Cut The Threads Of Fate
Birthed wrong by the standards of every world, they were Aslan’s Scourge and Sword, his children-gods called to free the throne by slaughtering the Witch.
They were the Pevensies, born of Frank and Helen.
They were War.
They were Pestilence.
They were Famine.
And they were Death.
Peter, golden-haired and ocean-eyed, with a sharp tongue and a sharper mind.
Peter, who taught himself blade-work by the age of five with butter knives.
Peter, who ran an underground fighting ring for the neighborhood children.
Peter, who was always at the center of every schoolyard fight, despite never throwing a punch himself.
Peter, who, when questioned about the aforementioned schoolyard scraps, would always smile a bit too sharp and laugh for a bit too long and then say the same things over and over, that it wasn’t him, that he had simply spoken, and that they had simply complied.
Peter, who learned he liked the taste of blood as he licked his sword clean, a headless human corpse slumped beneath his boots.
Peter, who was crowned in gold and blood.
Peter, who was Magnificent.
Peter, who was War.
Lucy, slight and light-footed, slipping between the shadows easily and unnoticeable.
Lucy, who only ate what she could find herself in an English forest when she was a child, lips stained from green leaves and black gnarled roots and poisonous berries as red as the lipstick her sister would someday wear.
Lucy, who sent a girl home with an illness that would not heal, that would never heal, when she’d insulted her sister — why doesn’t she talk, she a retard or something? — simply tilting her head to the side and asking the other student why it mattered, when the news came back that the girl had died.
Lucy, who slipped her hand into the embrace of the goat-man with a parasol and simply knew how deep the Witch’s corruption spread.
Lucy, who received a cordial from Father Christmas to balance out the death she’d been able to give since birth.
Lucy, who could take an arrow from her quiver, run her fingers down it, string it, and shoot it — the minions of the White Witch drowning in their own blood, skin falling off of bones, bones splintering into shards, cancerous growths bursting and twisting out of their bodies, rotting from the inside out, growing from the outside in, dying by the thousands.
Lucy, who was crowned in ashes and copper.
Lucy, who was Valiant.
Lucy who was Pestilence.
Edmund, pale as snow, eyes like dark hollows carved into his face, hair a tangle of brown soil and rotting red leaves.
Edmund, always just out of the frame in photographs, always just out of the corner of eyes.
Edmund, who only gained color in mirrors and looking glasses and the fear-widened pupils of others.
Edmund, who was nothing but collection of bones and a gaping mouth with pointed teeth and cracked, bloody lips — when adam’s flesh and adam’s bone — and a Hunger that never went away, but was sometimes filled with his mother’s blisteringly-hot vegetable soup and his siblings understanding of their shared Otherness and his father’s words of kindness and love and gentle affections.
Edmund, who stumbled into an another world with sneer and then stumbled out of it after a war and a decade-and-five years of peace with the blood of the sun running through his veins in place of his own and winter split into his bones instead of the marrow.
Edmund, who felt full only once the Witch’s magic settled in his stomach like frostbitten-stones, spelled so he drew blood from his wrists with his teeth and called it hot chocolate, drew snow and ice from the ground and called it Turkish delight.
Edmund, who sunk into a Witch’s embrace to distract her just long enough for his brother to run them both through.
Edmund, who was crowned in dew and platinum.
Edmund, who was Just.
Edmund, who was Famine.
The stone is broken here, cracked and shattered and splintered, the paper records burnt or molded or swallowed by the sea, the ending of the ballad of the god-children is simply: lost.
Only a fragment remains, passing from mouth to mouth and drifting on the grief-soaked southern winds.
Only a sentence remains.
The only words, in memory and not, to ever be spoken by the god of death, the god of mourning, the god of silence.
Take me with them
If they ever was an answer, it is unknowable.