King Edmund the Just @pevensie-edmund - Tumblr Blog

dungeons deep and caverns old | peter and edmund

The way the castle was built was something Peter didn’t quite understand. He knew how to cross through it, knew every path and secret crevice, had learned its insides and changed them since the moment it was proclaimed their home by Aslan’s paw. But he could never get himself to picture it the way he knew Susan could, for example, like a vivid sketch inside her mind that she could jot down in beautiful watercolours. Peter knew which turns led to which chambers but he didn’t understand the ways the air flew in and out, the way it stayed up in the air and didn’t crumble into the beach—or at least, he didn’t know enough for his satisfaction. When they had overseen the projects for the new tunnels and every time they wanted to change or modify the existing chambers and towers, Peter had to check on the project and give his green light so they could continue but he was not in charge of any of them nor did he have the capacity to understand the principles that went into a project of the magnitude.

He knew certain things, though, out of touch and experience. He knew the way the gales hit the windows up on the highest towers, slamming into the glass like desperate bodies. He knew the way the chimneys in the first floor below ground were the warmest, although he didn’t know if it was because of the dark or because it was the servant’s first floor. He knew, most of all, that the openings at the sides of the cliff made the dungeons and the lower rooms of the castle, have the sort of drafts that chilled one to the bones during the ugly days and nights. Cair Paravel had been carved into stone and slammed by water that was not warm and every cavernous room below ground was proof of this. Before, he and Isla had made sure that the guards, especially the giants at the vault, who were tall and had a lot of blood that was hard to get flowing and easy to cut, had enough fireplaces and blankets to fight their way through the biting cold that was merciless at night.

Except, of course, now there was no Isla. Peter had left Tommen up in their tower, with Lilia tucking him in and playing her part, and only his booted steps had echoed as he went down the thousand steps to reach the vault. He carried fire and blankets, as it had become custom, a cracking torch to light his way through the darkness of the lower levels. The darkened halls smelled of soil and never changed shape even during daylight. There was perpetual fire in some places, the ones he tried his best to reach first. He had the staff send out warm meals every night to the guards that had to spend their nights guarding entries that they had never seen, that had not needed to be guarded before. The twisted paths that led nowhere but that needed someone there, just in case. The dungeons smelled of sea salt, close as they were to the walls that hit the sea, and were always wet. His boots picked up the dust and turned it to mud as he went towards the last part of his journey: the vault room.

Peter always thought it smelled rusty. Like the oxide compounds they had learned about in school, the first chemistry class that the war had ripped off his hands. In one of his recent nightmares, he looked down to see his hands turning steel, red at the edges, and then the steel turned stone and then there came the soft feeling of guilty satisfaction and he woke up to look at Tommen, who slept in the same bed as him since the night Isla had been turned into a statue. He greeted the giants and the guards at the vault, he gave them their blankets and let them be, feigning ignorance at their pointed questions of “another night in here, king Peter?” as if they didn’t all know. The boys inside the vault, that looked to be guarding the mountains of gold but were, instead, guarding the statue in the middle of the cavern were the least talkative of all. They nodded their thanks and turned around and, like every night he had come down, they went away and left him alone with what remained of his wife.

There was a draft in the place where Isla’s statue stood. The wind flew in and hit his back mercilessly. Dried off his tears instantly. He thought it was too cruel that he could not move her to a warmer place. She must’ve been cold. She didn’t like the cold. She liked to tuck her frozen feet between his thighs to warm them up, and sneak her arms around his waist, and nuzzle her nose against his neck. He had ran out of blankets and the wind kept flowing in. It was too cruel.