ficbits: modern! post-Dust! Narnia

[bedlamsbard]

So I wrote a thing? This is apparently what I do when left to my own devices. Or rather, I wrote a thing which could in theory be part of a bigger thing, though it is not at this point in time. *cough* And now that I have gotten that confusing bit out of the way, I shall continue.

So I mentioned this on Twitter, partially as a modern!Narnia story and partially as a post-Dust story. (Thus my dramatic "I can never ever post it!" though clearly that went to naught.) And now comes the part where I start hemming this around with cuts, in case there are readers who are nervous about being spoiled for the end of Dust. Sorry, y'all. Okay, first off: it is very hard for me to tell because Dust is my baby, but there are some light spoilers for Dust here just in the set-up, aside from the tell-tale of "post-Dust story." (Sorry, I don't think "the world does not end" is a spoiler, though thank you, C.S. Lewis, for making that a viable option.)

If this was a novel, the jacket copy would look something like this:

It has been a thousand years since the Calormene Occupation of Narnia ended. The world has changed since King Tirian's time; this Narnia is a rich, modern nation to match our own, a land of industry, high-speed rail, and thriving cities. To most, it seems as if Narnia has finally come into her own. But even in this land of plenty and wealth, there is something rotten at the core of Narnia.

It begins with a series of bombings in the capital, Cair Paravel. Dozens die. Worse, the bombings don't end there, but spur copycats in Narnia's other cities. Initially, these attacks are blamed on nonhuman terrorist groups, but when a strange power begins stirring in the east, it soon becomes clear that there may be something far more malicious at play. There is a seemingly unstoppable force from beyond the Great Eastern Ocean that will not stop until Narnia is on her knees. It is a new enemy -- or a very, very old one.

Kyrinn [Surname] is reading history at the University of Glasswater. So far she's been lucky: the bombings haven't touched her directly. But her comfortable life is threatened when a pair of unexpected visitors come to her door in the midst of a chaotic night in Glasswater. As the chaos in Narnia intensifies, Kyrinn and her friends find that they might be the only people capable of giving Narnia a fighting chance against the growing darkness from the east, but at what cost?

Only old gods can fight the oldest of the old.

And then I wrote a bit of this -- two scenes, a little wandering. Well, technically I wrote them, then built the summary off what I'd written. snacky, aella_irene, there's some new material here. Oh, can you tell that I had the chance to see the guts of the BM here, heh?

It had started as a joke. Leanza was interning at the Narnian Museum that year and, when they came up to Cair Paravel for the day, got them all down into the lower levels, which were a maze of featureless corridors and closed doors labeled things like “HIGH CALORMENE STATUARY” and “EARLY TEREBINTHIAN OSSUARY” and, alarmingly, “SPIDERS.” Hibah eyed this last worriedly as they passed by it, the lights in the hallway coming on as they passed the motion sensors.

“There aren’t really spiders in there, are there?” he asked, his tail switching nervously back and forth. His hooves clicked on the bare concrete floor, one two three four, in counterpoint to Issey’s heavier tread and the comparatively light patter of the humans in their shoes.

Leanza glanced over her shoulder. “It’s for a special exhibit,” she said. “I think it’s just some fossils and mosaics and stuff from the Francian period.”

This didn’t mean much to anyone but Callery, who had written his thesis on the so-called Wild Years in Archenlander literature. He said something about giant spiders turning up occasionally in what remained of the epics, which made Hibah shudder and beg him to be quiet.

Leanza took them down two floors and made a series of increasingly incomprehensible turns before coming to a stop in front of a door labeled “HIGH NARNIAN MISC. – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” She swiped her ID card over the card reader and pulled the door open, fumbling around for a light switch inside as the others followed her into the big room.

At first it looked like more of the same – lots of dusty metal shelves stuffed full of mostly labeled plastic boxes, the floor covered with bits of statuary (some of it partially packed up), a few climate-controlled glass cases. It didn’t look like anyone had been down here in a long time. Leanza led them unerringly through the mess, passing between a stone badger and what looked like a griffin’s wing rendered in stone down to the last pinfeather, and pointed at the glass cases lined up against the back wall.

“That’s it,” she said.

They looked. It was the sort of thing that they’d all seen in history books, not to mention on the national seal and the coinage and, for that matter, on the NM pediment, since whoever had designed the museum had been prone to that sort of fancy. Up close it might have been expected to look smaller and shabbier, diminished by the passage of long centuries, but even after all this time there was something about it that caught and held the eye, focused on the snarling lion’s head caught in the crisp, sharp lines of pale ivory, yellowed a little by the passage of time. The teeth looked sharp enough to cut. It seemed to gather the pale light from the electric lights and hold it, almost appearing to glow slightly against faded black of the case floor and the stand that held it up.

The horn of Susan the Gentle of Narnia, Queen of Spring.

“Wow,” Kyrinn said eventually, and at the sound they all started and looked at their watches or mobiles. They had been staring at the horn for a good seventeen minutes, even though it had only felt like a few seconds.

Leanza let out a yelp of alarm. “My break’s going to be up soon!” she said, and hustled them all out of the room. They went, most of them glancing back at the horn in its glass prison until Leanza finally shut the heavy door. She led them back up to the main floor, more or less shoving them out into the mess of people wandering around in one of the permanent displays, and hissed at Kyrinn, “I’m off at five, I’ll come meet you at the maglev station – St. Reep’s, right?”

Kyrinn nodded, and she and her friends went off, making their way through the NM’s usual crowd. Hibah made a comment about the spiders again, and they talked for a while about the mess of corridors hidden behind the neatly curated walls of the NM. Queen Susan’s horn was forgotten until much later.

*

The beginnings of it were blamed on nonhuman terrorist associations, one or all of the Dwarven Liberation Army or the Centaur Independence Front or any of their numerous counterparts. Kyrinn was home for Winter’s End vac when the first explosion occurred: one of the maglev stations in the Lion’s Court, near the Cortes building. She’d been in the bathroom curling her hair when she’d heard her mother’s gasp, the sound of a mug breaking, and dropped the curling iron in the sink and dashed into the kitchen to see a frantic-looking reporter on the telly, firefighters and police running back and forth behind the woman. Within fifteen minutes the second and third explosions had destroyed two other maglev stations and a bomb warning had been called in at the Cortes and at the Jeweled Palace, up the hill by the remains of Caspian’s castle. Kyrinn and her mother clutched at each other, unwilling to tear themselves away from the telly or, when she finally managed to leave for two minutes to fetch it, the etherweb reports on Kyrinn’s laptop.

When the fourth bomb went off, it was in a small coffeeshop two blocks from the NM. The news said that something must have gone wrong, that this one must have been unplanned, since the K&S wasn’t exactly a prime target the way the maglev stations were. Kyrinn didn’t care, too busy wearing out her fingers on the buttons of her mobile and trying to get through to Leanza, who was still at her internship.

The lines were all tied up, of course they were; everyone in Narnia was probably calling their friends and loved ones in Cair Paravel. Kyrinn got a text from Callery while the telly was split between reporters at the Lion’s Court station and the caution tape outside the Cortes: r u ok?

Fine. At home. Trying to reach Leanza, Kyrinn texted back, her thumbs clumsy on the tiny buttons. Callery had stayed in Glasswater for the hols instead of going back to home to Lantern Waste.

It took fifteen minutes, but eventually Leanza texted her back. im ok. nm on lockdown, she said, and Kyrinn texted back, Thank the gods. Come here when they let you go, my mum’s going mental.

k, Leanza texted back almost immediately.

Kyrinn and her mother spent the next few hours staring alternately at the telly, waiting for something else to happen, and at Kyrinn’s laptop, where the blogosphere was doing a bang-up job on speculating wildly on who might be responsible for the attacks, since none of the usual suspects had stepped up to claim responsibility. Kyrinn almost knocked it off the table when the doorbell rang and she made a dash for the door, opening it to find Leanza standing there in a smart skirt and a stained University of Glasswater sweatshirt.

“I had to take the bus,” she said, her voice bright with forced bravado. “The maglev’s closed –”

But Kyrinn barely heard the words, she was clutching her friend so hard. She dragged Leanza inside and shut the door behind her, standing right there in the foyer and hugging her. Leanza let her backpack slip from her shoulder and hugged her back, the two of them swaying around in on the stained linoleum floor clutching at each other.

“I was just at that K&S this morning,” Leanza said into her hair. “I was just – gods, Kyr –”

“Come and have some tea, dear,” Kyrinn’s mother said from the kitchen. Kyrinn could hear the telly going even from out here, the endless loop of coverage on the bombing sites. She gripped Leanza’s hand, unwilling to let her friend go as she fumbled her phone out of the pocket of her jeans to text Callery and the others that Leanza had arrived.

Apparently, I finally wrote something that I looked at and went, "Okay, this would probably work much better as an original." (Though I'd tweak a few things besides just the names/serial numbers, heh.) I have been playing with the idea of writing something set in a modern or sci-fi 'verse with high fantasy tropes, so this tickles that part of me.

Settings partially inspired by these modern Westeros gifsets (scroll down, there's some character stuff in the middle, but it's the setting bits I'm thinking of).