I Can't Believe How Many People My Age Or Younger I Run Into Who Haven't Read The Chronicles Of Narnia.

I can't believe how many people my age or younger I run into who haven't read The Chronicles of Narnia. If that describes you, you're missing out on something so deep and simple and beautiful and true that I literally can't stress this enough: please go read it. Read at least one book. They're worth their weight in gold.

It’s his birthday everyone give him a kiss

The Pevensies are foreign when they return home.

The streets no longer know them. They do not seem to fit in their own bodies as they stroll the cobbles, Lucy’s hand tucked carefully into Peter’s, Edmund trailing watchfully behind Susan like a shadow. Their eyes are sharp, their smiles crooked, and those who see them cross to the opposite side of the road, afraid of the ancient gleam they see reflected back at them that does not belong in the eyes of a child.

Water murmurs to Lucy when she flits past, and lamplight follows her wherever she goes, even in broad daylight when the lamps are unlit. Their flames sputter into existence when she walks by, flickering at her in a way that seems to whisper I know you. Lucy looks at them with feral teeth and smiles, and vines twist from the cobbles at her feet. She laughs like a wild thing, eyes glowing, but a moment later she blinks and it is gone. Her feet hardly seem to touch the ground at all as she darts through the alleys.

The sky is clearer when Peter walks the streets, clouds vanishing like they were never there at all. His eyes are too much like a lion’s, struck through with gold and filled with a brooding fierceness, yet he laughs as he twirls Lucy around, and claps Edmund on the back as they share a stupid joke, and smiles with Susan when she tells him of the bow she plans to carve. He is all warmth and friendliness, but there is something about his eyes. There is something about all of their eyes.

The sun caresses Susan as she moves about, and she is graceful, too graceful, her hair seeming to be alive of its own accord as she steps lightly along the streets. Her skin is pale like ice, and sometimes her gaze appears almost silver as she stands by the river, gazing into its depths with a distant, siren-cold smile. She is gentle, but her fingers look a little too long sometimes. Her laugh is a little too unsettling.

Trees lean towards Edmund when he walks past, branches scraping his clothing, leaves showering around him. Books and journals and pages covered in notes perpetually fill his arms, spilling from his grasp but never quite falling. His voice is even-keeled, quiet, but there is something wild about it, something unhinged. He speaks of things none have ever heard before, dark hair falling into his eyes, mouth unsmiling and hands perfectly still, and for a moment he seems to be someone else, fangs beneath his lips, dirt on his tongue. He tilts his head just a little too far, sometimes.

The Pevensies are foreign when they return home. They do not fit their bodies. They do not fit the streets. People who encounter them cross to the other side of the road to avoid them, terrified of the oldness they see in the children’s faces. Such depth does not belong in the gaze of a child.

And yet four sets of eyes, ancient and deep and flickering like candlelight, stare out from the children’s faces, and their smiles are sharp, too sharp. Their laughter is a little too wild as they walk, the oldest and youngest hand-in-hand, the middle children trailing each other like shadows.

There is something about those children’s eyes.

There is something about those children.

I love slightly unhinged/changed pevensie children headcannons. Even though it's not technically cannon, it's still cool.

A SAVAGE PLACE

because I just re-read Prince Caspian and remembered how completely different it is to the movie, and because it says Aslan is good but not safe and I think so is Narnia and, as they become part of the fabric of it, so are the Pevensies

“You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember.”

Trumpkin has never heard a silence so loud as this that follows his warning. The children glance at each other, crowding the air with a language he isn’t hearing. His skin prickles with it. He turns away from them, drawing his knife to begin skinning the wild bear.

Only a moment later, the smaller, darker boy is drawing his own knife and dropping to his knees. Trumpkin looks at him sidelong, uncertain.

“I’m a fair butcher,” King Edmund tells him mildly, and he plunges his arms in up to the elbows.

~

This is the story Trumpkin knows.

That once, Narnia was held in the grip of a terrible Winter brought upon it by a tyrant Witch, that four children were called by Aslan the Great Lion out of their own land to cast her down, and when they had done so the Lion crowned them himself at the shining castle of Cair Paravel, where the ruins now lie on the sea. That they governed so wisely and well that the folk of Narnia knew nothing of evil or hardship. That all was joy, when the trees danced and the animals spoke.

That the first of them held with equal steadiness the sceptre and the sword, that to him was given the crown above crowns, that every sovereign before or since stood but palely in the shadow of his glory. That the second of them surpassed all other beauties, that she was soft of hand and soft of heart. That the third of them had learned such wisdom on the path of darkness that his counsel was worth more than rubies, and the tongue in his mouth was as silver as his crown. That the fourth of them was the darling of the land, that laughter and lightness were her constant companions, that to see her smile was to be blessed.

In front of him now, the fourth is drying her eyes with dirty sleeves, and the third curses as he picks blood from under his fingernails, and the second scowls, tugging at her long hair, all straggly with salty air and sweat, and the first of them is building a thin fire with trembling hands, silent.

~

“Don’t say much, eh, that brother of yours?”

He is walking alongside Queen Lucy the Valiant, who is all of nine years old, wearing a grin and a dagger. They are following the tall one, whose steps are sure and make no sound.

“Well, of course not. He has to be careful what he says.”

“Don’t we all?”

He is chuckling, but she isn’t. Her face is young and pale and flecked with sunlight that shifts like a glamour.  There are moments when her teeth look too big for her mouth, when her eyes sit strangely, as though she has stolen them from another. Sometimes she is difficult to look at.

“Not like Peter does. When he speaks…”

Smiling, she spreads her arms wide, embracing the still trees and sleeping waters, the sky above them and the earth below.

“Narnia listens.”

They trudge on, and Trumpkin watches King Peter watching the clouds. He has never been so far as Narnia’s northern border, where the sky lies heavy and indomitable on the bleak, open land. He does not know what it would mean to be crowned for the blue mountains and distant thunder of the cold, still North; the terrible immensity of it. The carvings on the walls of Aslan’s How are flat and dead, fading under the dust of uncountable years. They do not show these things, and they do not show the High King’s lion-gold hair or his clear, calm predator’s eyes, or how at dusk in enemy lands it was once whispered that behind closed lips, his teeth were fangs and his breath smelled of iron.

The little girl skips ahead to catch her brother’s hand. The trees shiver around them, remembering the rhythm of her steps on the earth, the way she’d danced, mad and barefoot, her shrieking laughter in the night. The echo of it has hung in their leaves for a thousand years. Trumpkin sees them stirring, shakes his head, cannot help wondering if her voice, too, is threaded with this deep magic. It’s here in the very presence of these four living ghosts, in their fingertips and their footprints and the corners of their eyes. And though Trumpkin has never been a believer until now, he has heard enough to know that magic is not always sweet.

Behind him, the older girl is humming a tune that Trumpkin doesn’t quite recognise, though it catches in his ears like something familiar. There are no histories written of Queen Susan and the sly sirens, of how she would step from the sea like a drowned woman with her clinging hair, her deep-hued lips, to sing the music she had learned. The histories that remain crown her to the rich south, where the crops grow and the flowers open their delicate hearts for the indifferent eyes of the sun. As Trumpkin turns to look, pulled by that hypnotic song, she snaps a bloom from a bush of wild roses to slide into her hair.

She has not seen him glancing back, but the other one, the younger boy, has. Under his dark eyes, Trumpkin feels as pinned as if he were at the point of a dagger. Though they are far from the wild woods of the west, this is still King Edmund’s realm: the forest with all its shadows and its green secrets, laid bare when winter’s frozen hands come to strip them away. But now it is high summer and the leaves are thick, cloaking the woods in their mystery, and Trumpkin cannot see what is behind the boy-king’s sharp smile.

~

Time is long and wearing, and this is the story the Old Narnians have forgotten.

That Susan’s soft fingers had stung under the tautness of her bowstring, the first time she’d pulled it back to kill. That Peter had wept beside the corpse of the wolf. That Aslan’s maw had been red and sticky, dripping thick ropes of blood, and that the Witch had been beautiful, in her cold way.

~

“I have been told – I have learned about the Golden Age,” Caspian tells them later, shaky and fervent. “The legend. Of what Narnia was when you ruled it. It must seem like a sparse, savage place, compared with the one you knew.”

They watch him silently. Peter, whose eyes are bright and blank as a clear sky, and Susan with her full, unsmiling lips are already their own statues. After a moment, Edmund’s harsh laughter fills the darkness, and Lucy pinches him with fingers as sharp as any faery’s.

That night, Caspian puts the Horn where he cannot see it before he tries to sleep.  

Consider The Bison from Consider Chaos by @awesomeavocadolove

[Id: Black and white art. Zuko and Dragon. No a dragon, but the sky bison calf. Zuko in a straw of fresh hay, a newborn bison half sprawled over him, its sleeping body keeping him firmly in place. He grump, but his hand does not stop stroking the calf's fur and another one still holding the bottle with the pacifier. Calf have flame-like stain. End id]

thoughts on the Pevensies returning home

Peter Pevensie was a strange boy. His mind is too old for his body, too quick, too sharp for a boy. He walks with a presence expected of a king or a royal, with blue eyes that darken like storms. He holds anger and a distance seen in veterans, his hand moving to his hip for a scabbard that isn't there - knuckles white. He moves like a warless soldier, an unexplained limp throwing his balance. He writes in an intricate scrawl unseen before the war, his letters curving in a foreign way untaught in his education. Peter returned a stranger from the war, silent, removed, an island onto himself with a burden too heavy for a child to bear.

Only in the aftermath of a fight do his eyes shine; nose burst, blood dripping, smudged across his cheek, knuckles bruised, and hands shaking; he's alive. He rises from the floor, knighted, his eyes searching for his sisters in the crowd. His brother doesn't leave his side. They move as one, the Pevensies, in a way their peers can't comprehend as they watch all four fall naturally in line.

But Peter is quiet, studious, and knowledgeable, seen only by his teachers as they read pages and pages of analytical political study and wonderful fictional tales. "The Pevensie boy will go far," they say, not knowing he already has.

His mother doesn't recognize him after the war. She watches distrustfully from a corner. She sobs at night, listening to her son's screams, knowing nothing she can do will ease their pain. Helen ran on the first night, throwing Peter's door open to find her children by his bedside - her eldest thrashing uncontrollably off the mattress with a sheen of sweat across his skin. Susan sings a mellow tune in a language Helen doesn't know, a hymn, that brings Peter back to them. He looks to Edmund for something and finds comfort in his eyes, a shared knowing. Her sons, who couldn't agree on the simplest of discussions, fall in line. But Peter sleeps with a knife under his cushion. She found out the hard way, reaching for him during one of his nightmares only to find herself pinned against the wall - a wild look in Peter's eye before he staggered back and dropped the knife.

Edmund throws himself into books, taking Lucy with him. They sit for hours in the library in harmony, not saying a word. His balance is thrown too, his mind searching for a limp that he doesn't have, missing the weight of his scabbard at his side. He joins the fencing club and takes Peter with him. They fence like no one else; without a worthy adversary, the boys take to each other with a wildness in their grins and a skillset unforeseen in beginner fencers. Their rapiers are an exertion of their bodies, as natural as shaking hands, and for the briefest time, they seem at peace. He shrinks away from the snow when it comes, thrust into the darkest places of his mind, unwilling to leave the house. He sits by the chessboard for hours, enveloped in his studies until stirred.

Susan turns silent, her mind somewhere far as she holds her book. Her hands twitch too, a wince when the door slams, her hand flying to her back where her quiver isn't. She hums a sad melody that no one can place, mourning something no one can find. She takes up archery again when she can bear a bow in her hands without crying, her callous-less palms unfamiliar to her, her mind trapped behind the wall of adolescence. She loses her friends to girlishness and youth, unable to go back to what she was. Eventually, she loses Narnia too. It's easier, she tells herself, to grow up and move on and return to what is. But her mourning doesn't leave her; she just forgets.

Lucy remains bright, carrying a happier song than her sister. She dances endlessly, her bare feet in the grass, and sings the most beautiful songs that make the flowers grow and the sun glisten. Though she has grown too, shed her childhood with the end of the war. She stands around the table with her sister, watching, brow furrowed as her brothers play chess. She comments and predicts, and makes suggestions that they take. She reads, curled into Edmund's side as his high voice lulls her to sleep with tales of Arthurian legends. She swims, her form wild and graceful as she vanishes into the water. They can't figure out how she does it - a girl so small holding her breath for so long. She cries into her sister, weeping at the loss of her friends, her too-small hands too clumsy for her will.

"I don't know our children anymore," Helen writes to her husband, overcome by grief as she realizes her children haven't grown up but away into a place she cannot follow.