Narnia fic: "Dust in the Air" (29)
Jun. 30th, 2012 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Dust in the Air (29)
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: R
Content Notes: disturbing imagery, offscreen cannibalism, ritual human sacrifice, violence
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW. Dust in the Air does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). Thanks tosnacky for beta and handholding!
Peter Pevensie is fourteen years old and has the world in the palm of his hand.
Well, it’s not the world, really, but at fourteen it might as well be. He raises the snow globe to eye level, peering at the perfect representation of Narnia within, down to the tiny glimmering lamppost in Lantern Waste and the tattered remains of the Beavers’ dam on the Western River. Cair Paravel is a glittering white figurine on the coast, counterpart to the spiky shadow of the White Witch’s castle between its twin mountains. He can see the Stone Table, still unbroken. The rivers are frozen, the trees bare, the land white. He tosses the globe up and catches it again, sending snow swirling up and spiraling down again.
His hands are smooth, unscarred – a schoolboy’s hands, without sword calluses. They curve around the snow globe as if it had been made for them.
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
Peter whirls, Rhindon’s familiar hilt suddenly in his right hand as he switches the snow globe to his left. The White Witch holds up her hands, one of which is holding her wand, whole and unbroken. “I’m only here to talk, Peter,” she says. “Put your weapon away.”
He shakes his head a little, taking a step backwards to put the table between them. He spares a heartbeat to glance around, taking in their surroundings – his old campaign tent, with its rack of weapons and armor against one canvas wall, the table covered with maps of Narnia and a half-empty jug of wine, a pair of silver cups. Two cross-frame chairs, with lion’s heads carved on the arms. A curtain hides his bed from view. He can cut through the wall if he needs to.
The White Witch looks coolly back at him in all her splendor, in a dress like frozen water and a crown of icicles that stab at the air. White fur cascades over her shoulders and cold rolls off her in waves, making Peter clench his teeth together to keep from shivering. “Do you still fear me even after all this time?”
Peter stares at her, weighing his options. “Give me your wand,” he says, trying not to grimace at the sound of his voice – a boy’s voice, just starting to break.
She shakes her head, mirror of his prior gesture. “I need my wand,” she says, and smiles a little. There’s no warmth in it. “Trust me, Peter Pevensie. You want me to have my wand.”
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
They stare at each other, the woman who had been queen and the boy who would be king, and at last, after the Witch makes no move to strike him with her wand, Peter slides Rhindon home in its sheath. “Sit,” he invites, tipping his head at once of the chairs. He puts the snow globe down on the table and pours himself a cup of wine. “Do you drink?”
“From time to time,” she allows, so he pours her a cup too and pushes it towards her, a little wine slopping out from the vigor of it. The red liquid falls onto one of the maps. Peter, raising his cup to his lips, looks down automatically and winces: there are three splashes like blood on the map, one on the Vale of the White Bear, one on the city of Cair Paravel, and one in the Bay of Heroes. He runs his finger through them, smearing a thick red streak across the Narnian heartland, up from the High Reaches down to the Archen Mountains.
He downs the wine quickly and pours himself another cup, dropping into the other chair. There’s a sheathed dagger on the table holding down one edge of a map of the High Reaches, close enough that he can reach it without stretching. Peter doesn’t do anything so obvious as look at it, but he knows it’s there, and the knowledge reassures him.
“So,” he says in his boy’s voice. “What do you want to talk about?”
The Witch dips a finger into her cup, holding it up so that the red wine runs down her white hand to drip off her elbow, vanishing as soon as it hits her gown. “What do you know of the Deep Magic?”
Peter shifts, suddenly even more uncomfortable than he’d been a moment earlier. “The Deep Magic is what made Narnia. What governs Narnia – this world.” He glances down without meaning to, then up again. “You spoke of it once, the first time we…met.” “Met” meaning “the time you came to Aslan and threatened to murder my brother,” of course. He licks dry lips. “The laws on which Narnia was built.”
“Every traitor belongs to me,” the White Witch says, with a caress to the words. “And for every treachery I have a right to a kill. And you drew steel – you, a boy, a Son of Adam! That was the third time you drew your blade in anger, was it not?”
Peter’s hand falls to Rhindon’s hilt. “What of it?”
“You never used it,” she says, like it matters.
Peter bangs the half-full wine cup down on the table. “What do you want from me, Witch?”
“‘Aslan knows,’” she quotes, “‘that unless I have blood as the Law demands, all of Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water.’”
“You had your blood,” Peter says. “You had Aslan’s blood! What more do you want?”
“I want you to know that there are laws, King of Summer!” the Witch snaps, half-rising. Peter rises too, and they stare at each other, her hand on her wand and his hand on his sword.
“You’re dead,” he says through gritted teeth. “Aslan killed you – I saw him!”
“Even Aslan cannot kill one such as me,” says the Witch, so close that he can feel her breath on his face, cold as a winter wind. “Just as I cannot kill him. Only the Emperor-over-the-Sea can do that.”
Dead. Not dead. Peter’s brain is tearing down the implications like a racehorse on a steeplechase. They had never recovered her body after the battle – he supposes that he’d assumed that there wouldn’t be a body, that she’d melted away like snow in spring. That whatever had returned when they’d come back to Narnia in Caspian’s time had been something else, a ghost or a shadow – not the real thing. Easier to think that, easier to believe that she was dead and gone, not something that could come back, no matter what kind of black magic was used.
He turns aside, breaking the White Witch’s gaze, and drains the remaining half-cup of wine. “So you aren’t dead,” he says, staring down at the maps of Narnia. His Narnia, Caspian’s Narnia, Tirian’s Narnia. Two thousand years. The truth isn’t that this hasn’t been their world for two thousand years, but that even after two thousand years it’s still their world. “If you aren’t dead, then where are you?” he asks, not looking at her. He flattens his palms against the table, looking at the maps. The spilled wine looks like blood, splashes of red across Narnia.
The Witch slides her icy palm over his shoulder, her touch light on the back of his neck. “Not in this world,” she says. “But not quite in another, either. You might call it a prison.”
“But you’re here now. You’re speaking to me.”
“I am.”
“Why me?”
“Perhaps you ought to ask why you’re listening,” she says, taking her hand off him. “You aren’t that boy who didn’t understand what he was asking for when you challenged me for your brother, not anymore.”
Peter turns around to look at her, leaning back against the table. “Are you still the same woman?”
“I am not a woman,” says the White Witch. “And are you so sure that you are a man, Peter Pevensie?”
“What else would I be?” Peter asks. He reaches for the wine jug, but his hand slips at the last minute and it goes down, down, down, red wine pouring over the maps, all over Narnia, sending the snow globe slipping off the table and shattering on the floor in a shower of water and fake snow.
He and the White Witch both stare at it. Unlike before, this wine stains her gown red, droplets spattered across the blue-white fabric. His hands are sticky with it. The scent is thick in the air.
“Is this what’s going to happen?” Peter says, tapping his finger on the mess, over the wine-darkened image of the island where the ruins of his Cair Paravel still stand. “Is this what’s going to happen to Narnia? Blood – and eternal winter? After all we have done for Aslan, he’ll allow you to return, do again what you once did?”
The Witch laughs, a sound like ice breaking up on a frozen river. “Aslan? You really don’t understand, do you? Aslan isn’t the one who called you into Narnia. He never was. And Aslan will never allow me to return. Not while he thinks he knows the Deep Magic.”
“The Deep Magic,” Peter repeats. Back to the Deep Magic. He’d prefer politics, frankly, and he’s not terribly fond of those. “What about it?”
“There are laws,” the White Witch says and moves, fast as a striking serpent, faster than Peter can ever hope to be. Her wand strikes the space between his eyes as she finishes, “King of Summer.”
Peter opens his eyes with a start, his hands clenching on his horse’s reins. The horse – the warhorse Edmund had liberated for him, whose tack gives his name as Fix – snorts a little at the sudden movement, unsure of what it means. Peter leans forward and strokes his neck to reassure him, looking around to see if any of the others had noticed that he’d – well, for lack of a better way to put it, that he’d gone away for a little while. He hadn’t slept, he’s sure of that. It hadn’t felt like a dream. He glances down at his gloved hands, still feeling the stickiness of the spilled wine on his palms, getting under his nails like blood, and has to strip his gloves off quickly to wipe his hands discreetly clean on his trousers, even though there’s nothing to be seen there. He slides his gloves back on, flexing his fists and watching the leather stretch across his knuckles. The lambswool lining is comfortably warm against his palms.
The others don’t appear to have noticed his momentary – absence, Peter supposes – and from the position of the sun he hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes. He takes a sip from his waterskin, swirls it around his mouth and spits it aside to clear the taste of the wine, careful so as not to have the wind blow it back into his face. The harsh wind has come down off the northern mountains, still deep in winter, and it smells like snow and ice, sweeping across the desolate landscape of the High Reaches and sending tumbleweeds rolling along the earth before it.
Peter touches a reflexive nervous finger to the place between his eyes, half-expecting – what? Cold stone? Colder ice? But all he can feel his own skin, cool and a little chapped from the wind, and feels self-conscious about the gesture. He settles his hands back on the reins, letting his gaze flicker cautiously around him.
They’re well into the High Reaches now, far from friendly territory but also, fortunately, leagues away from Calormene-occupied Narnia, since not even Prince Bahadur is foolish enough to venture into the openly hostile Reaches. It’s beautiful land, stark and seemingly empty – not much changed from what it had been two thousand years ago in his own time. It seems like the only part of Narnia that is. It probably isn’t.
Even in his own time, another name for the vast western expanse of the Reaches had been the Scablands, for the odd scars in the earth that riddle the land – channels and potholes and rolling hills, the elevation varying wildly as some areas stab straight upwards, while others cut down. The Great River runs down through a canyon that had clearly housed a much greater river, one that from above looks like it had burst its banks, hundreds or thousands of years before Peter and his siblings had ever set foot in Narnia. From the air, the Scablands look like nothing less than the remains of a dried out riverbed, vastly maximized in size – like nothing Peter has ever seen before, in his own world or in this one. He supposes that if there were any place in Narnia that was going to play home to hosts of murderous cannibals, this Reaches would be it. Well, the Reaches and the Northern Marshes, anyway, and if unpleasant rumor is true, then both may actually be right. Neither had been true in his own time, but this isn’t, as he knows well, his own time.
The grasses have faded from the first flush of brilliant green that had followed the spring rains to a rather dull greenish-tan. Their horses’ hooves throw up occasional billows of dirt as they pass, stepping over and through spiky witch’s crown bushes and tumbleweeds. No roads up here. Nothing resembling civilization at all – Tirian’s ancestors had never dared colonize this part of Narnia; those that had tried, first in Caspian’s time and then later, after Rilian’s Ban had been lifted, had all died. Somewhere up here must be the ruins of the frontier fortresses from Peter’s own time, but after two thousand years they must be weathered away to bare stone, if even that. Only the mines might still remain.
Among the brown grasses and bare rock Peter can see patches of blue or green, pools of varying depths in the potholes and the numerous tiny streams and small rivers that run through the Scablands. Nearer into summer all but the deepest will dry up, but the spring storms have left the Reaches heavier with water than they usually are this time of year, every nook and cranny filled, much to the delight of the inhabitants. The dumb ones, at least. The others are apparently something else entirely.
“Peter,” Eustace says, bringing his horse as close to Fix as he can, “have you noticed that we’re being followed?”
Peter nods. “Great cats, I think. What was it that Tirian called them – the marozi?”
Their party has been shadowed ever since they left the diamond fort, small groups of great cats forming a wide, outspread circle around them. They must know that they’re being watched as well as doing the watching; Peter has noticed that different groups are more or less willing to be seen by the Narnian party. It’s not easy to spot them if you’re not looking; their coloring isn’t as vivid as the pure great cats of his own time, mostly shades of dull tan and dark brown that blends well into the brownish-green of the Scablands. None of them, singly or otherwise, has made any move to approach the Narnians closely.
Eustace touches the scars on his face reflexively, white against his flushed cheeks. “What do you think they want?”
“At a guess? They’re just here to make sure that we do what we’ve agreed to and get to the salt mines on time. Maybe they’re making sure we don’t get lost.” He glances across the Reaches again; only a few horse-lengths away is one of the abrupt cliffs beneath whose drop is a deep pothole. “Maybe they’re protecting us.”
Eustace follows his gaze. There’s probably nothing down there except maybe a few pronghorn antelope drinking at the pool, but the High Reaches had been strange even in Peter’s time, when there had been creatures here that hadn’t been found anywhere else in Narnia. Maybe they’re still here. “From what?”
“Are you really sure you want to know?”
“I really probably don’t,” Eustace shrugs. “But I’d rather know that not.”
“So would I,” Peter says, glancing around. “I don’t know. It’s hard to make any guesses based on what it would have been in my own time. So many things have changed. The Reaches look like they haven’t, but they clearly have – we didn’t have the marozi.”
“Lucky you,” Eustace mutters, touching his face again. He turns his horse back towards Tirian and Jewel, in the process trampling a small grayish-green spread of witch’s crown, a fragrant, coarse shrub that Peter has never seen anywhere else in Narnia, despite repeated attempts at grafts in the Southern Marches.
He hadn’t brought many people with him, choosing to leave the main bulk of the force with Lucy at the diamond fort. If the High Reachers plan on killing him, they wouldn’t have been so kind as to have invited him to a meeting. And besides, Lu needs the men far more than he does. Besides Eustace, Tirian, and Jewel, there are only five others: two archers and a small wolf pack of two females (one of whom is actually a deerhound bitch) and a male. Everyone else is needed elsewhere.
It’s a long day’s ride from the diamond mines to the salt mines. They had left before dawn, Peter kissing a sleepy Lucy goodbye at the gates. The marozi have dogged them the whole way, clearly waiting near the fort for their arrival and departure. Peter doesn’t doubt that there are still Reacher watchers on the fort, even if there are at least a dozen marozi tailing them.
By the time they top the next rise, it’s well into twilight. Out here it’s mostly rolling hills, not the scarring damage that marks the Scablands, though it’s the same kind of country. The potholes just come more rarely here. Tirian and Jewel, in the lead, pick around for the safest route down the steep hill. The three wolves are visibly uneasy, their hackles up and teeth bared as they look around.
“What do you smell, Aron?” Peter asks, leaning down in the saddle to address the male.
“Unnatural death,” the wolf rumbles, glancing around. “And the marozi. Those damned High Reach barbarians are here.”
“That’s good news,” Peter says.
“Speak for yourself, sire,” says Aron, walking in nervous stiff-legged circles.
“We’ve found a path,” Tirian calls. They go to join them, the horses and Jewel picking their way delicately downhill amidst clouds of loose dirt, each step sending pebbles rolling down the hill before them. The sharp scent of witch’s crown is bitter in Peter’s nose. The path isn’t much of anything, just a bare track scratched into the harsh earth, still with hoof- and paw- prints marked on it. Peter leans down out of his saddle to peer at the prints before they descend, scuffing them out. There hasn’t been any rain since the storms had left Narnia and these marks might have been here for days – or at least as long as the relentless winds that sometimes sweep the plains will allow them to be. They might have been here for weeks; they might have been here for mere hours. There’s no way to tell.
“Should we stop for the night?” Eustace wonders out loud, casting his gaze up at the rapidly darkening sky.
Peter flicks his gaze up too. He’s seen some truly marvelous sunsets in Narnia before, but tonight isn’t one of those nights, the sky so overcast that even the round curves of the full moon are hidden. “No,” he says. “We’re not far from the salt mines now. And I don’t think the High Reachers will appreciate it if we’re a day late.”
Eustace’s mouth tightens. They pause at the edge of the stream cutting through the narrow valley for the horses and wolves to drink, the humans looking cautiously around. No sign of the marozi, but Peter’s sure that they’re still out there, lurking in the land that they know far better than the Narnians do.
“Do you have any idea what we’re walking into, Peter?” Eustace says softly. Tirian, on his other side, leans over to hear the answer.
Peter drags a hand through his hair. “No.”
Eustace’s left hand is resting, probably unconsciously, on his sword hilt. He and Tirian and Jewel exchange an unreadable look, and he flexes his fingers, brushing them over the pommel of his sword. “We could be walking into a trap.”
“So we could,” Peter acknowledges. He glances up at the sky again. The heavy cloud cover makes it hard to tell, but he’s nearly certain that he sees at least one owl, and maybe more circling high above. There have been hawks and other birds the whole way from the diamond fort – not that that means anything, they could very well be feral or dumb, but Peter hasn’t lived as long as he has being reckless. Well, not all the time.
“They know we’re here,” he says, which makes Eustace look even more unhappy.
Eustace had been against this plan from the start. He taps his fingers against his sword hilt and says, “It’s not too late to turn back –”
“It is,” Tirian interrupts, looking like the words hurt him to say. He’d been extremely vocally opposed to this plan too. “The High King is correct. The people of the High Reaches undoubtedly know that we are here and if we were to turn back – if we were to make any move that indicated that we were going against the promise that Queen Lucy had made – then we would not live to return to Narnia. We would never leave the High Reaches.”
Jewel swears softly. “We should never have come here,” he mutters. “This land is cursed.”
“No,” Peter says. “Not cursed. The High Reaches are Narnia too – or they were once, even if they aren’t now.”
Tirian shakes his head briefly. “Not in my lifetime, or my father’s, or any of my father’s father’s back to Caspian the Conqueror.”
“It’s Narnia,” Peter repeats, and then, on instinct, swings one leg over the side of his saddle and slides to the rocky ground. He crouches down, pulling his gloves off and sticking them through his sword belt. Here next to the creek the sparse grass is bright green – just shadows in the gathering dusk, really, but it’s a nicer, softer kind of grass than the harsh stuff that accompanies the witch’s crown and the tumbleweeds out in the greater part of the Scablands. Peter slides his fingers into it, pressing past the grass into the cold damp earth, and closes his eyes. He can feel the shape of the land in the back of his mind, Narnia down to the bedrock, deeper, here and further north, further west, stretching to the furthest limits of her onetime borders – twice, three times the size that she is now.
Hello, he thinks – a greeting that isn’t quite words, not really, mostly emotions. Hello and I’ve missed you and remember me?
The land stirs. He can’t tell if it’s all in his head or if there’s something like a very small earthquake beneath the soles of his feet, but he feels the land stir sluggishly and draws in his breath. It pushes and prods, shoving experimentally at the shape of him, and Peter digs his bare hand more tightly into the earth, wondering if he needs to draw blood for the land to recognize him. Two thousand years is a long time, and the High Reaches hadn’t had the kind of reminder that the rest of Narnia had during Caspian’s time.
At last – at long last – he feels the reply course through him, not quite words but not quite not, either, deep and slow and steady: I – remember – you – High King.
“Peter!” Eustace hisses, his hand closing on Peter’s shoulder.
He opens his eyes with a start, keeping himself from overbalancing and tipping into the stream by bracing his hand against the grass. “What is it, coz?”
Eustace’s fingers dig into his shoulder. Peter can feel the strength of that grip even through his leather coat; Eustace has come a long way from the boy he’d been seven years ago. Seven years ago in English time, anyway; add on another five years for Narnian time. Twelve years.
Tirian has dismounted and is standing with one hand on Jewel’s shoulders, looking around. The two archers, Orris and Amd, have both strung their bows and nocked arrows, though they don’t seem to know what to aim at. The wolves are stiff-legged and snarling, staring into the shadows. Even the dumb horses everyone but Tirian is riding seem to have noticed the alarm, nervous and shivering, Peter’s highstrung warhorse stamping a little as he shakes his head, tack jangling.
“Can’t you hear it?” Eustace says, gritting his teeth as if to drown out the sound that thrums through the earth, reverberating up through Peter’s boots and his bracing hand. “Drums.”
Peter can hear them now: a steady deep beat, slow and steady; a higher, quicker rat-tat; the fleet tap of smaller drums; the tenor of an hourglass drum; the fast pounding of the huge, deep timpani. He can feel the drums as much as hear them, a steady signal from the earth beneath his feet up to his bones, the blood flowing smoothly through his body. The heartbeat of the High Reaches.
“I hear them,” he says, wiping the wet dirt off his hand on a patch of grass. He stays crouching, though, cocking his head to the side as a new sound joins the drumming, haunting and eerie. Panpipes.
“They’re close,” says Amd through his teeth, the shaft of his nocked arrow clattering slightly against his bow as he tries to hide the fact his hands are shaking. It’s a disturbing sound; Peter can’t blame him. “Are you sure we ought to press on, your majesty?”
“Can’t turn back now,” Peter says. He flicks his gaze upwards at the hills, hiding his start of surprise as he sees the fog rolling slowly down the Scablands towards them. Fog isn’t usual for the High Reaches.
“Peter,” Eustace says uneasily, his hand still gripping Peter’s shoulder. “If we’re not going back, are we just going to sit here all night?”
Peter shakes his head, but otherwise doesn’t answer. He feels distinctly odd somehow, the drumbeats pounding deep in his bones, his blood, his heartbeat; the panpipes filling his ears with their lilting call. He doesn’t quite feel like himself.
“What are they doing?” Aron demands.
Peter closes his eyes, breathing in and steadying himself on the ground with both hands. He hears Tirian’s answer as if from a very long way off, the king’s voice going in and out like a bad wireless signal. “They’re calling down the gods. A specific one, I think, not just anyone. They’re usually very careful about that sort of thing. In the Reaches they believe that the gods will come down to earth and walk among mortals, if they’re properly invited and properly satiated. They need to be hemmed in with rules and bonds, or they’ll walk free and wreak whatever havoc strikes their fancy.”
“And has anyone ever actually come?” Eustace says, his grip a steady weight on Peter’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” Tirian says after a moment. “Jewel and I were – guests – among one of the centaur clans in the Reaches for a few days several years ago –”
“I remember,” Eustace says. “You came chasing rumors of Aslan. Jill was sick and I stayed with her in the Western Waste while you two went north.”
Tirian makes a noise of assent. “They tried it when we were there. Strath – their greenwitch – told me that usually the gods wouldn’t come clad in their own flesh, but only in their spirits, wearing – they call it riding – the bodies of others for however long they remained. A few minutes, a few hours – never longer. They like human bodies best, but there aren’t many of those up here. That’s why they were so pleased to have me.”
Somehow, Peter finds the strength to straighten, letting Eustace help pull him to his feet. At first he thinks his vision has started to go, but he realizes that it’s just the fog, curling around him like a lover. “Well, let’s not disappoint them,” he says, gripping Fix’s reins as he splashes across the creek.
Riding in this muck would be a recipe for disaster, so they make their slow way up the rise of the hill on foot, following the sound of the drums. The fog is so thick in places that Peter can barely see a horse-length in front of him, but his feet seem to know unerringly which way to go, even if he stumbles over rocks or witch’s crown once in a while. Eventually the ground evens out into a plateau, which makes Peter even more anxious: out here in the Scablands, that usually means that a pothole is lurking somewhere nearby. He flexes the fingers of his free hand, trying to will the fog to dissipate as it slides warm and close around him. The drums are still pounding in his ears, the coaxing lilt of the pipes drowning out any other sound. He can’t even hear his own breath. The drums seem to have taken the place of his pulse, drawing him inexorably onwards.
“Peter. Peter. Peter, we have to stop. Peter, are you listening to me? Peter!”
He swings out his arm without thinking, jerking both himself and Eustace to a stop. The fog flows gently aside as rocks go skittering over the side of the abrupt drop at the edge of a pothole large enough to lose a giant in. Both of them had nearly gone over.
For a few heartbeats, he’s able to banish the sound of drums, although it’s promptly replaced by the sound of Eustace letting loose a stream of blistering, uncharacteristic profanity. Under normal circumstances Peter would be tempted to do the same, but this time he’s breathing too hard, staring down into the depths of the pothole that had nearly killed them.
Eustace grabs his arm and yanks him away from the edge, Fix following eagerly. “Are you insane?” he demands, peering into Peter’s face like he expects to find evidence of it. “Peter, we have to stop. It’s not safe to be wandering around in this fog, not in the Scablands, not when we don’t even know where we’re going. And I was saying your name for a good minute!”
“We can’t stop,” Peter says. The sound of the drumming is starting to return, a steady beat that’s now fit itself in behind his eyes as well as in his bones and blood. He does his best to shove it aside, but it’s still there – damn it, can’t Eustace feel it? Dragging them on to the salt mines?
Eustace’s fingers are digging into his arm. “You’re going to get us all killed!”
Peter twists Fix’s reins around his hand, letting the pain of the leather cutting into his skin clear away some of the dizziness left by the drums. He can tell that it’s only going to work for a minute or so at most. “Then you and the others spend the night here and join me at the salt mines when the fog clears. I’ll go on alone.”
“No.” It’s Tirian this time, coming up with Jewel at his shoulder. “This is the High Reaches. No one goes anywhere alone. And I’m afraid that he’s right,” he adds apologetically to Eustace. “I think we need to go now.”
“We’re all going to die,” Eustace says in tones of despair, letting go of Peter’s arm.
“No one’s going to die,” Peter says, slackening his hold on Fix’s reins when it becomes clear that the effect is fading. “They didn’t bring us here to die.”
“We’re talking about the High Reaches,” Jewel says in his soft voice. “The only reason they bring outsiders here is to die.”
Well, that’s certainly an unpleasant thought. Still, Peter finds his feet already turning towards the drumming, taking a few unmeaning steps before Eustace drags him to a stop. His cousin peers at him with suspicious, unblinking eyes, frowning the whole time.
“Peter,” he says softly, the way Edmund or Susan or Lucy might say it. “You all right?”
Peter shakes his head a little, glancing in the direction of the drums. They seem to have taken the place of his heartbeat, so that it’s all he can hear, all he can feel. “You and the others have a choice,” he says, for Eustace’s ears alone, though he can barely gauge the volume of his voice, the drums are so loud. “I don’t think I do.”
Eustace chews on his lower lip for a few seconds, while Peter grips Fix’s reins and tries not to twitch too much. The others are all watching him – the two human archers, the three wolves, Tirian and Jewel. He can’t tell anymore if the marozi are still following them, but he’s certain that they are. Of course they are. They’re probably being herded towards the salt mines. If they stand here for too long, the marozi will probably appear out of the shadows, all snapping teeth and almost-familiar faces. Not pure great cats, Lucy had been clear on that. Some kind of new species – crossbreeds of some sort, even though no one had even thought that was possible. Peter wouldn’t exactly protest if they did show up, since he’s been eager to see them for himself.
“All right,” Eustace says eventually, tugging his wool cap down over his ears. “We all go together.”
Peter nods, the pounding of the drums – like they’re inside his skull now – growing worse. He should say something, he knows, but he can’t seem to think that well, so he just shakes Eustace’s hand off his arm and starts walking without seeing if the others are following. He can feel sweat curling at the small of his back, running down the line of his spine, and stops to shrug his coat off, tossing it over Fix’s saddle.
The fog is so thick that he can barely see anything, but soon afterwards the land starts sloping steeply upwards. He hears one of the others curse – or thinks he does, but the sound is weirdly distorted, either because of the fog or the damn drums – but ignores it, climbing steadily, once almost tripping over a witch’s crown bush as high as his knee. Fix snorts at that, reins tugging at Peter’s hand as he dances delicately aside, but he’s calm enough under the circumstances, having barely batted an ear at traveling with three wolves and a unicorn.
Eventually the slope levels off. Peter pauses at the top, turning back to peer through the fog – it’s lightened a little – at the others, who are making their own way up the hill. The urge to keep on moving seems to have abated slightly with the fog, and while he can certainly still hear the drums, at least he’s sure for the moment that he’s hearing them with his ears and not in his head. Fix drops his head to clip at the grass while they’re stopped, tack jingling.
Peter turns back to reach for his waterskin, just as the fog drifts aside in front of him to reveal eight massive X-frames made out of wood, six of which have forms – sweet Aslan, people – strung up. He curses, shock driving all thought of the drumming from his mind, and finds himself grabbing for his sword before he steadies himself.
Four of the figures are definitely dead – two are only bones, a faun and a human. Of the other two, neither is human. Both are naked, one a dwarf with his throat slit and his blood spilled and congealed on his rotting chest. The other, a satyr, appears to have been skinned. Peter grabs for Fix to steady himself, resisting the urge to vomit as the harsh wind brings the smell to him. Fix snorts and prances backwards, unnerved by the scent of death; Peter can’t exactly blame him.
Eustace, the first to join him, takes one look at the X-frames and turns aside to be violently sick, almost losing his grip on his horse’s reins. At least one of the others does the same; Tirian just presses the back of his hand to his mouth, looking ill.
The two remaining figures are breathing shallowly. Both are human, both male, both naked, both Calormenes. Peter hands Tirian Fix’s reins and presses his sleeve to nose and mouth as he steps closer to inspect them. One man has had his left arm and leg amputated, the wounds burned black and bound off with bloody rags. Although there’s nothing where his leg should be, the space where his arm ought to be has been replaced with the missing bones, picked – gnawed – clean of flesh and tied into place on the frame. Peter can see the toothmarks on the bones.
The other man is seemingly untouched, aside from the yellow remnants of old bruises and a few thin red lines from shallow cuts, his extremities blue or black from frostbite. He had probably been a soldier, maybe even a tarkaan, though there’s no way to tell now. Peter starts to reach for his dagger, wondering if he ought to cut him down, but – this isn’t their place, and right now they need the High Reaches very badly. He can’t afford to piss them off even before they’ve been introduced, even if it’s the right thing to do.
Eustace is still half-turned away, rinsing his mouth out with water and spitting it aside. He turns towards the figures with jerky, uncertain motions, his hands shaking a little as he tugs his sleeve up to copy Peter’s gesture. “What the devil is that?” he demands, his voice slightly muffled. “I don’t – oh God.”
He barely gets his hand out of the way before he vomits again, apparently having spotted the toothmarks on the bound-up bones.
“I told you that High Reachers are barbarians,” Jewel says, his voice flat. He butts his head against Tirian’s chest, horn barely missing Tirian’s cheek and going just over his shoulder. Tirian doesn’t appear to notice, patting his neck in a reassuring sort of way.
Tirian hands off Fix’s reins to Orris, pushing Jewel gently out of his way. He doesn’t bother covering his mouth, just steps up beside Peter and draws his dagger. Even Peter doesn’t realize what he’s doing until the new blood is dark on the first man’s chest, spilling down from the blow to the heart as Tirian withdraws his dagger from his chest. He wipes it clean on a cloth from his belt, turning towards the second man, the one with all his limbs intact.
Peter catches his wrist before he can strike again. “No.”
“They will eat him alive,” Tirian says. Peter has never seen that look in his eyes before, and if he was a weaker man, he might be unnerved by it. “Just as they began to eat that other poor bastard and ate them.” He stabs his finger at the two skeletons. “Trust me, Peter – he would rather be dead.”
It’s the first time Tirian has ever called Peter by his name.
“We don’t know why they’re here,” Peter says. The drums are starting to return, a steady beating in the back of his brain. They make it hard to concentrate.
“I do,” Tirian says, turning towards him. “They’re offerings to the gods. The ones who’ve been eaten, anyway. The gods can come and take them whole if they wish while they’re here, or in pieces, but while they’re waiting the Reachers eat their flesh and leave the bones for the gods. They burn the fat – sometimes the skins, depending on the clan – to get the gods’ attention. Some clans take scalps for themselves – luck amulets. Not whoever put these men up, though.”
Everyone looks up, as if to check that both dead men and living one have their scalps in place. They do.
Eustace claps his hand to his mouth, looking as if he wants to throw up again. Peter really can’t blame him, even though he’s seen worse things.
“He would rather be dead,” Tirian says again, his wrist flexing in Peter’s hand. He looks abruptly at Peter, his eyes very pale in his tanned face. “Unless you want him to die in your name. Slowly. Painfully. Excruciatingly.”
“No,” Peter says, and plucks the dagger from Tirian’s fingers at the same moment he releases him. Tirian stumbles a little, looking startled. “I think we’d all rather he lived.”
He cuts the man down as quickly as he can, Eustace catching him as he stumbles. Tirian stares blankly for a moment, then pulls off his own coat and wraps it around the naked man, pressing his fingers to his neck to check his pulse. “They won’t appreciate this,” he says, looking up at Peter.
“What are they going to do?” Peter says, holding the dagger out to him hilt-first. “Kill their god?”
Tirian stares at them, apparently barely noticing Eustace and Amd getting the Calormene man up onto one of the horses, which tries to dance aside, snorting protest. He takes the dagger, probably without thinking about it, and then – he laughs. “We’re all dead men,” he says, seeming almost delighted by it. He jerks his head at the Calormene. “We can’t take him down into the Reacher camp. They’ll take it better if he’s just missing than if they realize he’s with us.” He grins at Peter through his teeth, sliding the dagger home in its sheath. “They’ll think you ate him.”
“What a delightful thought,” Peter says. He presses the heel of his hand against his forehead, trying to will the sound of drums and pipes away, then looks into the fog, which is thick everywhere but around them.
“Marozi,” he says into the night, ignoring the way the others stare at him, “I know you’re out there. I want to talk to you. I am Peter the High King, whom you call the King of Summer.”
He doesn’t know what he expects. What he knows is that he doesn’t want to be here, with five corpses strung up in his name to one side of him and the living to the other, with drums pounding like a second heartbeat and panpipes screaming come here in his ears, in a land that doesn’t feel remotely like his even though he knows it is down to his blood and bones.
“They’re coming,” says Jesla, the hound who has tried her damnedest to make herself into a wolf. She and her packmates tense, lips skinning back from their teeth, and Orris and Amd knock their bows. Eustace looks around, steadying the horse with the Calormene man slung over its back, while Jewel scrapes one hoof against the dry earth and lowers his horn meaningfully. Peter and Tirian stand shoulder to shoulder, Tirian with one hand wrapped around his sword hilt. Peter just waits, loose-limbed and calm.
This is Narnia, after all, whatever people think of it now. Nothing in Narnia has ever been able to hurt him badly enough to matter.
When they do come, sooner than he expected, there are four of them, great cats so mixed up and muddled that they resemble all and none of the pure great cats he had known in his own time. The one in the lead, whom he knows immediately is the head female, is built like a lioness, though perhaps a little leggier and with something of a leopard around her muzzle. Unlike a lioness her fur is striped and spotted with faint rosettes and tiger stripes, not black, but a brown only a little darker than the rest of her tan fur. She has a cream-colored patch of fur under her jaw, like a tiger, but there’s a thin ruff-like mane around her neck. Beneath her thick fur are at least a dozen ropy scars, with a healing wound on her left front paw. Two of her companions are spotted or striped likewise, while the third is an unmarked dirty tan.
The head female looks at Peter with an expression that would be uncertain on a human. “We are here,” she says. “What do you want?” She glances at the three wolves in clear disdain, acknowledging their presence and just as quickly dismissing them as unthreatening. Peter watches her gaze taken in the limp cloth-covered figure slung over Eustace’s horse, mouth settling into something like a frown.
“My companions need somewhere to pass the night,” Peter says. “Somewhere near to this place, and somewhere where they will be safe.”
“Safe?” she repeats, her voice rich with amusement. “You might be the King of Summer, but they –”
“Are under my protection,” Peter finishes for her. He shifts a little, enough to give her a better view of Rhindon’s lion’s head pommel. Her grass-green eyes flicker towards it, taking in the lion’s head pommel with no visible change of expression.
“Yes,” she allows, “there is a place they may stay for the night; I do not think that there is anyone there this eve. And it would not be –” Her mouth twists and her tail lashes, amusement clear on her expressive face, “– safe for any outsider to enter our meeting-place tonight. If they still live by morning, my lionesses will bring them to you.”
“If you still live,” one of her companions says, but the words are barely out of her mouth when the head female whips around, smacking her across the muzzle with one paw. The blow leaves blood in her wake; her claws had been extended.
“Be silent!”
“All ri –”
“Peter,” Eustace hisses, abandoning the horse to grab Peter’s arm and pull him back. He ignores the head female’s warning growl, dragging them both around so that their backs are to the marozi. “We aren’t splitting up, remember? Nobody goes anywhere alone. This is the High Reaches, where they don’t just kill you, they kill you and eat you, which ought to be pretty fresh in your mind right now.”
Tirian has joined them. “Trusting the marozi is like trusting the river,” he warns, his teeth chattering against the cold that barely touches Peter. “It will betray you if it can.”
“You know, I’ve actually known many trustworthy rivers,” Peter points out, and sees Eustace make a face.
“It’s a metaphor!”
Peter ignores him. “They don’t want me dead,” he says, “and all of you are tired; we’ve been traveling since before dawn. You need to take care of our friend.”
Eustace shrugs. “She just said it wouldn’t be safe for any outsider to join them!”
“I’m not an outsider,” Peter says. “Or at least, they don’t think of me as one. I’m probably the safest person in the High Reaches right now.” He grins at them, humorless; both of them glower back. He lets the grin fall aside. “Go with them. Find somewhere safe to hole up, see if you can get our friend conscious and find out who he is and if he knows anything. Join me at the Reacher camp in the morning. It will be all right.”
“You should hurry,” says the head female from behind them. “The summoning will not last forever. Were I you, I would not delay. Though far be it from me to tell Bittersteel of Narnia what to do.”
“Who’s Bittersteel?” Eustace demands of her, frowning.
“Me,” Peter says.
“I probably should have guessed that,” he scowls.
Peter turns back towards the marozi. Most of them look interested, the head female looks annoyed, and the dull tan one looks bored. He’s somehow grateful for that. “All right,” he says again. “Take my friends to your safe place, and I’ll go on alone.”
“No alone,” Tirian says quietly but firmly. “Jewel and I will go with you.”
The head female frowns at him. “You may not survive.”
“I’ve survived the High Reaches once,” Tirian says. “I’m sure I’m capable of repeating the experience.”
“He’s the King of Narnia,” Amd puts in, somewhat to Peter’s surprise. “You wouldn’t dare –”
“King of Narnia?” she laughs. “We eat Kings of Narnia for breakfast and cast lots with their bones, little man.”
“I would advise you not to do so,” Peter says. He doesn’t think she means it metaphorically. He puts his hand on Tirian’s arm. “Are you sure?”
Tirian doesn’t look at him. “Oh, yes. Jewel?”
“Yes,” says the unicorn, looking down his long nose at the marozi.
The marozi female shrugs. “Very well. It’s your funeral.” She looks around at her companions. “Iralo, Allet, take them to the Boneglass. They will be safe enough there tonight. And you, Bittersteel – you and your friends will come with me and Kebibi.”
Peter dips his head in acknowledgment and gestures towards Eustace. “He’s my cousin,” he says, “my blood – I advise your people not to do anything ill-considered.”
“Even though he killed one of the marozi?” she grins, showing sharp teeth. “And wounded me?” She raises her scarred paw. “Oh, yes, Son of Adam, we remember you. We all remember you.”
Eustace tenses. He doesn’t reach for his sword, but he shifts a little to a better stance, his hands curling into fists. “Are you telling me to watch my back?”
“I’m not that nice.”
“He gets hurt, I get angry,” Peter says in his mildest voice. “I believe you said we were short on time.”
She snorts a little. “Come with me.”
“Tirian,” Eustace mutters, apparently having given up on getting through to Peter. “You shouldn’t –”
“No one goes anywhere alone,” Peter hears Tirian reply, though he’s already turned away. “We’ll be well enough, Eustace. We’ll see each other in the morning.”
“Or we’ll all be dead,” Jewel says under his breath, his hooves releasing a breath of witch’s crown as he stomps meaningfully over a bush on his way to Tirian’s side.
The head female watches them sort themselves out, while the two striped-and-spotted marozi slink over to join the Narnians, hissing at the wolves like housecats at hounds. The wolves don’t seem to be any happier about the situation, and Eustace stares at them both like he’s wishing he’d chosen to stay out of Lucy’s room at his parents’ house that day so many years ago, and missed coming to Narnia after all.
“I don’t know your name,” Peter says to the head female as he follows her past the grisly X-frames, somehow managing not to look too closely at them. He’s had his fair share of looking at them today, he thinks. Tirian and Jewel follow him, and the dull tan marozi – Kebibi, he supposes – brings up the rear. They leave the others behind, making their way along what appears to be a small, steep path barely wide enough for a single centaur. The fog gathers thick around them within seconds, pressing warm fingers against Peter’s bare cheeks, trying to worm past the high collar of his leather jerkin down his neck.
“Shetani,” she says. “Head female of the Ratscreamer Hills pride. My mate is Harith.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Peter says politely, and hears her snort softly in response.
“I hope you are who you say you are, or you won’t be for long.”
“He is,” Jewel says, his voice a little eerie and distant, given his position behind Tirian.
After this they fall into silence. Peter can hear the drums again, as clearly as he’s heard them yet, and the wild, desperate wailing of the panpipes. They must be very close now, though he still has no notion of precisely where they are in relation to the salt mines; the fog has turned him about entirely. It’s so thick now that he can barely see Shetani’s round white-tipped ears. The heat presses close in around him, like Cair Paravel in high summer, and Peter reaches up to loosen the first few buttons of his jerkin, which doesn’t help much. His palms are slick with sweat.
Eventually, the path that they’re following begins to slope gently downhill, and as it does, Peter begins to become aware of other sounds, mixed in with the drums and panpipes. He can hear singing, still too distant to make out the words, and the sound of raised voices. As they grow closer the roar of sound begins to resolve itself into recognizable words.
High King Peter, High King Peter
Come and open the door for me
I’ve wet my sword and shed my blood
High King Peter, High King Peter
Come and open the door for me
King of Summer, Lord of Narnia,
You hold the keys to the Long Country
Here I stand with sword in hand
Blooded and battered in the shield-wall
Come and open the door for me
High King Peter, High King Peter
Come and open the door for me
I’ve wet my sword and shed my blood
High King Peter, High King Peter
Come and open the door for me
The lion’s path is clear before me
The gate stands locked and barred
I give to you my sword and shield
I lay down my arms before the gate
Come and open the door for me
Peter feels heat roll down his spine, something previously forgotten sparking in the back of his brain and stretching through his body with a feeling like a great sigh, a lion stretching out its body and extending his claws. He feels electric, ready to jump out of his own body, as if his skin is stretched too tightly over his bones. His sword hand twitches, wanting Rhindon’s hilt, and his shield-arm feels suddenly light. The drums pound in his ears.
They step abruptly out of the fog into a narrow bowl of a valley, lit by crackling flames of a dozen tall fires, stretching upwards towards the shadowed sky and throwing out sparks in all directions. The drums seem to beat down on Peter from all directions, echoing off the hills and reverberating around the valley. Dancing figures are nothing more than shadows before the fires – fauns and satyrs, centaurs and dwarves, wer-wolves and talking beasts, with prancing legs and upraised arms, their voices raised in exultation. Peter can feel the excitement rolling off dancers and audience alike, the heady surge of – there’s no better word for it – belief, all those people set on a single goal that strikes something deep inside him, so that his gut clenches as if for battle and his head comes up, crownless but crowned nonetheless.
In the darkness there seem to be hundreds of them, thousands of them, bare bodies slick with sweat and exertion in the firelight as they dance. He can smell wine and mead, sweet and heavy on his palate, and the savory scent of roasting meat; feels laughter burble unwelcome in his chest as a centaur rears and tosses a handful of salt into a fire, sending blue and green sparks dancing upwards. A satyr backs up and takes a flying leap over the tallest of the fires, barely clearing its top but landing cat-footed on the earth beyond, where he takes up a horn of some liquor and wraps his arm around a laughing naiad, accepting the offered kiss. Elsewhere, at what seems to be the central fire, not the tallest but certainly the largest, a massive faun with ropy scars across his bare chest stands and spreads his arms, wielding a horn whose carved gold edging catches the firelight in one hand and a sharp-looking knife in the other.
“King of Summer!” he booms, as the dancers pant and gasp, bare legs and polished hooves flashing in the firelight. “High King over all Kings! Hear me! I call you from the land beyond the Lantern Waste, I call you from beyond the cleft tree, I call you from beyond the Great Eastern Ocean! Hear your servant! I call you, with offerings of an enemy on whom to wet your sword, with offerings of food and drink to bind you to the earth, with offerings of blood willingly shed to call you to Narnia!” With this two sweat-streaked minotaurs thrust a bound man forward, shoving him headfirst into the flames as he screams. The faun doesn’t seem to notice, tossing the horn into fire after him. Smoke rises up after it, the honey-sweet scent of mead mingling with burning flesh as the man’s screams turn to moans and then, startlingly quickly, to nothing at all.
The faun drags the knife over his bare palm, shaking the drops of blood into the fire. “King of Summer!” he cries. “I name you and I call you: High King over all Kings, King Peter, Bittersteel, King of Summer, Peter the Magnificent, Peter of Narnia! I call you from the land beyond the Lantern Waste –”
Before he can repeat the invocation, an old centaur woman’s laughing cackle cuts him off. “He is coming!” she shrieks. “He is coming! The High King walks in Narnia again! He is coming – he is coming – he is –”
“Here,” Peter says. He isn’t even aware of moving, but he must have done so, because suddenly he’s there, standing with the fire between him and the faun, the savory scent of burning flesh and the sweet one of honey-mead in his nose. “I am Peter the High King, and I am here.”
----------
The Scablands of the High Reaches are based on the Channeled Scablands of Washington State.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Chronicles of Narnia movieverse/bookverse
Rating: R
Content Notes: disturbing imagery, offscreen cannibalism, ritual human sacrifice, violence
Summary: And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started. An AU of The Last Battle, some five years after that book begins.
Disclaimer: The Chronicles of Narnia and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to C.S. Lewis. Certain characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to Walden Media. Title and quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Little Gidding.
Author's Notes: Dust in the Air uses Warsverse backstory as a general rule of thumb. All chapters of Dust are posted on both LJ and DW. Dust in the Air does not use material from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). Thanks to
snacky for beta and handholding!Peter Pevensie is fourteen years old and has the world in the palm of his hand.
Well, it’s not the world, really, but at fourteen it might as well be. He raises the snow globe to eye level, peering at the perfect representation of Narnia within, down to the tiny glimmering lamppost in Lantern Waste and the tattered remains of the Beavers’ dam on the Western River. Cair Paravel is a glittering white figurine on the coast, counterpart to the spiky shadow of the White Witch’s castle between its twin mountains. He can see the Stone Table, still unbroken. The rivers are frozen, the trees bare, the land white. He tosses the globe up and catches it again, sending snow swirling up and spiraling down again.
His hands are smooth, unscarred – a schoolboy’s hands, without sword calluses. They curve around the snow globe as if it had been made for them.
“Pretty, isn’t it?”
Peter whirls, Rhindon’s familiar hilt suddenly in his right hand as he switches the snow globe to his left. The White Witch holds up her hands, one of which is holding her wand, whole and unbroken. “I’m only here to talk, Peter,” she says. “Put your weapon away.”
He shakes his head a little, taking a step backwards to put the table between them. He spares a heartbeat to glance around, taking in their surroundings – his old campaign tent, with its rack of weapons and armor against one canvas wall, the table covered with maps of Narnia and a half-empty jug of wine, a pair of silver cups. Two cross-frame chairs, with lion’s heads carved on the arms. A curtain hides his bed from view. He can cut through the wall if he needs to.
The White Witch looks coolly back at him in all her splendor, in a dress like frozen water and a crown of icicles that stab at the air. White fur cascades over her shoulders and cold rolls off her in waves, making Peter clench his teeth together to keep from shivering. “Do you still fear me even after all this time?”
Peter stares at her, weighing his options. “Give me your wand,” he says, trying not to grimace at the sound of his voice – a boy’s voice, just starting to break.
She shakes her head, mirror of his prior gesture. “I need my wand,” she says, and smiles a little. There’s no warmth in it. “Trust me, Peter Pevensie. You want me to have my wand.”
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
They stare at each other, the woman who had been queen and the boy who would be king, and at last, after the Witch makes no move to strike him with her wand, Peter slides Rhindon home in its sheath. “Sit,” he invites, tipping his head at once of the chairs. He puts the snow globe down on the table and pours himself a cup of wine. “Do you drink?”
“From time to time,” she allows, so he pours her a cup too and pushes it towards her, a little wine slopping out from the vigor of it. The red liquid falls onto one of the maps. Peter, raising his cup to his lips, looks down automatically and winces: there are three splashes like blood on the map, one on the Vale of the White Bear, one on the city of Cair Paravel, and one in the Bay of Heroes. He runs his finger through them, smearing a thick red streak across the Narnian heartland, up from the High Reaches down to the Archen Mountains.
He downs the wine quickly and pours himself another cup, dropping into the other chair. There’s a sheathed dagger on the table holding down one edge of a map of the High Reaches, close enough that he can reach it without stretching. Peter doesn’t do anything so obvious as look at it, but he knows it’s there, and the knowledge reassures him.
“So,” he says in his boy’s voice. “What do you want to talk about?”
The Witch dips a finger into her cup, holding it up so that the red wine runs down her white hand to drip off her elbow, vanishing as soon as it hits her gown. “What do you know of the Deep Magic?”
Peter shifts, suddenly even more uncomfortable than he’d been a moment earlier. “The Deep Magic is what made Narnia. What governs Narnia – this world.” He glances down without meaning to, then up again. “You spoke of it once, the first time we…met.” “Met” meaning “the time you came to Aslan and threatened to murder my brother,” of course. He licks dry lips. “The laws on which Narnia was built.”
“Every traitor belongs to me,” the White Witch says, with a caress to the words. “And for every treachery I have a right to a kill. And you drew steel – you, a boy, a Son of Adam! That was the third time you drew your blade in anger, was it not?”
Peter’s hand falls to Rhindon’s hilt. “What of it?”
“You never used it,” she says, like it matters.
Peter bangs the half-full wine cup down on the table. “What do you want from me, Witch?”
“‘Aslan knows,’” she quotes, “‘that unless I have blood as the Law demands, all of Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water.’”
“You had your blood,” Peter says. “You had Aslan’s blood! What more do you want?”
“I want you to know that there are laws, King of Summer!” the Witch snaps, half-rising. Peter rises too, and they stare at each other, her hand on her wand and his hand on his sword.
“You’re dead,” he says through gritted teeth. “Aslan killed you – I saw him!”
“Even Aslan cannot kill one such as me,” says the Witch, so close that he can feel her breath on his face, cold as a winter wind. “Just as I cannot kill him. Only the Emperor-over-the-Sea can do that.”
Dead. Not dead. Peter’s brain is tearing down the implications like a racehorse on a steeplechase. They had never recovered her body after the battle – he supposes that he’d assumed that there wouldn’t be a body, that she’d melted away like snow in spring. That whatever had returned when they’d come back to Narnia in Caspian’s time had been something else, a ghost or a shadow – not the real thing. Easier to think that, easier to believe that she was dead and gone, not something that could come back, no matter what kind of black magic was used.
He turns aside, breaking the White Witch’s gaze, and drains the remaining half-cup of wine. “So you aren’t dead,” he says, staring down at the maps of Narnia. His Narnia, Caspian’s Narnia, Tirian’s Narnia. Two thousand years. The truth isn’t that this hasn’t been their world for two thousand years, but that even after two thousand years it’s still their world. “If you aren’t dead, then where are you?” he asks, not looking at her. He flattens his palms against the table, looking at the maps. The spilled wine looks like blood, splashes of red across Narnia.
The Witch slides her icy palm over his shoulder, her touch light on the back of his neck. “Not in this world,” she says. “But not quite in another, either. You might call it a prison.”
“But you’re here now. You’re speaking to me.”
“I am.”
“Why me?”
“Perhaps you ought to ask why you’re listening,” she says, taking her hand off him. “You aren’t that boy who didn’t understand what he was asking for when you challenged me for your brother, not anymore.”
Peter turns around to look at her, leaning back against the table. “Are you still the same woman?”
“I am not a woman,” says the White Witch. “And are you so sure that you are a man, Peter Pevensie?”
“What else would I be?” Peter asks. He reaches for the wine jug, but his hand slips at the last minute and it goes down, down, down, red wine pouring over the maps, all over Narnia, sending the snow globe slipping off the table and shattering on the floor in a shower of water and fake snow.
He and the White Witch both stare at it. Unlike before, this wine stains her gown red, droplets spattered across the blue-white fabric. His hands are sticky with it. The scent is thick in the air.
“Is this what’s going to happen?” Peter says, tapping his finger on the mess, over the wine-darkened image of the island where the ruins of his Cair Paravel still stand. “Is this what’s going to happen to Narnia? Blood – and eternal winter? After all we have done for Aslan, he’ll allow you to return, do again what you once did?”
The Witch laughs, a sound like ice breaking up on a frozen river. “Aslan? You really don’t understand, do you? Aslan isn’t the one who called you into Narnia. He never was. And Aslan will never allow me to return. Not while he thinks he knows the Deep Magic.”
“The Deep Magic,” Peter repeats. Back to the Deep Magic. He’d prefer politics, frankly, and he’s not terribly fond of those. “What about it?”
“There are laws,” the White Witch says and moves, fast as a striking serpent, faster than Peter can ever hope to be. Her wand strikes the space between his eyes as she finishes, “King of Summer.”
Peter opens his eyes with a start, his hands clenching on his horse’s reins. The horse – the warhorse Edmund had liberated for him, whose tack gives his name as Fix – snorts a little at the sudden movement, unsure of what it means. Peter leans forward and strokes his neck to reassure him, looking around to see if any of the others had noticed that he’d – well, for lack of a better way to put it, that he’d gone away for a little while. He hadn’t slept, he’s sure of that. It hadn’t felt like a dream. He glances down at his gloved hands, still feeling the stickiness of the spilled wine on his palms, getting under his nails like blood, and has to strip his gloves off quickly to wipe his hands discreetly clean on his trousers, even though there’s nothing to be seen there. He slides his gloves back on, flexing his fists and watching the leather stretch across his knuckles. The lambswool lining is comfortably warm against his palms.
The others don’t appear to have noticed his momentary – absence, Peter supposes – and from the position of the sun he hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes. He takes a sip from his waterskin, swirls it around his mouth and spits it aside to clear the taste of the wine, careful so as not to have the wind blow it back into his face. The harsh wind has come down off the northern mountains, still deep in winter, and it smells like snow and ice, sweeping across the desolate landscape of the High Reaches and sending tumbleweeds rolling along the earth before it.
Peter touches a reflexive nervous finger to the place between his eyes, half-expecting – what? Cold stone? Colder ice? But all he can feel his own skin, cool and a little chapped from the wind, and feels self-conscious about the gesture. He settles his hands back on the reins, letting his gaze flicker cautiously around him.
They’re well into the High Reaches now, far from friendly territory but also, fortunately, leagues away from Calormene-occupied Narnia, since not even Prince Bahadur is foolish enough to venture into the openly hostile Reaches. It’s beautiful land, stark and seemingly empty – not much changed from what it had been two thousand years ago in his own time. It seems like the only part of Narnia that is. It probably isn’t.
Even in his own time, another name for the vast western expanse of the Reaches had been the Scablands, for the odd scars in the earth that riddle the land – channels and potholes and rolling hills, the elevation varying wildly as some areas stab straight upwards, while others cut down. The Great River runs down through a canyon that had clearly housed a much greater river, one that from above looks like it had burst its banks, hundreds or thousands of years before Peter and his siblings had ever set foot in Narnia. From the air, the Scablands look like nothing less than the remains of a dried out riverbed, vastly maximized in size – like nothing Peter has ever seen before, in his own world or in this one. He supposes that if there were any place in Narnia that was going to play home to hosts of murderous cannibals, this Reaches would be it. Well, the Reaches and the Northern Marshes, anyway, and if unpleasant rumor is true, then both may actually be right. Neither had been true in his own time, but this isn’t, as he knows well, his own time.
The grasses have faded from the first flush of brilliant green that had followed the spring rains to a rather dull greenish-tan. Their horses’ hooves throw up occasional billows of dirt as they pass, stepping over and through spiky witch’s crown bushes and tumbleweeds. No roads up here. Nothing resembling civilization at all – Tirian’s ancestors had never dared colonize this part of Narnia; those that had tried, first in Caspian’s time and then later, after Rilian’s Ban had been lifted, had all died. Somewhere up here must be the ruins of the frontier fortresses from Peter’s own time, but after two thousand years they must be weathered away to bare stone, if even that. Only the mines might still remain.
Among the brown grasses and bare rock Peter can see patches of blue or green, pools of varying depths in the potholes and the numerous tiny streams and small rivers that run through the Scablands. Nearer into summer all but the deepest will dry up, but the spring storms have left the Reaches heavier with water than they usually are this time of year, every nook and cranny filled, much to the delight of the inhabitants. The dumb ones, at least. The others are apparently something else entirely.
“Peter,” Eustace says, bringing his horse as close to Fix as he can, “have you noticed that we’re being followed?”
Peter nods. “Great cats, I think. What was it that Tirian called them – the marozi?”
Their party has been shadowed ever since they left the diamond fort, small groups of great cats forming a wide, outspread circle around them. They must know that they’re being watched as well as doing the watching; Peter has noticed that different groups are more or less willing to be seen by the Narnian party. It’s not easy to spot them if you’re not looking; their coloring isn’t as vivid as the pure great cats of his own time, mostly shades of dull tan and dark brown that blends well into the brownish-green of the Scablands. None of them, singly or otherwise, has made any move to approach the Narnians closely.
Eustace touches the scars on his face reflexively, white against his flushed cheeks. “What do you think they want?”
“At a guess? They’re just here to make sure that we do what we’ve agreed to and get to the salt mines on time. Maybe they’re making sure we don’t get lost.” He glances across the Reaches again; only a few horse-lengths away is one of the abrupt cliffs beneath whose drop is a deep pothole. “Maybe they’re protecting us.”
Eustace follows his gaze. There’s probably nothing down there except maybe a few pronghorn antelope drinking at the pool, but the High Reaches had been strange even in Peter’s time, when there had been creatures here that hadn’t been found anywhere else in Narnia. Maybe they’re still here. “From what?”
“Are you really sure you want to know?”
“I really probably don’t,” Eustace shrugs. “But I’d rather know that not.”
“So would I,” Peter says, glancing around. “I don’t know. It’s hard to make any guesses based on what it would have been in my own time. So many things have changed. The Reaches look like they haven’t, but they clearly have – we didn’t have the marozi.”
“Lucky you,” Eustace mutters, touching his face again. He turns his horse back towards Tirian and Jewel, in the process trampling a small grayish-green spread of witch’s crown, a fragrant, coarse shrub that Peter has never seen anywhere else in Narnia, despite repeated attempts at grafts in the Southern Marches.
He hadn’t brought many people with him, choosing to leave the main bulk of the force with Lucy at the diamond fort. If the High Reachers plan on killing him, they wouldn’t have been so kind as to have invited him to a meeting. And besides, Lu needs the men far more than he does. Besides Eustace, Tirian, and Jewel, there are only five others: two archers and a small wolf pack of two females (one of whom is actually a deerhound bitch) and a male. Everyone else is needed elsewhere.
It’s a long day’s ride from the diamond mines to the salt mines. They had left before dawn, Peter kissing a sleepy Lucy goodbye at the gates. The marozi have dogged them the whole way, clearly waiting near the fort for their arrival and departure. Peter doesn’t doubt that there are still Reacher watchers on the fort, even if there are at least a dozen marozi tailing them.
By the time they top the next rise, it’s well into twilight. Out here it’s mostly rolling hills, not the scarring damage that marks the Scablands, though it’s the same kind of country. The potholes just come more rarely here. Tirian and Jewel, in the lead, pick around for the safest route down the steep hill. The three wolves are visibly uneasy, their hackles up and teeth bared as they look around.
“What do you smell, Aron?” Peter asks, leaning down in the saddle to address the male.
“Unnatural death,” the wolf rumbles, glancing around. “And the marozi. Those damned High Reach barbarians are here.”
“That’s good news,” Peter says.
“Speak for yourself, sire,” says Aron, walking in nervous stiff-legged circles.
“We’ve found a path,” Tirian calls. They go to join them, the horses and Jewel picking their way delicately downhill amidst clouds of loose dirt, each step sending pebbles rolling down the hill before them. The sharp scent of witch’s crown is bitter in Peter’s nose. The path isn’t much of anything, just a bare track scratched into the harsh earth, still with hoof- and paw- prints marked on it. Peter leans down out of his saddle to peer at the prints before they descend, scuffing them out. There hasn’t been any rain since the storms had left Narnia and these marks might have been here for days – or at least as long as the relentless winds that sometimes sweep the plains will allow them to be. They might have been here for weeks; they might have been here for mere hours. There’s no way to tell.
“Should we stop for the night?” Eustace wonders out loud, casting his gaze up at the rapidly darkening sky.
Peter flicks his gaze up too. He’s seen some truly marvelous sunsets in Narnia before, but tonight isn’t one of those nights, the sky so overcast that even the round curves of the full moon are hidden. “No,” he says. “We’re not far from the salt mines now. And I don’t think the High Reachers will appreciate it if we’re a day late.”
Eustace’s mouth tightens. They pause at the edge of the stream cutting through the narrow valley for the horses and wolves to drink, the humans looking cautiously around. No sign of the marozi, but Peter’s sure that they’re still out there, lurking in the land that they know far better than the Narnians do.
“Do you have any idea what we’re walking into, Peter?” Eustace says softly. Tirian, on his other side, leans over to hear the answer.
Peter drags a hand through his hair. “No.”
Eustace’s left hand is resting, probably unconsciously, on his sword hilt. He and Tirian and Jewel exchange an unreadable look, and he flexes his fingers, brushing them over the pommel of his sword. “We could be walking into a trap.”
“So we could,” Peter acknowledges. He glances up at the sky again. The heavy cloud cover makes it hard to tell, but he’s nearly certain that he sees at least one owl, and maybe more circling high above. There have been hawks and other birds the whole way from the diamond fort – not that that means anything, they could very well be feral or dumb, but Peter hasn’t lived as long as he has being reckless. Well, not all the time.
“They know we’re here,” he says, which makes Eustace look even more unhappy.
Eustace had been against this plan from the start. He taps his fingers against his sword hilt and says, “It’s not too late to turn back –”
“It is,” Tirian interrupts, looking like the words hurt him to say. He’d been extremely vocally opposed to this plan too. “The High King is correct. The people of the High Reaches undoubtedly know that we are here and if we were to turn back – if we were to make any move that indicated that we were going against the promise that Queen Lucy had made – then we would not live to return to Narnia. We would never leave the High Reaches.”
Jewel swears softly. “We should never have come here,” he mutters. “This land is cursed.”
“No,” Peter says. “Not cursed. The High Reaches are Narnia too – or they were once, even if they aren’t now.”
Tirian shakes his head briefly. “Not in my lifetime, or my father’s, or any of my father’s father’s back to Caspian the Conqueror.”
“It’s Narnia,” Peter repeats, and then, on instinct, swings one leg over the side of his saddle and slides to the rocky ground. He crouches down, pulling his gloves off and sticking them through his sword belt. Here next to the creek the sparse grass is bright green – just shadows in the gathering dusk, really, but it’s a nicer, softer kind of grass than the harsh stuff that accompanies the witch’s crown and the tumbleweeds out in the greater part of the Scablands. Peter slides his fingers into it, pressing past the grass into the cold damp earth, and closes his eyes. He can feel the shape of the land in the back of his mind, Narnia down to the bedrock, deeper, here and further north, further west, stretching to the furthest limits of her onetime borders – twice, three times the size that she is now.
Hello, he thinks – a greeting that isn’t quite words, not really, mostly emotions. Hello and I’ve missed you and remember me?
The land stirs. He can’t tell if it’s all in his head or if there’s something like a very small earthquake beneath the soles of his feet, but he feels the land stir sluggishly and draws in his breath. It pushes and prods, shoving experimentally at the shape of him, and Peter digs his bare hand more tightly into the earth, wondering if he needs to draw blood for the land to recognize him. Two thousand years is a long time, and the High Reaches hadn’t had the kind of reminder that the rest of Narnia had during Caspian’s time.
At last – at long last – he feels the reply course through him, not quite words but not quite not, either, deep and slow and steady: I – remember – you – High King.
“Peter!” Eustace hisses, his hand closing on Peter’s shoulder.
He opens his eyes with a start, keeping himself from overbalancing and tipping into the stream by bracing his hand against the grass. “What is it, coz?”
Eustace’s fingers dig into his shoulder. Peter can feel the strength of that grip even through his leather coat; Eustace has come a long way from the boy he’d been seven years ago. Seven years ago in English time, anyway; add on another five years for Narnian time. Twelve years.
Tirian has dismounted and is standing with one hand on Jewel’s shoulders, looking around. The two archers, Orris and Amd, have both strung their bows and nocked arrows, though they don’t seem to know what to aim at. The wolves are stiff-legged and snarling, staring into the shadows. Even the dumb horses everyone but Tirian is riding seem to have noticed the alarm, nervous and shivering, Peter’s highstrung warhorse stamping a little as he shakes his head, tack jangling.
“Can’t you hear it?” Eustace says, gritting his teeth as if to drown out the sound that thrums through the earth, reverberating up through Peter’s boots and his bracing hand. “Drums.”
Peter can hear them now: a steady deep beat, slow and steady; a higher, quicker rat-tat; the fleet tap of smaller drums; the tenor of an hourglass drum; the fast pounding of the huge, deep timpani. He can feel the drums as much as hear them, a steady signal from the earth beneath his feet up to his bones, the blood flowing smoothly through his body. The heartbeat of the High Reaches.
“I hear them,” he says, wiping the wet dirt off his hand on a patch of grass. He stays crouching, though, cocking his head to the side as a new sound joins the drumming, haunting and eerie. Panpipes.
“They’re close,” says Amd through his teeth, the shaft of his nocked arrow clattering slightly against his bow as he tries to hide the fact his hands are shaking. It’s a disturbing sound; Peter can’t blame him. “Are you sure we ought to press on, your majesty?”
“Can’t turn back now,” Peter says. He flicks his gaze upwards at the hills, hiding his start of surprise as he sees the fog rolling slowly down the Scablands towards them. Fog isn’t usual for the High Reaches.
“Peter,” Eustace says uneasily, his hand still gripping Peter’s shoulder. “If we’re not going back, are we just going to sit here all night?”
Peter shakes his head, but otherwise doesn’t answer. He feels distinctly odd somehow, the drumbeats pounding deep in his bones, his blood, his heartbeat; the panpipes filling his ears with their lilting call. He doesn’t quite feel like himself.
“What are they doing?” Aron demands.
Peter closes his eyes, breathing in and steadying himself on the ground with both hands. He hears Tirian’s answer as if from a very long way off, the king’s voice going in and out like a bad wireless signal. “They’re calling down the gods. A specific one, I think, not just anyone. They’re usually very careful about that sort of thing. In the Reaches they believe that the gods will come down to earth and walk among mortals, if they’re properly invited and properly satiated. They need to be hemmed in with rules and bonds, or they’ll walk free and wreak whatever havoc strikes their fancy.”
“And has anyone ever actually come?” Eustace says, his grip a steady weight on Peter’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” Tirian says after a moment. “Jewel and I were – guests – among one of the centaur clans in the Reaches for a few days several years ago –”
“I remember,” Eustace says. “You came chasing rumors of Aslan. Jill was sick and I stayed with her in the Western Waste while you two went north.”
Tirian makes a noise of assent. “They tried it when we were there. Strath – their greenwitch – told me that usually the gods wouldn’t come clad in their own flesh, but only in their spirits, wearing – they call it riding – the bodies of others for however long they remained. A few minutes, a few hours – never longer. They like human bodies best, but there aren’t many of those up here. That’s why they were so pleased to have me.”
Somehow, Peter finds the strength to straighten, letting Eustace help pull him to his feet. At first he thinks his vision has started to go, but he realizes that it’s just the fog, curling around him like a lover. “Well, let’s not disappoint them,” he says, gripping Fix’s reins as he splashes across the creek.
Riding in this muck would be a recipe for disaster, so they make their slow way up the rise of the hill on foot, following the sound of the drums. The fog is so thick in places that Peter can barely see a horse-length in front of him, but his feet seem to know unerringly which way to go, even if he stumbles over rocks or witch’s crown once in a while. Eventually the ground evens out into a plateau, which makes Peter even more anxious: out here in the Scablands, that usually means that a pothole is lurking somewhere nearby. He flexes the fingers of his free hand, trying to will the fog to dissipate as it slides warm and close around him. The drums are still pounding in his ears, the coaxing lilt of the pipes drowning out any other sound. He can’t even hear his own breath. The drums seem to have taken the place of his pulse, drawing him inexorably onwards.
“Peter. Peter. Peter, we have to stop. Peter, are you listening to me? Peter!”
He swings out his arm without thinking, jerking both himself and Eustace to a stop. The fog flows gently aside as rocks go skittering over the side of the abrupt drop at the edge of a pothole large enough to lose a giant in. Both of them had nearly gone over.
For a few heartbeats, he’s able to banish the sound of drums, although it’s promptly replaced by the sound of Eustace letting loose a stream of blistering, uncharacteristic profanity. Under normal circumstances Peter would be tempted to do the same, but this time he’s breathing too hard, staring down into the depths of the pothole that had nearly killed them.
Eustace grabs his arm and yanks him away from the edge, Fix following eagerly. “Are you insane?” he demands, peering into Peter’s face like he expects to find evidence of it. “Peter, we have to stop. It’s not safe to be wandering around in this fog, not in the Scablands, not when we don’t even know where we’re going. And I was saying your name for a good minute!”
“We can’t stop,” Peter says. The sound of the drumming is starting to return, a steady beat that’s now fit itself in behind his eyes as well as in his bones and blood. He does his best to shove it aside, but it’s still there – damn it, can’t Eustace feel it? Dragging them on to the salt mines?
Eustace’s fingers are digging into his arm. “You’re going to get us all killed!”
Peter twists Fix’s reins around his hand, letting the pain of the leather cutting into his skin clear away some of the dizziness left by the drums. He can tell that it’s only going to work for a minute or so at most. “Then you and the others spend the night here and join me at the salt mines when the fog clears. I’ll go on alone.”
“No.” It’s Tirian this time, coming up with Jewel at his shoulder. “This is the High Reaches. No one goes anywhere alone. And I’m afraid that he’s right,” he adds apologetically to Eustace. “I think we need to go now.”
“We’re all going to die,” Eustace says in tones of despair, letting go of Peter’s arm.
“No one’s going to die,” Peter says, slackening his hold on Fix’s reins when it becomes clear that the effect is fading. “They didn’t bring us here to die.”
“We’re talking about the High Reaches,” Jewel says in his soft voice. “The only reason they bring outsiders here is to die.”
Well, that’s certainly an unpleasant thought. Still, Peter finds his feet already turning towards the drumming, taking a few unmeaning steps before Eustace drags him to a stop. His cousin peers at him with suspicious, unblinking eyes, frowning the whole time.
“Peter,” he says softly, the way Edmund or Susan or Lucy might say it. “You all right?”
Peter shakes his head a little, glancing in the direction of the drums. They seem to have taken the place of his heartbeat, so that it’s all he can hear, all he can feel. “You and the others have a choice,” he says, for Eustace’s ears alone, though he can barely gauge the volume of his voice, the drums are so loud. “I don’t think I do.”
Eustace chews on his lower lip for a few seconds, while Peter grips Fix’s reins and tries not to twitch too much. The others are all watching him – the two human archers, the three wolves, Tirian and Jewel. He can’t tell anymore if the marozi are still following them, but he’s certain that they are. Of course they are. They’re probably being herded towards the salt mines. If they stand here for too long, the marozi will probably appear out of the shadows, all snapping teeth and almost-familiar faces. Not pure great cats, Lucy had been clear on that. Some kind of new species – crossbreeds of some sort, even though no one had even thought that was possible. Peter wouldn’t exactly protest if they did show up, since he’s been eager to see them for himself.
“All right,” Eustace says eventually, tugging his wool cap down over his ears. “We all go together.”
Peter nods, the pounding of the drums – like they’re inside his skull now – growing worse. He should say something, he knows, but he can’t seem to think that well, so he just shakes Eustace’s hand off his arm and starts walking without seeing if the others are following. He can feel sweat curling at the small of his back, running down the line of his spine, and stops to shrug his coat off, tossing it over Fix’s saddle.
The fog is so thick that he can barely see anything, but soon afterwards the land starts sloping steeply upwards. He hears one of the others curse – or thinks he does, but the sound is weirdly distorted, either because of the fog or the damn drums – but ignores it, climbing steadily, once almost tripping over a witch’s crown bush as high as his knee. Fix snorts at that, reins tugging at Peter’s hand as he dances delicately aside, but he’s calm enough under the circumstances, having barely batted an ear at traveling with three wolves and a unicorn.
Eventually the slope levels off. Peter pauses at the top, turning back to peer through the fog – it’s lightened a little – at the others, who are making their own way up the hill. The urge to keep on moving seems to have abated slightly with the fog, and while he can certainly still hear the drums, at least he’s sure for the moment that he’s hearing them with his ears and not in his head. Fix drops his head to clip at the grass while they’re stopped, tack jingling.
Peter turns back to reach for his waterskin, just as the fog drifts aside in front of him to reveal eight massive X-frames made out of wood, six of which have forms – sweet Aslan, people – strung up. He curses, shock driving all thought of the drumming from his mind, and finds himself grabbing for his sword before he steadies himself.
Four of the figures are definitely dead – two are only bones, a faun and a human. Of the other two, neither is human. Both are naked, one a dwarf with his throat slit and his blood spilled and congealed on his rotting chest. The other, a satyr, appears to have been skinned. Peter grabs for Fix to steady himself, resisting the urge to vomit as the harsh wind brings the smell to him. Fix snorts and prances backwards, unnerved by the scent of death; Peter can’t exactly blame him.
Eustace, the first to join him, takes one look at the X-frames and turns aside to be violently sick, almost losing his grip on his horse’s reins. At least one of the others does the same; Tirian just presses the back of his hand to his mouth, looking ill.
The two remaining figures are breathing shallowly. Both are human, both male, both naked, both Calormenes. Peter hands Tirian Fix’s reins and presses his sleeve to nose and mouth as he steps closer to inspect them. One man has had his left arm and leg amputated, the wounds burned black and bound off with bloody rags. Although there’s nothing where his leg should be, the space where his arm ought to be has been replaced with the missing bones, picked – gnawed – clean of flesh and tied into place on the frame. Peter can see the toothmarks on the bones.
The other man is seemingly untouched, aside from the yellow remnants of old bruises and a few thin red lines from shallow cuts, his extremities blue or black from frostbite. He had probably been a soldier, maybe even a tarkaan, though there’s no way to tell now. Peter starts to reach for his dagger, wondering if he ought to cut him down, but – this isn’t their place, and right now they need the High Reaches very badly. He can’t afford to piss them off even before they’ve been introduced, even if it’s the right thing to do.
Eustace is still half-turned away, rinsing his mouth out with water and spitting it aside. He turns towards the figures with jerky, uncertain motions, his hands shaking a little as he tugs his sleeve up to copy Peter’s gesture. “What the devil is that?” he demands, his voice slightly muffled. “I don’t – oh God.”
He barely gets his hand out of the way before he vomits again, apparently having spotted the toothmarks on the bound-up bones.
“I told you that High Reachers are barbarians,” Jewel says, his voice flat. He butts his head against Tirian’s chest, horn barely missing Tirian’s cheek and going just over his shoulder. Tirian doesn’t appear to notice, patting his neck in a reassuring sort of way.
Tirian hands off Fix’s reins to Orris, pushing Jewel gently out of his way. He doesn’t bother covering his mouth, just steps up beside Peter and draws his dagger. Even Peter doesn’t realize what he’s doing until the new blood is dark on the first man’s chest, spilling down from the blow to the heart as Tirian withdraws his dagger from his chest. He wipes it clean on a cloth from his belt, turning towards the second man, the one with all his limbs intact.
Peter catches his wrist before he can strike again. “No.”
“They will eat him alive,” Tirian says. Peter has never seen that look in his eyes before, and if he was a weaker man, he might be unnerved by it. “Just as they began to eat that other poor bastard and ate them.” He stabs his finger at the two skeletons. “Trust me, Peter – he would rather be dead.”
It’s the first time Tirian has ever called Peter by his name.
“We don’t know why they’re here,” Peter says. The drums are starting to return, a steady beating in the back of his brain. They make it hard to concentrate.
“I do,” Tirian says, turning towards him. “They’re offerings to the gods. The ones who’ve been eaten, anyway. The gods can come and take them whole if they wish while they’re here, or in pieces, but while they’re waiting the Reachers eat their flesh and leave the bones for the gods. They burn the fat – sometimes the skins, depending on the clan – to get the gods’ attention. Some clans take scalps for themselves – luck amulets. Not whoever put these men up, though.”
Everyone looks up, as if to check that both dead men and living one have their scalps in place. They do.
Eustace claps his hand to his mouth, looking as if he wants to throw up again. Peter really can’t blame him, even though he’s seen worse things.
“He would rather be dead,” Tirian says again, his wrist flexing in Peter’s hand. He looks abruptly at Peter, his eyes very pale in his tanned face. “Unless you want him to die in your name. Slowly. Painfully. Excruciatingly.”
“No,” Peter says, and plucks the dagger from Tirian’s fingers at the same moment he releases him. Tirian stumbles a little, looking startled. “I think we’d all rather he lived.”
He cuts the man down as quickly as he can, Eustace catching him as he stumbles. Tirian stares blankly for a moment, then pulls off his own coat and wraps it around the naked man, pressing his fingers to his neck to check his pulse. “They won’t appreciate this,” he says, looking up at Peter.
“What are they going to do?” Peter says, holding the dagger out to him hilt-first. “Kill their god?”
Tirian stares at them, apparently barely noticing Eustace and Amd getting the Calormene man up onto one of the horses, which tries to dance aside, snorting protest. He takes the dagger, probably without thinking about it, and then – he laughs. “We’re all dead men,” he says, seeming almost delighted by it. He jerks his head at the Calormene. “We can’t take him down into the Reacher camp. They’ll take it better if he’s just missing than if they realize he’s with us.” He grins at Peter through his teeth, sliding the dagger home in its sheath. “They’ll think you ate him.”
“What a delightful thought,” Peter says. He presses the heel of his hand against his forehead, trying to will the sound of drums and pipes away, then looks into the fog, which is thick everywhere but around them.
“Marozi,” he says into the night, ignoring the way the others stare at him, “I know you’re out there. I want to talk to you. I am Peter the High King, whom you call the King of Summer.”
He doesn’t know what he expects. What he knows is that he doesn’t want to be here, with five corpses strung up in his name to one side of him and the living to the other, with drums pounding like a second heartbeat and panpipes screaming come here in his ears, in a land that doesn’t feel remotely like his even though he knows it is down to his blood and bones.
“They’re coming,” says Jesla, the hound who has tried her damnedest to make herself into a wolf. She and her packmates tense, lips skinning back from their teeth, and Orris and Amd knock their bows. Eustace looks around, steadying the horse with the Calormene man slung over its back, while Jewel scrapes one hoof against the dry earth and lowers his horn meaningfully. Peter and Tirian stand shoulder to shoulder, Tirian with one hand wrapped around his sword hilt. Peter just waits, loose-limbed and calm.
This is Narnia, after all, whatever people think of it now. Nothing in Narnia has ever been able to hurt him badly enough to matter.
When they do come, sooner than he expected, there are four of them, great cats so mixed up and muddled that they resemble all and none of the pure great cats he had known in his own time. The one in the lead, whom he knows immediately is the head female, is built like a lioness, though perhaps a little leggier and with something of a leopard around her muzzle. Unlike a lioness her fur is striped and spotted with faint rosettes and tiger stripes, not black, but a brown only a little darker than the rest of her tan fur. She has a cream-colored patch of fur under her jaw, like a tiger, but there’s a thin ruff-like mane around her neck. Beneath her thick fur are at least a dozen ropy scars, with a healing wound on her left front paw. Two of her companions are spotted or striped likewise, while the third is an unmarked dirty tan.
The head female looks at Peter with an expression that would be uncertain on a human. “We are here,” she says. “What do you want?” She glances at the three wolves in clear disdain, acknowledging their presence and just as quickly dismissing them as unthreatening. Peter watches her gaze taken in the limp cloth-covered figure slung over Eustace’s horse, mouth settling into something like a frown.
“My companions need somewhere to pass the night,” Peter says. “Somewhere near to this place, and somewhere where they will be safe.”
“Safe?” she repeats, her voice rich with amusement. “You might be the King of Summer, but they –”
“Are under my protection,” Peter finishes for her. He shifts a little, enough to give her a better view of Rhindon’s lion’s head pommel. Her grass-green eyes flicker towards it, taking in the lion’s head pommel with no visible change of expression.
“Yes,” she allows, “there is a place they may stay for the night; I do not think that there is anyone there this eve. And it would not be –” Her mouth twists and her tail lashes, amusement clear on her expressive face, “– safe for any outsider to enter our meeting-place tonight. If they still live by morning, my lionesses will bring them to you.”
“If you still live,” one of her companions says, but the words are barely out of her mouth when the head female whips around, smacking her across the muzzle with one paw. The blow leaves blood in her wake; her claws had been extended.
“Be silent!”
“All ri –”
“Peter,” Eustace hisses, abandoning the horse to grab Peter’s arm and pull him back. He ignores the head female’s warning growl, dragging them both around so that their backs are to the marozi. “We aren’t splitting up, remember? Nobody goes anywhere alone. This is the High Reaches, where they don’t just kill you, they kill you and eat you, which ought to be pretty fresh in your mind right now.”
Tirian has joined them. “Trusting the marozi is like trusting the river,” he warns, his teeth chattering against the cold that barely touches Peter. “It will betray you if it can.”
“You know, I’ve actually known many trustworthy rivers,” Peter points out, and sees Eustace make a face.
“It’s a metaphor!”
Peter ignores him. “They don’t want me dead,” he says, “and all of you are tired; we’ve been traveling since before dawn. You need to take care of our friend.”
Eustace shrugs. “She just said it wouldn’t be safe for any outsider to join them!”
“I’m not an outsider,” Peter says. “Or at least, they don’t think of me as one. I’m probably the safest person in the High Reaches right now.” He grins at them, humorless; both of them glower back. He lets the grin fall aside. “Go with them. Find somewhere safe to hole up, see if you can get our friend conscious and find out who he is and if he knows anything. Join me at the Reacher camp in the morning. It will be all right.”
“You should hurry,” says the head female from behind them. “The summoning will not last forever. Were I you, I would not delay. Though far be it from me to tell Bittersteel of Narnia what to do.”
“Who’s Bittersteel?” Eustace demands of her, frowning.
“Me,” Peter says.
“I probably should have guessed that,” he scowls.
Peter turns back towards the marozi. Most of them look interested, the head female looks annoyed, and the dull tan one looks bored. He’s somehow grateful for that. “All right,” he says again. “Take my friends to your safe place, and I’ll go on alone.”
“No alone,” Tirian says quietly but firmly. “Jewel and I will go with you.”
The head female frowns at him. “You may not survive.”
“I’ve survived the High Reaches once,” Tirian says. “I’m sure I’m capable of repeating the experience.”
“He’s the King of Narnia,” Amd puts in, somewhat to Peter’s surprise. “You wouldn’t dare –”
“King of Narnia?” she laughs. “We eat Kings of Narnia for breakfast and cast lots with their bones, little man.”
“I would advise you not to do so,” Peter says. He doesn’t think she means it metaphorically. He puts his hand on Tirian’s arm. “Are you sure?”
Tirian doesn’t look at him. “Oh, yes. Jewel?”
“Yes,” says the unicorn, looking down his long nose at the marozi.
The marozi female shrugs. “Very well. It’s your funeral.” She looks around at her companions. “Iralo, Allet, take them to the Boneglass. They will be safe enough there tonight. And you, Bittersteel – you and your friends will come with me and Kebibi.”
Peter dips his head in acknowledgment and gestures towards Eustace. “He’s my cousin,” he says, “my blood – I advise your people not to do anything ill-considered.”
“Even though he killed one of the marozi?” she grins, showing sharp teeth. “And wounded me?” She raises her scarred paw. “Oh, yes, Son of Adam, we remember you. We all remember you.”
Eustace tenses. He doesn’t reach for his sword, but he shifts a little to a better stance, his hands curling into fists. “Are you telling me to watch my back?”
“I’m not that nice.”
“He gets hurt, I get angry,” Peter says in his mildest voice. “I believe you said we were short on time.”
She snorts a little. “Come with me.”
“Tirian,” Eustace mutters, apparently having given up on getting through to Peter. “You shouldn’t –”
“No one goes anywhere alone,” Peter hears Tirian reply, though he’s already turned away. “We’ll be well enough, Eustace. We’ll see each other in the morning.”
“Or we’ll all be dead,” Jewel says under his breath, his hooves releasing a breath of witch’s crown as he stomps meaningfully over a bush on his way to Tirian’s side.
The head female watches them sort themselves out, while the two striped-and-spotted marozi slink over to join the Narnians, hissing at the wolves like housecats at hounds. The wolves don’t seem to be any happier about the situation, and Eustace stares at them both like he’s wishing he’d chosen to stay out of Lucy’s room at his parents’ house that day so many years ago, and missed coming to Narnia after all.
“I don’t know your name,” Peter says to the head female as he follows her past the grisly X-frames, somehow managing not to look too closely at them. He’s had his fair share of looking at them today, he thinks. Tirian and Jewel follow him, and the dull tan marozi – Kebibi, he supposes – brings up the rear. They leave the others behind, making their way along what appears to be a small, steep path barely wide enough for a single centaur. The fog gathers thick around them within seconds, pressing warm fingers against Peter’s bare cheeks, trying to worm past the high collar of his leather jerkin down his neck.
“Shetani,” she says. “Head female of the Ratscreamer Hills pride. My mate is Harith.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Peter says politely, and hears her snort softly in response.
“I hope you are who you say you are, or you won’t be for long.”
“He is,” Jewel says, his voice a little eerie and distant, given his position behind Tirian.
After this they fall into silence. Peter can hear the drums again, as clearly as he’s heard them yet, and the wild, desperate wailing of the panpipes. They must be very close now, though he still has no notion of precisely where they are in relation to the salt mines; the fog has turned him about entirely. It’s so thick now that he can barely see Shetani’s round white-tipped ears. The heat presses close in around him, like Cair Paravel in high summer, and Peter reaches up to loosen the first few buttons of his jerkin, which doesn’t help much. His palms are slick with sweat.
Eventually, the path that they’re following begins to slope gently downhill, and as it does, Peter begins to become aware of other sounds, mixed in with the drums and panpipes. He can hear singing, still too distant to make out the words, and the sound of raised voices. As they grow closer the roar of sound begins to resolve itself into recognizable words.
High King Peter, High King Peter
Come and open the door for me
I’ve wet my sword and shed my blood
High King Peter, High King Peter
Come and open the door for me
King of Summer, Lord of Narnia,
You hold the keys to the Long Country
Here I stand with sword in hand
Blooded and battered in the shield-wall
Come and open the door for me
High King Peter, High King Peter
Come and open the door for me
I’ve wet my sword and shed my blood
High King Peter, High King Peter
Come and open the door for me
The lion’s path is clear before me
The gate stands locked and barred
I give to you my sword and shield
I lay down my arms before the gate
Come and open the door for me
Peter feels heat roll down his spine, something previously forgotten sparking in the back of his brain and stretching through his body with a feeling like a great sigh, a lion stretching out its body and extending his claws. He feels electric, ready to jump out of his own body, as if his skin is stretched too tightly over his bones. His sword hand twitches, wanting Rhindon’s hilt, and his shield-arm feels suddenly light. The drums pound in his ears.
They step abruptly out of the fog into a narrow bowl of a valley, lit by crackling flames of a dozen tall fires, stretching upwards towards the shadowed sky and throwing out sparks in all directions. The drums seem to beat down on Peter from all directions, echoing off the hills and reverberating around the valley. Dancing figures are nothing more than shadows before the fires – fauns and satyrs, centaurs and dwarves, wer-wolves and talking beasts, with prancing legs and upraised arms, their voices raised in exultation. Peter can feel the excitement rolling off dancers and audience alike, the heady surge of – there’s no better word for it – belief, all those people set on a single goal that strikes something deep inside him, so that his gut clenches as if for battle and his head comes up, crownless but crowned nonetheless.
In the darkness there seem to be hundreds of them, thousands of them, bare bodies slick with sweat and exertion in the firelight as they dance. He can smell wine and mead, sweet and heavy on his palate, and the savory scent of roasting meat; feels laughter burble unwelcome in his chest as a centaur rears and tosses a handful of salt into a fire, sending blue and green sparks dancing upwards. A satyr backs up and takes a flying leap over the tallest of the fires, barely clearing its top but landing cat-footed on the earth beyond, where he takes up a horn of some liquor and wraps his arm around a laughing naiad, accepting the offered kiss. Elsewhere, at what seems to be the central fire, not the tallest but certainly the largest, a massive faun with ropy scars across his bare chest stands and spreads his arms, wielding a horn whose carved gold edging catches the firelight in one hand and a sharp-looking knife in the other.
“King of Summer!” he booms, as the dancers pant and gasp, bare legs and polished hooves flashing in the firelight. “High King over all Kings! Hear me! I call you from the land beyond the Lantern Waste, I call you from beyond the cleft tree, I call you from beyond the Great Eastern Ocean! Hear your servant! I call you, with offerings of an enemy on whom to wet your sword, with offerings of food and drink to bind you to the earth, with offerings of blood willingly shed to call you to Narnia!” With this two sweat-streaked minotaurs thrust a bound man forward, shoving him headfirst into the flames as he screams. The faun doesn’t seem to notice, tossing the horn into fire after him. Smoke rises up after it, the honey-sweet scent of mead mingling with burning flesh as the man’s screams turn to moans and then, startlingly quickly, to nothing at all.
The faun drags the knife over his bare palm, shaking the drops of blood into the fire. “King of Summer!” he cries. “I name you and I call you: High King over all Kings, King Peter, Bittersteel, King of Summer, Peter the Magnificent, Peter of Narnia! I call you from the land beyond the Lantern Waste –”
Before he can repeat the invocation, an old centaur woman’s laughing cackle cuts him off. “He is coming!” she shrieks. “He is coming! The High King walks in Narnia again! He is coming – he is coming – he is –”
“Here,” Peter says. He isn’t even aware of moving, but he must have done so, because suddenly he’s there, standing with the fire between him and the faun, the savory scent of burning flesh and the sweet one of honey-mead in his nose. “I am Peter the High King, and I am here.”
----------
The Scablands of the High Reaches are based on the Channeled Scablands of Washington State.
Part One 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
Part Two 00 | 000 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Interlude | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-30 09:42 pm (UTC)I approve of dialing the creep factor up to eleven.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-30 10:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-30 11:25 pm (UTC)And also: of course Peter's going to cut a deal with the White Witch. Who else has the kind of power he needs? (And Edmund is going to have a coronary.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-01 12:49 am (UTC)The final scene was incredible and of it all, the savory scent was burning flesh was the creepiest for that is the scent of human flesh and Peter stands by and watches it and revels in it. The King of Summer indeed. And yes, I think after this obviously drugged sex follows.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-01 01:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-01 02:42 am (UTC)No Jalur traveling with the party up to the High Reaches? It would have been fun to see him trying to flirt with the Marozi from last time. :-)
Peter talking with Narnia again! I do like this little bit of sentient Narnia appearing in this story, and he doesn't have to draw blood this time for the earth to recognize and remember him.
The scene with the poor Calormenes strung up is so gruesome but I like that here, we see Tirian with a bit more spine and doing the right thing to put one of the men out of his misery. He's acting a bit more like the King that he is or should be. And yay that even one of the archers stand up for Tirian to the marozi.
I really enjoyed the visual descriptions of the "celebration" (for lack of a better word) of the High Reachers when Peter and the others arrive. I think it provides a glimpse of the "real" Narnia, of a time when Narnians used to revel like this though without the offering of a human sacrifice. And with all the music, the fog and the hint of Narnia talking to Peter, it seems as if there really is something else at work here, kind of how Jadis had hinted at the start of the chapter. And how Peter ends up rather calm about the meeting... I think he's right, that he really IS the safest person in the High Reaches right now. Between the worship of the King of Summer and how he knows the land beneath his feet is still Narnian in his blood and bones, it's probably helps to assure him that there there isn't much that could hurt him badly here.
So they are trying to bring Peter through a summoning though the Pevensies had returned well before then, and it's so different than how Arnau and the others did it by blowing Susan's Horn. The ending scene is wonderful, and it really does make Peter seem like a god.
(One question... Eustace does not recognize the name of Bittersteel. Did he forget reading the inscription in one of your stories when he, Jill and Puddleglum see a marker for Narnia's borders in the northern edge of Narnia?)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-04 12:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-04 12:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-04 01:03 am (UTC)As for the White Witch, well...
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-04 01:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-04 01:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-04 01:28 am (UTC)Mayor has familial obligations elsewhere, and there are no diamonds to lure him north this time. :)
One thing that ought to be remembered about this Narnia is that it isn't one distinct culture; the High Reaches don't consider themselves to be part of Telmarine-ruled Narnia at all, so Peter negotiating with the High Reaches is more or less the equivalent of Susan negotiating with Archenland: another foreign power. The Reaches have a culture distinct from Telmarine Narnia, they have a religion distinct from Telmarine Narnia (even if it is the same gods, they have different names -- Peter is only called Bittersteel by Reachers, for example). They're also extremely distinct from the older Narnia that Peter knows from his own time, or even the Narnia of Caspian's time, so they're really their own thing. Real enough, but their own reality; their presence doesn't make the Telmarine-Narnia culture of the rest of Narnia any less valid, nor the Narnian diaspora in Archenland, or the Archenlander culture, for example. They're all their own thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-08 01:10 pm (UTC)I wonder who the traitor the white which is after is? Leo is springs to mind, as she was in the last chapter... But I'm not sure she will turn out to be a traitor at all. Tyrian? He probably still believes he betrayed narnia by failing to withstand the callies. Some of the narnians, for betraying Tyrian, still after all the king of narnia? Even Susan, for whatever she did that spilt the family back in England? (Aslan, for letting narnia get mucked up and wanting to end the world?!?)
It is also interesting how there are hints that the P's have something more than human (even badass humans from the aincent past who have a magical connection to the land) going on... (The replication of wounds, Edmunds speed against the cross bow bolt, Susans arrow refusing to kill Tyrian, now Peter seeming to be summoned in response to a call to the gods....)
Again, excelent stuff, thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-07-10 09:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-15 01:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-15 12:55 pm (UTC)Aaah, are you from Central WA too? I went on a school trip to the Scablands when I was in high school (and apparently my high school doesn't do that trip anymore, boo) and something about the landscape stuck with me.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-16 07:05 pm (UTC)Of course, the first time around the idea of Pevensies-as-intercessors probably didn't last much past meeting one of them.
Southeastern, so I know gentler edges of the region better, but even there the paradoxical combination of open space and closed-in hills is unlike the landscape anywhere else I've lived. You know, both these hills and these ones. (Unfairly photographed in August, when the land looks most uncompromisingly like itself.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-18 01:17 am (UTC)I'm from dead center of the state, but the western edge of central Washington. But oh, yeah, Washington. Like, how is this actually real? (That's about an hour from my hometown. Also August!) Freaking Washington, man. Actually, it's funny with this chapter, I sent it to my beta and she said something along the lines of, "This landscape is so strange and alien! How did you come up with it?" and I was like, "THAT'S REAL."
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-21 03:46 am (UTC)Hah. Or this (not my photo) - sorry, I can trade PNW shots for days and days. My script goes something like, "Yes, Washington! No, not like Seattle!"
(no subject)
Date: 2013-02-22 02:36 pm (UTC)I think the elder three are perfectly willing to do anything that works, while Lucy's a bit more reluctant (although, of course, her Gift is the one with the most obvious effects -- the cordial, I mean) to play at godhood. Which is what they all think they're doing, of course.
I have had that conversation so many freaking times. "Oh, you're from Washington! You must be used to rain." "No, I'm from central Washington, where it rains very rarely!" (This is after the, "No, not that Washington, Washington STATE," dance. In all seriousness, I really liked the idea of transferring the Scablands to Narnia, because for one thing, I very rarely see fantasy set somewhere that feels like "home" (which is why Narnia is sort of a weird mash-up of Washington and Louisiana, because sure, that geography makes sense). For another, the Ice Age megafloods kind of fascinate me, and I feel like they, and the landscape they create, translate very well to a world where the rivers can be living things, gods in themselves, and where the world was still creating itself.