^ [open post]

[quote_gentle_unquote]

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.

Comments

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"My birthday is December sixteenth. By my reckoning, based on when I left London and when I arrived here, today ought to be May twenty-first."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Today is December thirteenth in my calendar."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"So either way you slice it, it makes little sense," Susan frowns.

[onthewillowsthere]

"Do you think the spirits are confused?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"I don't believe there are any spirits," she admits. "I know it's the going hypothesis but I haven't seen sufficient evidence."

[onthewillowsthere]

"What do you think it is? The house?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Yes, or some queer feature of the world. There's a power, certainly, but I don't expect it's any sort of entity." Susan is quite familiar with entities. This feels rather different.

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad nods. Everything time he has this conversation with someone it feels like collecting data and placing it into a file, where he can examine it when he wants.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"What do you think?" Obviously Susan trusts Galahad's observations more than most; she knows precisely how methodical he is.

[onthewillowsthere]

As he said to Constance, he says, "I think they are gods. Small gods. Powerful, but limited in their scope, as God was in the Old Testament."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Small gods," Susan repeats, picturing the river gods of Narnia. "Like Bacchus?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"No. He is a god for everyone believes in him. I mean family gods."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Family gods?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"When God, in the Old Testament, says He is God of Abraham and Isaac, He means that He is their God, and no one else's. Their worship gives Him power. I think the spirits are like that. Gods of this house, with power here."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan looks thoughtful at that. "You think there's enough belief to sustain such a thing?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"I believe there may be."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Coming from anyone else, Susan might reject this out of hand, but when she tilts her head and asks, "What evidence have you got?" it's yet another sign of her respect for Galahad's analysis and reasoning.

[onthewillowsthere]

"It's anecdotal. I'm not sure how to measure it. But I believe they have different purposes. Some of us were taken before our deaths, and some after. Mine did not provide for my birthday; yours has. Some this are easily attained, and some must be strived for."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan isn't entirely certain that she understands. "Are there other analogues to the types of gods you're describing? In folklore, perhaps?"

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad thinks of the only folklore he knows, which are the Welsh stories Percival used to tell him, of Manawydan and Brân Fendigaidd, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, and his sister, Arianrhod, Taliesen the bard. These aren't what he means. There are house spirits, bwbachod and bwac, but these aren't what he means either -- he's thinking of something more powerful, though perhaps equally precise in scope.

He shakes his head, and then says, "Lan Wangji says there is a god here. He is sustained through belief, so Lan Wangji has made a shrine for him. I think the gods of this place must do the things they do here so we do not stop thinking about them."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

It's not sufficient evidence for Susan. "Interesting," she says, meaning it, and makes a plan to speak to Lan Wangji about it later.

[onthewillowsthere]

"Lan Wangji says he is private," he adds, just so she goes in with reasonable expectations about how much Lan Wangji might tell her.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Thank you," says Susan, and turns her mind toward questions with clearer answers. She nods at the grass in his hands. "What have you got there?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"It's an ootheca." The egg case is long, with a herringbone pattern on its surface. "I think it's a mantid and not a cockroach. The texture is like the other mantid oothecae we found. Cockroaches have smooth cases."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, tremendous," Susan breathes. She loops the ribbons attached to the balloons around a nearby door handle, where they bobble against the ceiling, and leans in to inspect it. "Yes, I concur. It's a mantid - though I think perhaps a species we've not seen yet."