, for claiming them all despite that they are nothing but scared children.
Susan stumbles and trips in her wild course
and whispers about siblings and fear and hearts
dripping in old, rotten blood.
Edmund, when he tumbled through, was shivering in cold winter air, he bit through his tongue, blood
pooling in his mouth. The White Witch had smiled drearily.
Between her teeth, she bared a punctured, frozen still and black, heart.
Her expression had been soft and Narnia shuddered under her feet. Edmund had thought then, fear and utter peace laying claim to him, ‘ What a world.’
The Witch offered him another grin and he had thrown himself up into the sled. Their following journey was unsteady in its course
and later, Edmund thought, ‘We were children.’
‘The Four Kings and Queens of Old are nothing but children,’
Trumpkin thinks, disappointment laying heavy in his dwarven blood.
Long centuries have passed since Peter’s prayer and Susan’s muttering and that first course.
They have been left in a land most dreary,
smog and fear and something too old for their bones all that remained in the Old World.
And now, they are monarchs reprised, Narnia offering them the tattered remains of their hearts.
Still, they remain children with memories older than their minds, they remain locked in that smoggy, cold place so dreary.
‘Something cruel, and something kind,’ they murmur about their old Narnia, at Trumpkin’s request, a yearning to know deep in his blood, ‘a strange sort of world.’
Their path is scattered through a broken and erratic course, but Narnia grins back at them, a kinder smile than the Witch all those years ago, and offers them Her heart.