#narnia fanfic
Edmund has scars on his body. Peter does too. One or two on the arms, one or two on their backs, another on their legs. To see them—as a Narnian—you’d think of battle. Little nicks from a pointed knife, faint slashes from a curved scimitar, perhaps even a parting gift from an unfriendly beast. These are Narnia’s warrior kings, after all. Their bodies are riddled with scars longer and deeper and wider, scars from wounds only the cordial could heal. These are the showstoppers. What’s a few more?
But they’re notbattle wounds. At least, not that they remember. They’d brought these scars into Narnia from Spare Oom far away, and by silent agreement never addressed them. As the years passed they couldn’t quite place them, couldn’t point to them as they might to others—this was the edge of Prince Rabadash’s blade; this where the Witch pinned my arm to the ground; this where I lay dying on the barren fields of Beruna. These scars were not trophies. These scars they hid as though naked; these they refused to name, and here in Narnia in its Golden Years their name was fading fast. These were not glorious.
But here at glory’s zenith, one begins to descend. Wandering the far West of the world, happening upon a lantern post standing alone amidst a hundred generations of fallen autumn leaves—here at the lantern post, one begins to name. In the country War-Drobe in the land of Spare Oom, dream of a dream sharpening to reality where their finery transforms to wool and cotton vests and shirts, where their battle scars disappear with the abandonment of their battle-tried adult frames, Peter and Edmund are left only with those awkward, inglorious, thoroughly English scars and remember afresh the war from which they, children, hide: the war and its bombs that shattered the sitting room window, weeks and years ago, and the shards of glass in which they lay as Edmund snatched a photograph of a battle-tried father they’d forgotten.
