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Chapter Text

These are just flames

Burnin' in your fireplace

I hear your voice and it seems

As if it was all a dream

I wish it was all a dream

Can we go on like it once was?

Another Story by The Head & The Heart

25 September, 1940  |  5:47 pm  |  Professor Kirke's House, England/Western Woods, Narnia  |  Edmund

Edmund pounded through the manor’s dark halls, no clear destination in mind. He needed to get away. Away from Peter and Susan and Lucy, away from their accusing and disappointed looks, away from their judgment and hatred. His own words echoed through his head. You’re not Father! Stop pretending to be him. You’re not! I hate you! Every step carried him further from his siblings, the tears falling hot and fast on his cheeks. He was so sick of them all. Sick of this crumbling old house and the dreary professor that they all had to tiptoe around and especially sick of his brother and sisters. 

Edmund wanted out. He wanted to be back in his own bed in Finchley. He wanted to crawl into a dark corner and hide until the war was gone and Father came home. He wanted to be anywhere else, anywhere at all. 

Almost without realising it, Edmund found himself in a dusty room somewhere near the top of the house, empty but for an enormous wardrobe covered with a dust cloth. Suddenly, he wished he had thought to bring a book for something to do, but it hadn’t occurred to him in his earlier anger. It would be embarrassing to go back and face his siblings now, and even more so if he got lost on the way to the library and had to be dragged like a stray cat back to the clutches of his loving family by the housekeeper. 

Resigning himself to a tedious afternoon until he worked up the courage to face the others, Edmund poked around the dust-choked garret in which he had found himself. As he had surmised upon first glance, it was empty but for a large wardrobe pushed against the far wall. The door was intricately carved with images of trees and flowers and dancing creatures from mythology. The inside, when Edmund looked, was full of old fur coats and the overpowering odor of mothballs. He couldn’t have found a more boring room in which to seclude himself.

For a while, Edmund amused himself by drawing shapes on the dusty floor, but that grew old quickly. The watery sunlight allowed through the windows grew dim until Edmund was certain it must be twilight. Long shadows stretched over the walls, darkening the corners and playing tricks on his eyes. Was that a rat in the corner or merely his imagination? The crescent moon rose steadily in the east-facing window, painting the floorboards silvery-white until it disappeared over the eaves and the room darkened even further. His aching stomach told him that he had missed supper. The room was growing colder, too, a product of the autumn season. As the sun-warmed wood floor cooled in the evening chill, Edmund shivered, pulling his jumper tight over his icy fingers, hiding his hands under his arms and curling his legs beneath him where he sat on the floor against the wall. He ached to return to the warm rooms of the house below but dreaded the prospect of seeing his siblings. 

When he could see the foggy cloud of his breath in the air, it finally occurred to Edmund that there was an entire wardrobe full of coats just a meter away. Berating himself for his idiocy, Edmund climbed into the wardrobe—making sure to leave the door open—and went searching for a suitable coat, of which there seemed to be none. All the garments in the wardrobe were much too large for him and for women besides. At fifteen, Edmund was much shorter than Peter had been at his age, and even the other boys in his classes had stood at least a foot taller than him. 

As Edmund contemplated the unfairness of his thirteen-year-old sister being only a few inches shorter than him, an icy wind blew through the wardrobe door and swirled around his ankles. There was a loud bang, and he was plunged into darkness.

The door had blown shut. 

Employing a few choice words he’d learned from Peter, who wasn’t as good at censoring himself as he ought to be, Edmund fumbled for the doorframe. He prayed to any god that might listen that there was a handle on the inside and that he hadn’t just trapped himself in a wardrobe, in a room with copious amounts of dust that told him no one ever entered. Would anyone hear him if he were to yell? The rumbling of his stomach suddenly seemed so much more painful, as if it knew that he might not ever eat another meal. The hanging coats tangled and wrapped around him like jungle vines, rendering his searching hands useless. His mouth was full of fur and his nose stung with the nauseating aroma of mothballs. It was so dark that he couldn’t see his hand before his face. 

Growing desperate, Edmund threw himself forward, hoping to hit a wall and use it to navigate to the door but succeeded only in tumbling to the floor. He hadn’t thought the wardrobe was this large from the outside. From where he lay, limbs akimbo and on his back, he should have touched at least one wall by now. Breathing heavily, Edmund lay still and tried to think of what to do, but his mind was too clogged with panic for rational thought. 

It was at this moment that he began to feel a creeping damp chill beneath his back and struggled upright. His hand landed in the wet spot, and he startled back with a yell. It was icy cold and gritty, almost like . . . snow? He inhaled and the mothball scent cleared, only to be replaced with a sharp smell like pine and cold air. In fact, his whole body was suddenly freezing cold, as though he’d stepped into a London night without his coat, though the air was cleaner and fresher than in London. Just as he noticed this, he saw also that it was growing lighter. The smothering darkness was dwindling slowly to a soft gray-blue that allowed him to see at last his immediate surroundings.

Unbelievably, inexplicably, Edmund was no longer in the wardrobe at twilight, but in the middle of a wood at dawn.

Towering pines rose around him, piled so high with snow that they looked like hunched old men bowed under their own weight. The ground, too, was blanketed in a soft layer of new snow, smooth and unmarked but for the place where Edmund had flailed around in his confusion. All was quiet; not even the birds sang, and no breeze stirred the branches. The whole world seemed to be holding its breath, but for what, Edmund couldn’t tell.

Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Edmund stumbled through the trees, searching for a way back home. Was he even in England anymore?

As he pushed by, the trees bowed around him just like real trees would—but they couldn’t be real. It was impossible that he had walked into a wardrobe in autumn and walked out into a wood in winter. Every rule of science contradicted it. This had to be a dream. Perhaps, Edmund thought hopefully, he had hit his head in the wardrobe and was now suffering delusions. He had never expected to hope for an outcome like that, but what was the alternative? Magic? Edmund wasn’t a little kid. He knew that magic, like Father Christmas and haunted houses, didn’t really exist. Maybe Lucy would still believe this was real, Edmund supposed, but he was much too smart for that.

Just as he had this thought, Edmund rounded another tree and entered a clearing in the wood. The other end overlooked a long valley that stretched far into the distance, ending in a spike of tall, snow-capped mountains and beyond, a glimpse of the sea. From where Edmund stood to the horizon, there was nothing but quiet, snow covered trees. No buildings or people or smoke or even roads to be found anywhere. 

The only fixture of civilization, bizarrely out of place, was a single iron lamppost—just like the ones lining every London street—in the center of the clearing, as though it had simply sprung out of the ground. The flame within the lamp burned merrily, casting a halo of yellow light onto the ground. The lamppost, like everything else in this strange world, wore a cap of snow. 

Grasping the lamppost in both hands like a lifeline, Edmund tipped his head against the cold metal and tried to breathe. He was alone in a foreign land without a coat or food or means of getting back, and he had no idea what to do. This was seeming less and less like a dream each minute, and he wanted, desperately, to wake up.

Behind him, a twig cracked and the forest came alive.

Chapter Text

Long is the road that leads me home

And longer still when I walk alone

Bitter is the thought of all that time

Spent searching for something I'll never find

Cold Is The Night by The Oh Hellos

25 September, 1940  |  10:09 pm  |  Professor Kirke's House, England  |  Susan

It was after ten o’clock and Susan was growing quite worried. Edmund had stormed off several hours earlier, after a poorly handled argument with Peter, and he hadn’t returned since. It had grown dark, and Edmund’s untouched food sat, cold, still on the table. Peter, when asked if they ought to be concerned, shrugged it off. “It’s not as though he could’ve left the house,” he said reasonably. “He’ll turn up eventually.”

Susan hoped so, but she couldn’t shake an odd sense of foreboding, as if something had happened that she should know about, but couldn’t quite grasp. That feeling was the reason she was still awake, sitting at the dining room table, long after Peter and Lucy had gone up to bed. The house was quiet now—even Mrs Macready had succumbed to sleep—so the sudden creak of the floorboards in the hall was clearly audible. 

A chill ran down Susan’s spine. “Who’s there?” she called, heart racing.

“It’s just me,” a voice said, and Edmund appeared in the doorway. Although there was no doubt it was him, Susan still observed that he was different somehow, so much so that it had taken her a moment to recognise him. It was ridiculous, of course. She’d seen him only a few hours before, and there’d been nothing remotely strange or unnerving about him then. He wore the same clothes that he’d worn all day, though covered with dust now, and he was still her little brother: short stature, dark hair and eyes like her own, expression set in an almost perpetual scowl. Yet, something had changed. Edmund stood straighter, shoulders back, poised as though an iron rod had been glued to his spine. Something in his eyes as he looked at her, though she didn’t know what, seemed older, wearier. His whole countenance had shifted in a way that Susan could not find the words to describe, as though he had gone from being a wallflower to the first person anyone noticed in the room. He looked like Peter, she thought, probably for the first time in her life. Despite being polar opposites in appearance and personality, they now shared the same confidence in their walk, the same importance in the set of their shoulders that said, even unintentionally, that they knew exactly where they were going. A complete stranger had walked into the room wearing her brother’s face, and for a moment, Susan felt afraid. 

But then Edmund shot her his familiar smug smirk and her fear eased. This was Edmund. This was her baby brother. What was she thinking?

“Is that for me?” Edmund asked, and Susan nodded. He pulled out a chair in front of his cold soup and sat, picking up the spoon and digging in gingerly while she looked on in amusement and not a little concern. 

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You loved that soup last week.”

Edmund shrugged, avoiding her eyes. “Guess I just don’t have much of an appetite.”

“Edmund,” Susan said, and there must have been something in her voice because he looked up, untouched spoonful suspended between his bowl and his mouth. “Where did you go?”

A strange expression crossed his face. “Go?” He repeated. 

Susan frowned. “Yes, go . You were gone for almost five hours. I, for one, was worried sick!”

Edmund’s face cleared, a fleeting glimpse of what was unmistakably relief crossing his face before disappearing. Susan looked at the blank mask that remained and wondered when her impulsive little brat of a brother had learned to control his emotions. “Just upstairs,” he said with a casual air that she couldn’t help but find suspicious.

“Where upstairs?” she pressed.

He raised an eyebrow. “An empty room. I doubt I’d be able to find it again, or else I’d show you. There was an interesting wardrobe that I think you’d have liked. Lots of carvings of flowers and such.”

Uneasily, Susan dropped the matter. She was an elder sister, you see, and that came with a heightened sense of perception and yes, suspicion, when it came to her younger siblings. Her ears were tuned to the footsteps that passed outside her door in the night, her eyes were always watching for missteps and stumbles, and as much as they complained that she nagged, she couldn’t help reminding them to remember their schoolwork and look for passing automobiles when crossing the road. It was as though she had a sixth sense for the goings on of her siblings, Edmund and Lucy especially. That included, most of the time, a sense for when they were lying. 

Edmund was lying. 

Susan couldn’t have told you how she knew. It was nothing more than an itching feeling that he was not telling her the whole story. Perhaps Edmund really had wandered into some far away nook or closet and spent the last five hours there, worrying her half to death, but if that was the truth, what was there to lie about? There was something he wasn’t saying, something he felt the need to keep hidden, and Susan had no idea what it could have been.

Susan was an elder sister, protective and suspicious of her siblings in equal measure, but she also knew when to keep her silence. She had kept Edmund’s secrets before—when he stole sweets from Peter’s pockets, when he received a bad mark in Gymnasium and didn’t want their parents to know, when he smashed a picture of their father in his anger at him for going off to war and came to Susan with tears in his eyes and a handful of glass shards—and she would keep them again. She knew Edmund. If he didn’t want to tell her what was plaguing him, what weighed in the set of his shoulders, then she wouldn’t get to know, and no amount of pressing him would change that. He would tell her when he was ready, and not a minute before.

Susan sighed. “Eat your soup,” she told him, and stood to leave.

She paused in the doorway, watching how Edmund slumped when he thought she had left. His head dropped into his hands and his elbows rested on the tabletop, soup abandoned. He let out a long breath that was equal parts sigh and sob. “Oh,” he said quietly, and she had to strain to hear the rest of what he said next.

“Oh,” Edmund repeated. “Oh, Aslan. What am I supposed to do now?”

14 May, 1000 (Narnian Time)  |  6:31 am  |  Western Woods, Narnia  |  Edmund

Behind him, a twig cracked and the forest came alive.

Edmund whirled around, putting the lamppost between him and whoever had made the sound. “Who—who’s there?” he asked, his breath escaping in clouds of mist.

There was a shuffling sound like footsteps in the snow, and then a great deal of harsh whispering between several different voices. It sounded like an argument. Finally, one side seemed to win and the forest went quiet again.

“Um,” Edmund said, feeling quite silly practically hugging a lamppost. “Hello? Is there someone there?

“It’s only just,” he continued when no one was forthcoming with their presence. “I think I’m lost. Or at least, I don’t know where I am. At the moment. So if whoever you are—if you would please give me directions to the nearest town? I would be very grateful.”

“The nearest town?” a high, mocking voice asked from the trees, and a few other voices made low growling noises that Edmund might assume was laughter if he was being optimistic, which he wasn’t very inclined to be. 

“Yes?” he ventured, staring fruitlessly into the pines, “I mean, I think so? A village would be fine, too, I suppose. Anywhere I could get warm, and maybe something to eat and some directions to the nearest train station?”

All the voices laughed again, and it was not at all a friendly sound. “A town,” one said. “Are you sure you don’t mean a castle, little dwarf? Does your witch not keep you warm enough now?”

“What?” Edmund blurted. “I’m not a dwarf.”

The voices had another whispered argument, of which Edmund caught only bits and pieces. 

“ Not a dwarf—”

“Stupid—”

“Of course he’s a dwarf—”

“—what is he, then?”

“The White—”

“It’s a trap—”

“It isn’t nice to talk about people behind their backs,” said Edmund, who was quickly regaining his courage and also excelled at annoying people. “You could just ask me.”

“Well,” said one of the voices after a long pause. “What are you, then?”

Edmund rolled his eyes. “English, of course.”

This set off another long bout of conversation, ending only when the first voice barked out an order for “Silence!”  

“Are you, by chance, human?” one of the voices asked, and Edmund was taken aback. Of course, he was human. What else would he be? He said as much to the collection of voices, making clear his distaste for the whole thing.

Contrary to their prior reactions, this actually caused them to go abruptly silent. The silence continued for so long that Edmund, teeth chattering and fingers numb, began to worry that the strange voices had deserted him altogether, alone in the middle of the forest. He had just begun to wonder which direction it would be best to begin to walk in, when the snow crunched behind him. All of a sudden, there was a sharp pain in the back of his head. 

Everything went blurry. Blinking sluggishly, the snowy forest floor suddenly very close to the side of his face, Edmund struggled to peer through the encroaching darkness in the corners of his vision. Weightless, he floated in the dimness, only marginally aware of the fuzzy shapes of people that had appeared overhead. Hands grabbed at his limbs, lifting him into the air.

The blackness rose up and swallowed him whole.

Chapter Text

Growing up, child

Is just a matter of time

So, won't you dance under the sun?

Growing old

Feels like you're giving up your soul

Growing Up by Run River North

30 September, 1940 | 11:02 pm | Professor Kirke's House, England | Lucy

The woods were dark and silent when the white wolf stepped into the moonlight. 

Snow lay thick on the ground and icicles sparkled on the limbs of the trees. There was no wind and no birds sang at night, so Lucy could hear every crunch of the wolf’s paws as it stalked closer, lithe and graceful and deadly. She tried to back away, but found that her feet wouldn’t move. She was frozen to the spot. Her heart pounded in her ears and a scream tore itself out of her mouth. The wolf lunged, sharp teeth and golden eyes gleaming, and closed its jaws around her throat.

The nightmare ripped like wet paper and Lucy woke abruptly. The room was dark and unfamiliar and, for an instant, she didn’t know where she was. Focusing on calming her racing heartbeat, she told herself things that were true. They were in the country, in the manor house of the old professor. It was wartime. That was Susan breathing quietly in the next bed over, and Peter whose snores could be heard through the wall. The dim gray light through the window meant it was only an hour or two from dawn. This was real. Real. There were no moonlit forests, no wolves. There would be toast and jam and hot tea for breakfast—no sugar, of course, because of the rationing—and lessons in the morning and perhaps it would be warm enough after lunch to escape to the outdoors. 

Sleep had just begun to creep over her once more when there was a creak and a thump in the hall, like a door being swung shut. Lucy was suddenly and unpleasantly awake again. Someone cursed in a low voice, accompanied by another thump, and she relaxed. It was only Edmund, probably getting up for the loo. But his footsteps were going the wrong way, up towards the stairwell instead of down the hall. Unable to quell her curiosity, Lucy slid out from between her warm blankets and picked up the dim candle that burned on her bedside table. 

Shivering in her thin nightdress, with nothing between her bare feet and the cold stone floor, she crept out of the room she shared with Susan, careful to let the door swing quietly shut behind. The hall was empty, lit only by the moonlight through a window and the solitary candle in her hand. 

A creak somewhere above her head reassured her that she hadn’t imagined her brother’s footsteps outside, so Lucy gathered her courage and set off toward the stairwell. 

She found him in a high attic room. The garret was unfamiliar to her, despite the many hours spent playing hide-and-seek the last few days. It was covered in dust and empty but for a large, carved wardrobe in the corner. Edmund sat on the floor, leaning against the wardrobe. Like her, he wore only his nightclothes but had evidently had the forethought to bring a blanket, which he had wound tightly around his shoulders. His head was buried in his drawn up knees and his shoulders quaked with silent gasps of breath. 

He didn’t react to her presence, even as Lucy sat beside him and pulled a corner of the blanket over her own lap, setting the candle in its holder off to the side so it didn’t catch the blanket. She didn’t speak, allowing Edmund the space to deal with . . . whatever was troubling him. Lucy had to admit, she was at a loss. Never before had Edmund been so vulnerable and emotional in her presence, except perhaps when they were very small children. 

The candle had dwindled to only a stub when Edmund finally spoke. His voice was muffled. “If I told you something crazy, would you think I was crazy?”

Lucy’s brow furrowed. “No.”

“Would you believe me if I swore it was true, no matter how unbelievable it sounds?”

Lucy laughed weakly. “Edmund, who do you think you’re talking to?”

He lifted his head at last, and Lucy had to stifle a gasp. His face was blotchy and wet with tears. His eyes were red from what must have been hours of crying. Her perfectly put-together brother who had scoffed at her for crying when they had had to leave Finchley, who had told her that Father Christmas wasn’t real and to stop acting like a baby, Lucy, was gone. In his place was someone unfamiliar, someone Lucy wasn’t sure she knew. 

“Still,” he said, staring at her so seriously that she couldn’t help but respond honestly.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.” 

“If I asked you to keep it a secret, even from Peter and Susan, would you?”

This was the first time Lucy could remember that Edmund had ever asked her to keep a secret for him, had ever trusted her with something as precious as his jealously guarded secrets. Lucy, contrary to what many believed, was not stupid. She was naive, perhaps, and tended to look for the best in people. She would readily admit herself that she could be quite gullible and trusted easily. She was, by nature, an open person who was unused to hiding even the slightest thing. But she was not, and had never been, stupid. She recognized this for the opportunity it was and did not squander the chance to grow closer to her aloof older brother.

“Yes,” she said once more, holding his gaze. “Yes, I will keep your secret.”

Edmund exhaled softly and his entire body seemed to melt with it, as though his bones had collapsed inside his skin. He turned his face away and looked at the large wardrobe behind them. In his eyes was something like desperation, something like grief, and Lucy wondered what had happened to give him the same look as the people who climbed from bunkers and tube stations and cellars to find their homes and families vanished beneath a pile of rubble and dust. 

Just when she began to think that perhaps he wouldn’t say anything else after all, Edmund opened his mouth and out came words like a dam breaking, one pouring over another in an endless stream. “Five days ago, I ran away from that fight with Peter and I came to this room. I went into the wardrobe, but the door blew shut. It was pitch black and when I finally found my way out again . . . I wasn’t in this room anymore. There was a forest, at dawn. It was covered in snow, like the middle of winter. There was no one there and I couldn’t find the way back through to your—to England.”

Lucy listened quietly as Edmund spun his increasingly unbelievable tale. Part of her wondered if this was just another trick, another fiction to relay to Peter later: Guess what I got our idiot sister to believe this time! But no—that wasn’t fair. Edmund hadn’t done anything like that in ages, and besides, there was no way he could—or would take the effort to—fake the pained expression on his face as he talked or the way his voice cracked. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

“I got lost,” Edmund said. “In the forest. I don’t really remember, I think I wandered around for a while. But then I found the lamppost.”

“A lamppost?” Lucy asked, unable to keep the incredulous tone out of her voice. 

Edmund nodded, laughing a little. “Yes. A real lamppost with a flame burning inside, just there in the middle of the wood. It was like it had just sprung out of the ground.”

“A lamppost,” Lucy said, unable to keep the skeptical tone from her voice. “Alright.” He was already asking her to believe that there was a forest inside the wardrobe, so she saw no reason why a lamppost was out of the question.

“Anyway, I was by the lamppost and starting to wonder if I’d dreamed the whole thing, when I heard noises in the trees. I called out, asked who it was, and someone responded. They asked if I was human, as though they were not. But before I could do anything, I was knocked unconscious.”

“Unconscious!” Lucy gasped. “Are you alright?”

Edmund looked at her a little oddly, like it had never occurred to him that he might have been injured. “Of course. It was years ag— Never mind.”

“No,” Lucy protested, feeling a slow, creeping sensation of dread crawl up her spine. “What were you going to say? Were you about to say that it was years ago?”

“No!” Edmund said hotly, then blushed, looking guilty. “Actually, yes. I was. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to reveal it all at once. It is rather overwhelming for me, and I lived it all. I know it would only make you worry to know how long I’ve really been gone.”

“And how long is that?” asked Lucy. Her heart felt like it had stopped completely, like maybe someone had reached into her chest and frozen it solid. He had said years. Years. Years wasn’t something you made up to fool your gullible little sister. If he had wanted to trick her, he would have spun a much less fantastical tale. Years wasn’t at all believable, which was exactly what made her inclined to believe it could— possibly, maybe— be true. “ How many years?”

Edmund sighed. “Fifteen.”

Lucy’s heart didn’t stop. It didn’t freeze. Instead, she felt as though it had simply vanished from her chest, leaving nothing but a gaping hole the span of fifteen years. Fifteen years that Edmund had spent alone, in the strange land he told her of—that he somehow wasn’t lying about. Fifteen years that left such a toll on him that it was visible—apparent in the way he looked longingly at the wardrobe and cried without any fear of who might see and judge his tears. It was obvious in the way he had so dramatically changed from a moody, irritable child with a mean streak a mile wide to a withdrawn, soft-spoken young man within the course of a night. Or rather, she realized, not within a night at all. Within half a lifetime spent in an entirely different world. 

Lucy was startled to notice that she was crying.