This post is backdated to the first day of Dark!

The first morning of Dark dawns clouded and cold, a ferocious wind howling past Susan's windows.

But her schedule shan't wait for nicer conditions. She's been inventorying and re-inventorying the supplies she and Tress put away — a surplus even if their population should swell considerably, but there are the individual taste preferences of residents to account for, and little surprises to tuck away in the event that anyone might be having a bad day. She's posted announcements here and there throughout the Mansion about where to find particular resources, including hand-delivering invitations to Lan Wangji and - yes - even the angel, explaining that she's got several varieties of tea stowed away in the parlor that has become part of her suite of rooms, should they run out. Some of the supplies she's lain away were provided by the Mansion; many preserves (fruit, vegetables, cheeses, fish, sausages, and so on) are ones she and Tress prepared across the course of the year, with aid from friends and neighbors. There are general stores available for all, and also pockets specified for particular individuals based off what she knows about their tastes. These latter stockpiles she's edited, again and again, as new people arrive and some individuals leave.

Last Dark, Sagramore and Laertes hadn't even had their little cottage by the lake. Now their home is brim-ful of family - and she's got the sense that their preference is to be able to host any friend who might wander their way in search of a meal, as well. Naturally, she'd like to enable that. At least much of her rejiggering of the size of their allotment was precipitated in early autumn by their visitors, when there was still ample time to easily make adjustments to the variety and volume of the goods earmarked for them. Still, there's more food than she could possibly carry over by herself, even with use of a wagon.

("You'll help me, won't you?" she'd asked Lancelot late last evening, curled up on his lap as they sat on the couch, the throw blanket pulled up over both of them in a facsimile of propriety and as protection from Regina's sharp little claws, the book she'd been reading aloud cast off to the side. His fingers stroking through her hair were gentle, distracting. "Neither of them has approached me about the signs Tress and I posted, and I shouldn't want them to go without just because they've not seen them." And of course he'd agreed to help her take over supplies after his morning training.)

Since she's got a very full day ahead, though, she takes the first bit over herself whilst Lancelot is still out. It's rather early still (but not so early as to be rude), and behind the clouds the sun has just risen past the new mountain. The wagon, full of what she imagines must be early essentials (coffee, sausages, fruit preserves, canned vegetables, and plenty of flour, sugar, and oil), drags through the snow, wheels catching on some frozen furrows of mud by the Mansion's door and as the path veers closer to the lake and then away again, but she makes it to their door unscathed. Once there, she squares her shoulders, wipes away the tears brought forth by the sharp frigidity of the wind, and knocks.

Susan doesn't believe in the mansion spirits, but she is being followed by something in a way that makes little sense.

It begins when she wakes up. Opening the drawer to the sideboard in her room to retrieve tea, she finds another gold chess piece wrapped neatly in ribbon. Lancelot didn't put it there - it hadn't been there when she made her pre-sleep cuppa the night before, and she woke up when he did and sleepily saw him off to his training; he hadn't gone near the drawer. She shuts the chess piece firmly away, makes her tea, and dresses blearily for her own archery practice.

There's a new bow in the closet, too. To her pleasure, it's a heavier one that requires a stronger pull - she's quite got used to the draw of the ones the closet first supplied to her.

After her shooting routine, she finds a lipstick in the precise shade Ingrid used to wear on the bathroom vanity. When she's showered and dressed for the rest of her day, she finds her favorite pastry - a sort of breakfast roll she used to get from the shop by the tube station she'd walk past on her way to work, back in London - on a platter in the kitchen.

It's when she opens one of the closets in the hall off the library to return a pile of laundered wash-cloths that she receives both some clarity and a deepening of the mystery: a jumble of assembled balloons tumbles out, made of some queer material and filled with a gas that keeps them afloat. The writing on them reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUSAN PEVENSIE.

She stares at them, perplexed.


Susan's birthday post! Three days (by our reckoning) and eight months (by her reckoning) early! Feel free to have your puppets run into her in any reasonable location at any point during the day; she's just going to be accumulating more Stuff she can't get rid of as the day goes on.

Susan cinches her quiver-belt too tightly around her waist, shoulders her heaviest longbow, and stalks off into the deepest, densest part of the forest, where even on a summer-warm day, the air is cool and soft. She sets a brisk pace, and she's sweating by the time she's underneath the clawing branches and heavy shade, so deep within that the undergrowth gathers only where the light touches the forest floor around a fallen oak.

The trees here are thick-trunked, strong and tall, and there's a deep hush. Susan doesn't care for the hush; it makes the clamor of thoughts in her head all the louder.

There aren't any established targets here. Susan knows of this spot due to one of her rounds of insect- and soil-sample gathering, but it's not where she typically goes when she wants to train in a less-structured setting. The absence is what she needs. She can pick new spots, harder spots, spots she isn't used to. A crack in the bark of one tree. A shelf fungus on the stump of the fallen oak. A flower, small, in the tiny patch of moss lain over a tumble of what may have, at one point, been boulders.

She fires her arrows quickly, as fast as she can fit each to the string and draw, twisting, whiplike, between every shot to find a new target to inevitably hit. Even though she's not taking considerable time to aim, each point finds its mark. The arrows land deep. Some require all of her strength to yank back out when she retrieves them for her next round.

Susan's memory has never been impeccable. In Narnia, all four of them had forgot London, and England, and anything of the elsewhere that yielded the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve fit to rule a Narnian throne - beyond the fact that there needs must be an elsewhere. She was, of course, the only one to forget Narnia upon their return, but she forgot it thoroughly. The moving stories Edmund and Peter and sweet Lucy would share of their time there didn't phase her. Every time Peter cajoled or Lucy implored or Edmund argued, Susan's own resolve strengthened. Her concern for them mounted. She'd dig her heels in and try all the harder to show them that they were the ones who were wrong.

Select target. Draw. Fire. Turn. Select target.

She keeps detailed notes, mostly to have a rigorous record of the changes of a capricious home, but also because she doesn't trust her own memory. She's far too talented at manipulating it, smoothing over uncomfortable truths with pleasant lies that are less challenging to believe. It's odd - when she'd learned of Aornis's powers, she'd understood that this might mean she'd been led to forget some things. Ultimately, she hadn't sought discrepancies between her notes and her memories (that way lay madness). But when those memories return to her, they're striking only in that they are utterly unremarkable.

Draw.

Aornis had been perfectly pleasant with her at every turn. They'd drink together sometimes, and chat occasionally. Never in any depth, never at any great length, but they were - friendly. Casual acquaintances. Ostensibly interested in some of the same things. Susan finds herself unnerved, and she runs over the memories, again and again, searching for some weak point, some breach that might suggest she's written over Aornis's further manipulations as well as she did Narnia, and England before it. Some sign that she's found yet another pleasant lie to paper over a more unsettling truth. But she finds nothing. The memories slip through her fingers like sand, like water, and she sifts them over and over again. They don't change. It's just casual, studied pleasantness.

For a brief and endless moment, Susan staggers, an ache lancing through her. She wants so badly to talk about this with Edmund. He'd been pleasant and friendly with the White Witch. Aornis was no Jadis, but Susan hasn't got experience being chummy with a villain, and she finds herself revulsed by the knowledge that they got even as close as they did with her still unaware of Aornis's true nature. Edmund would know what to say. He'd either soothe her or tell her there's no soothing but time, and even then she'd know for sure what to anticipate. Without him, she doesn't know. She hates not knowing things, prefers to understand as much as she can as thoroughly as she can. And this - the knowledge that Aornis took from her only memories of pleasant and inoffensive interactions - curdles in her chest, sour and stale, fissioning and tangling into her quagmire of thoughts.

Fire.

Susan has been forgetting London again. Oh, not in any grand sweeping way. Not in the manner she has been prone to forgetting when Narnia is involved in some part of the process. But she can't clearly recall the details of her day-to-day. There was that rug shop between work and classes that she loved... but what time of day would she slip inside? What was her Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy lecturer's name? He was a man with a mustard stain on the pocket of his favorite tweed blazer. Certainly he had a name. Susan can't even recall which letter that name began with, though. She remembers holding court in the pubs in Holborn, and the scratched-up finish on the surface of the bar in her favorite, but not the route she'd take to get there from Miriam's flat.

Ingrid's hair was straight and yellow and often twisted up into a chignon held by an old hat-pin; her eyes were deep brown. Her couch was secondhand and sagging in the middle, and there was always a big cranky cat nestled on the back of it. But what color was the couch underneath its age? Miriam's hair was curlier. Darker. She had a freckle underneath her left breast and runs in most of her stockings. But what lipstick did she prefer? Were her shoes scuffed at the toe, or is Susan thinking - God forbid - of Lucy's? She's not angry to be here any more, like she was when she first arrived. She's not upset that her life has been thoroughly interrupted. She's found happiness here, and a new shape for her life to take. Ultimately, she's always been adaptable to changing direction after changing worlds. But as the bowstring thwaps against her bracers hard enough that she knows she'd have a welt if she left them off, she's forced to acknowledge that she doesn't remember the vagaries of what, precisely, has been interrupted by her arrival here. Is this forgetting the natural course of a mind set to a new future, or something more insidious? Ought she be concerned?

Turn.

Susan retrieves her arrows again, freeing them from wood and bracken with sharp, firm pulls that broker no argument from their points. Already she can feel the ache in her shoulders and the way her back shall knot up, eventually, from the intermittent stillness and swift changes of her posture. She's spent so much time here missing the idea of Narnia while loathing many of its implications as she unearths them. It's been hitting her with astonishing regularity especially lately: the feeling of loss, the wish things might be different. The stars are wrong here, but when given the opportunity, she'd searched for Alambil and Tarva. Not for any of those she knows from blacked-out London. Not any of the ones covered in classes and books and all the great literature.

Aornis came from England. A rather different England, to be sure, but still one more similar to Susan's than essentially anyone here save Thomas, who has been absent of late. It was one of the things they discussed, mildly, companionably, over cocktails. But Susan is fairly certain none of Aornis's memory-work took away her knowledge of her own England. No, that's all Susan's own foibles, organic to her own limited mind.

Select target.

Susan is frankly fed up with the limitations of her memory. She's unhappy with the pretty little gaps in it that she papers over thickly enough that it becomes hard to tell whether and where there's been an excision. The worst part is her well-honed sense of guilt about it all. When the Pevensie children all gave themselves over to Narnia and forgot home, they sacrificed childhood for duty, and their parents for Aslan and power. When Susan put Narnia from her mind back in London and focused on growing up, it was another rejection of her family, and one she can never now reconcile. What might forgetting the details of her life before this land imply? Has she truly focused so much on trying to remember Narnia - even the worst bits of it - and on building a life here that she's doubly rejected her first and longest home, and (again) those who were important to her within it?

She misses her next shot and, in a fit of pique, casts her bow to the side, crosses her arms, and stamps her feet, letting loose a frustrated growl of a yell that she swallows as soon as she hears the sound. As if there might be some being watching, ready to intervene and make things a little less discomfiting for a woman indulging in a tawdry little temper tantrum.

But there's nothing in the clearing save one Susan Pevensie, who can't even tell whether she's enraged, devastated, or numb. She sinks to her knees, digging her hands into leaf matter and loam, and closes her eyes. Breathes in deep. Tries to set herself in order without plastering over all those jagged edges inside of her. It takes a long, long time, and she's deathly silent throughout the process. Her jaw is set; her eyes are closed. One fat tear winds its way down her cheek and slips into the furrow by her nose, hot and slow. She tastes its salt when it reaches the corner of her mouth and then grimly rises again and retrieves the bow. It's easy to keep herself from rolling her eyes at her own melodramatics - she often holds tight control over her actions and expressions. It's less easy to keep from indulging further in the maudlin flush suffusing her.

Draw.

Fire.

Turn.

Turn.

Turn.

Turn.

When Susan packs it up to go back to the mansion, it's only because she physically can't shoot any more. First she starts missing her exacting targets, then her arrows start flying wider and wider. The sweat trickling into her eyes and down her back - despite the coolness of the shadows here - certainly doesn't help. She's entirely too worn out to yank the last deeply-embedded arrow from its home in the dirt at the roots of a sapling struggling to reach enough sun to thrive, and so she leaves it behind. Her pace as she trods the path home is slow, but steady. Ambient noise ticks up apace with the sunshiney heat the closer she gets: first the chattering animals and the crash of waves on the new shore, then the murmur and shuffle of wedding preparations in the gardens, and finally the distant hum of voices shared between people going about their days as she draws closer and then pushes inside.

Her hands are trembling from the exertion by the time she reaches her rooms, and it takes a few tries for her to fumble the quiver belt free. Rather than putting everything in its proper place, she leans it and the bow against the wall. She can't manage the buttons on her dress, so she yanks it over her head - she shall take it to the tailor to repair the seam later, and let him extract some story of home in trade, and perhaps etch the story deeper into her mind in the process.

Regina comes to investigate her bow and quiver and the pile of clothes on the floor. Aside from Susan's jumbled pile of books next to her favorite armchair, both she and Lancelot are both rather fastidiously neat; Regina hasn't got the opportunity to sniff around items discarded on the floor with terrible frequency. Susan watches for a moment, wondering if she ought to get them out of range of tooth and claw, but can't muster up enough energy to be concerned. Instead, she runs a hot bath, crawls inside, and curls up, waiting for the chill at the heart of her to start leeching away or for anything to rouse her from her ill spirits.

The knowledge that Shen Yuan may yet return frees up enough of Susan's mental and emotional space that she can turn her mind, in earnest, to the issue of Sagramore. A strange prospect, to be sure, given that she has, historically, generally rarely thought about him. But this seems important now. She'd stood in that hallway, listening to him and Lancelot speak... until he'd started to cry and it felt inappropriate, voyeuristic, an imposition, and she'd left, but thou art my brother keeps ringing in her memory.

She doesn't mind that he clearly dislikes her - clean, straightforward dislike has never twigged the part of her that craves respect. She likes being liked, of course, or at least appreciated, but she's never needed it. Being the least popular monarch of Narnia just meant she was still queen of Narnia, after all. No, what bothers her is that Sagramore's distaste seems as if it's based on such an inaccurate dataset that it's practically grounded in fiction, and it bothers her specifically that he's so wrong when they've got so many people they care for in common.

A less-liked queen still has duties, and being strangely nervous doesn't mean that you ought to put them off. So while Susan doesn't start tracking Sagramore, she does keep an eye out for a day when his demeanor seems improved. This comes about a week after their last encounter, and several days after Nina's announcement. He's walking Szarka toward the stable as she's coming in from archery practice. By now, Susan has a good sense of what this means, timing-wise. She makes her way inside to put away her bow and prepare her supplies. This involves battle armor: a fussy dress (black, again; her time out of mourning was short-lived) and stockings, with loads of ties and buttons to get into order, and her hair, carefully brushed and braided and pinned. Into her pocket she slips the bullet-point list of conversational topics that she's prepared, lest she forget any major point. And then she prepares her bribe.

Three full mugs carefully balanced between two hands, she then conspires to arrive at his door a few minutes after she projects that he ought to get back. Then she squares her narrow shoulders, sets her jaw, and knocks carefully with one foot.

Susan has devised another activity to occupy her days. By the calendar's reckoning, the start of spring is roughly a week away. Between her and Tress, they've got the outline of a plan for the next Dark, and Susan is happy to rely on people who've got greater interest in and skill for growing things insofar as agriculture goes. But the growing season here shall be longer than usual, and Susan should like to have some idea about what that might mean for the ecosystem,

This is her flimsy excuse to pardon the latest stack of books she's currently carrying out of the library. There is a marginal off-chance that preparatory reading on soil biota could, potentially, be useful. Perhaps she might even talk someone else into reading on the subject as well, so that they might discuss it.

Now that the Mansion is producing goods again, it's very easy for Susan to compile a picnic basket full of, essentially, the makings of a rather international charcuterie board. Four cheeses (a good British cheddar, a French camembert, an Italian sheeps-milk ricotta, and a wedge of Dutch Leyden), three meats (jamon Iberico from Spain, mortadella with pistachios, and something labeled as an American bison-blueberry salami), along with some honey, fruits and fruit preserves, a baguette, olives, nuts, and crackers. She tops this off with nice linens and silverware and all the necessary ingredients for French 75s. It's definitely more than enough for two people.

Something about the end of that dreadful month has her considering wearing color again. As a first step toward moving past mourning clothes, she experiments with a very flattering deep navy dress that's definitely not black, though it looks it in most lights. She adds a coat of lipstick, and then takes herself and her basket to Janet's room, where she raps lightly on the door.

NSFW!

Some new signs have appeared on the Welcome Table:



Below this sign are a stack of papers, a pen, and a box in which to place the papers. Each paper says:

<b>Name:</b> I AM (check all that apply) __Interested in giving a lecture or demonstration on __________________ __Interested in attending all lectures. __Interested in attending depending on the topic of the lecture or demonstration. __Not interested in giving or attending any lecture.

Next to this is a drop-box for topics for Grantaire's lecture series.

Another set of interest check forms has appeared, following a quick offscreen conversation between Susan and Magnus:




<b>Name:</b> I AM (check all that apply) __Interested in preparing dishes for a potluck feast; I am best at cooking __________________________. __Interested in attending a potluck feast, but not preparing any dishes. __Not interested in attending or contributing to any potluck feasts.




The box under the table contains a modestly-revised production of The Wizard of Oz suitable for seven to ten actors and including two gratuitous sword fight interludes disconnected from the broader plot; time slots are in 15-minute increments.


The final set of papers is labeled Satisfaction and Needs Survey; there is also a box to place completed forms:
<b>Name (optional)</b>: <b>With the exception of this month's deprivation, I would characterize my time here so far as</b>: <b>My experience here would benefit from</b>: <b>I would like to see the following changes</b>: <b>If there are there any sorts of social gatherings I miss and would like to see recreated here, I will describe them now</b>: <b>I would like to see a continuation of the following things we're already doing</b>: <b>Free space for additional feedback</b>:


Typist note: For ease of organization, if your puppets would respond to any of these, post them in a comment from the appropriate journal! You can do them in the same or in separate comments based on what makes the most sense to you

Although she realizes almost immediately what's going on (she has, after all, been fearing it, and has the greatest measure of the general contents of each room in this place), the full weight of the situation takes a day or so to hit Susan, as she flits from closet to cupboard to store-room and finds them empty save for the items she's specifically handled in the past. Her emergency closets - the ones she's been appointing - are intact; the rest seem relatively barren.

And so, she thinks, grimly, the other shoe has dropped.

Certain residents would be forgiven for imagining that Susan Pevensie might gloat, to have her worst fears proven right. A Cassandra, vindicated, smugly telling others left and right that she told them so, and they ought to have been more interested in preparations. But they would have been wrong about this, too. Distracted and panicked enough to forget entirely about her standing lunch date with Lancelot, she instead walks steadily, smoothly to her room, where she shuts the door firmly (she means to latch it, but she's so caught up in her frenzy that it slips her mind) and paces, pulling at her hair until it's half-snarled, tugged partially free from its usual crown of braids. Her other hand she keeps firmly in her pocket, clutched tight around the very last cruel new thing the Mansion had given her, right before it stopped cooperating entirely.

Water, she thinks, abruptly, mid-step. Will the water run out? But there's a lake out there, and there are trees to boil it; it might be significantly less convenient but they shan't run out of water. The taps are still flowing, but will that last? And so she fills some of the vases she's been accumulating with whatever will come from the tap, just in case she needs it later.

Then, with the wind fully out of her sails, she sinks into a seat on the edge of her bed, despondent, with her head in her hands for a spell. It might be a good twenty minutes, it might be several hours - she couldn't say. She'd been ever so worried about this - she ought to have pushed harder. She ought to have been more organized, to have really impressed upon people that they oughtn't assume that just because they've got a good thing now, it'll be there forever. But she let herself get distracted. There were other, more pressing things - things that seem ridiculous now, in retrospect. Sorting through junk papers? Getting caught up with a man to the extent where she forsook her self-appointed responsibilities for days on end? Love - if that is indeed what she feels for him - is no excuse. She should have - she could have - she ought to have -

I mustn't fall into this trap again, she tells herself, firmly, springing from her bed as swiftly as she'd sat down and striding over to the desk she'd moved into her room when she started writing her letters. (She's now missed dinner, too. The light outside is already dwindling, and the electricity doesn't seem altogether forgiving - it's working, but it's dimmer. But she oughtn't waste the few candles she'd set aside. What if they're needed more later?) It is far too easy to get caught blaming oneself until all that's left is blame. I really mustn't go back there.

But that tiny knot of cold in the center of her - the one that she'd very nearly unpicked over the past few months - tightens and grows. Grimly, she takes out paper and a pen. Her mood is dire. It's only appropriate to start the next one:

Dear Peter, she writes. I hardly know what to say to you.

She sticks the end of her pen in her mouth and chews.

A letter, tucked between the pages of an anthology of Plato's writings, stained in places with ink and a single ring of red wine.

Dearest Edmund,

Forgive me for saying so, but yours was not the most difficult death to swallow. And yet, the implications of what came after are the hardest for me to accept.

We were never the favorites, you and I. That was Lucy, with her fair shining hair and her reputation as the Valiant; that was Peter, who was the eldest and for some reason regarded as the most reliable. I know now that you spent fifteen-and-ten years trying to make up for betraying us once, as a child. I spent the same time too nervous and uncertain to truly commit to anything. And so you were called Just, and I was called Gentle, and we never quite measured up, did we? It didn't matter all that much to me when you all were alive, but now, sometimes, I think back, and I wonder if I mightn't have forgotten so quickly if I hadn't felt forgotten.

Oh, but that's not the point of this letter, is it? There's no need to point fingers. Let's see: In your honor, I am trying to be more stubborn. I think I might be succeeding. I believe ██████████████ ███████████████████ █████████████████████ █████████████████, but as it turns out, I had it in me all along.

Lucy visited! Several months ago now. I do hope she told you. I do hope she hasn't forgotten. The picture she painted of Aslan's country was- I haven't the words to describe my reaction, but it seems as if earthly cares, like your dear living sister, mightn't be at the forefront of your mind any more. If she told you, then you'll know now that I've remembered everything about Narnia. I'm sorry to you in particular that I forgot for so long - and you know how I am about apologies. On the one hand, I do wish I could have remembered before you died, so that we could have spoken about it together without fighting. On the other hand, I'm glad I didn't. I like being alive, and no matter how much Lucy likes where you all are, now, I shouldn't want to be there.

Oh, Ed, I could never keep a secret from you. I suppose I'll just come out with it, then: You'll hate me for saying this, but I wish you could leave Aslan's country. Lucy's faith is unwavering; to sever her from that land would be her undoing. Peter - I shan't talk about Peter. But when she told me you were no longer curious - that you no longer fought to understand what made people do the great and terrible things they do, that you no longer craved learning more, that you lost your hunger - my heart fell. Who are you, without your passion and inquisition? From what little Lucy told me, I fear Aslan's country has made you smaller. She said no one wants for anything there. That you have everything you need, and so you don't think to need anything. The Edmund I remember would hate that. We shared greater struggles than our siblings, and so striving toward our goals became as important as reaching them. ██████████ █████████ ███████ Who is Edmund Pevensie without the joy of working to some end? Who is Edmund Pevensie when he wants for nothing?

(Please don't think that I wish you wanted for anything. I have found myself in a queer little world where most everything is supplied for us - but there is still room to learn and grow. I believe you'd be suited for this sort of world ever so much more than how Lucy described Aslan's country.)

I did not say this enough when you were alive: I love you, Edmund. I think often of when you were a child, and I would read to you, back even before we first went to Narnia. I hope it has occurred to Lucy to tell you that I have met some of the characters from those story-books: Sirs Lancelot, Sagramore, and Galahad come to mind. Sir Galahad reminds me of you, even though you are very different people, and Sir Lancelot is a very dear █████ friend to me. I think I lo I care very much for him. You'd like him ever so much. He's quite handsome. I imagine you'd appreciate that he's quite handsome.

I do so wish we could have discussed that, too. I believe you might have had homosexual tendencies, like me, like me. But by the end we weren't discussing much at all, were we? I wasted so much time, forgetting Narnia. I shan't let myself regret it - you of all people know my policy on regret, though you disagreed heartily with it the few times we spoke about it. Oh, Ed, I miss fighting with you ever so much. It was never heartbreaking or horrible, like when Lucy or even Peter got cross or disappointed with me. You wanted me to fight back, and you gave as good as you got. With the others, when Narnia came up, I always felt absolutely horrid. Like I was shaming them in some awful way; like they were condescending to me. You just wanted me to defend my positions. You always seemed so heartbroken about it, but you didn't make me bear your heartbreak. You never accused me of only caring about lipstick and nylons and invitations, because you bothered to fight with me about it, and learned of my classes and my job and - yes - my friends and my dates. You let me explain that my world was more expansive than just one way of being.

I suppose I'm the heartbroken one now. When they asked me to identify your body, I almost couldn't, there was so little there. Sometimes when I close my eyes and try to remember you, it's all I can see. They'd washed the blood off, but I could still tell where it had gone. Your face ██████ ████████████ Perhaps it's good that I still didn't remember Narnia when I went to that morgue. If I'd known then that Lucy's drops were real, I rather think I would have ripped the world apart at the seams to get at them. Aslan once lectured Lucy for spending too much time on you when you were injured during that first battle, do you remember? -Did we ever tell you? Ed, it was never a waste. Aslan was wrong, so terribly wrong. If I had Lucy's cordial, I'd have put a drop on every injury I could see, and if that didn't bring you back to life, I would have yelled at Aslan himself until he struck me down.

I have to write you first, you see, because you'll be the least disappointed at how furious I am with Aslan. You'll just want me to defend my position, as usual. My position is this: I hate what he's done with you. You died, and in so dying, you've become someone who isn't yourself, anymore. Lucy will always be faithful little Lucy who loves Aslan with her whole heart, but you and I, we had questions. We had goals. We had journeys and destinations. I'd hate to rip you out of Heaven, but can it truly be a Heaven if you must be re-molded to fit in there?

And if you truly believe that it suits you... well. I can't help but wish you could come here, even for an hour, and defend your position to me. That you can't means that I shan't ever forgive Aslan. Honestly, Ed, I hope there's some way that you'll some day be able to get furious with me for saying so.

Love,
your silly big sister,
Susan