Six

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𝕯𝖊𝖘𝖕𝖊𝖗𝖆𝖙𝖊 𝖆𝖈𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓𝖘
𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖉 𝖙𝖔 𝖗𝖊𝖌𝖗𝖊𝖙

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━━━━━━━1990

THAT NIGHT, Cornelia lay awake in her bed thinking about her adventure to Narnia. It was real. She'd determined that in her sleepless state. Even with her imagination, there was no way it was dreamt up. The lion statue should've been missing— that was the fact that had made her come to her decision. And then there was Miss Susan's reaction to her question. If she'd made up Narnia as one of her many games, the old woman would've reacted like her parents had, not gotten spitting mad.

That settled it, then. She'd gone on an adventure she'd only ever dreamed about, complete with a Queen-of-Hearts-esque character and the Mad Hatter's tea party, only with a faun and a girl instead of the traditional guests. Lucy was another piece of the puzzle. How could a girl just disappear like that? Her hand had been firmly in Cornelia's grasp even as she'd tilted forward out of the wardrobe in her haste to get to her brother. Then, she'd disappeared like smoke in the wind as if she never existed, only for Cornelia to find the lion statue in it's original place on the Professor's sitting room shelf.

The girl had been dressed strangely too, with a rough-spun-looking dress and drab colors. She'd called Cornelia's clothes "boy's clothes" as if girls didn't wear pants every day. The blonde stiffened under her covers. Maybe she was from another part of the world. The other explanation was too impossible to consider immediately. It would make sense, really. Cornelia knew that there were cultures who frowned upon girls wearing pants. The Amish, for example. Maybe the wardrobe had a copy and that was how Lucy had arrived in Narnia?

The little girl's speech cadence had been different, too, as well as the easy trust she had of Mr. Tumnus. Maybe it was due to her age, but Cornelia was only a few years older and had been wary of the strange faun from the beginning. Unable to sleep due to her whirling thoughts, the girl threw back her covers and climbed out of bed. Padding soundlessly over the wooden floorboards, she opened the door to her room and crept out to the hall.

Pausing just outside, she wondered where she should go. There were no answers for her Narnia situation in the house especially with Miss Susan unwilling to answer them. Miss Susan! Of course, the library! Her destination set, Cornelia moved quickly down the hall as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Carefully cracking open the library's door, she peered inside to make sure the old woman wasn't in her usual seat.

Once the coast was clear, she made her way over to the lamp and flicked it on before the others went the same way until the room was bathed in a golden glow. Approaching her chair from yesterday, Cornelia knelt on the floor and lowered herself so her back was flat on the carpet. Wiggling slightly to position herself underneath the chair, she looked up at the bottom panel of wood, searching for the gauges her eyes had caught earlier that day. There!

With her index finger, she traced the deep, slightly-uneven grooves in the wood. She'd thought it odd that the bottom of the chair was so... used-looking. Someone had carved letters into the wood and she ran her finger over them again, unable to see them clearly in the shadows.

EP + CL.

Who was EP? Were they soulmates? Why was it carved on the bottom of a chair? Her initials were CL, but so were a million other people's. Her soulmate's initials were EP, but he wasn't the only one, either. It could really be anyone. If there had been a middle initial she could have at least narrowed the possibilities. Miss Susan had said she had a brother named Edmund. Maybe she had a P last name? It wasn't necessarily Pevensie, though. It could be Pack or Pace or Pine or a hundred other 'P' names.

𝐑𝐄𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄 ━  edmund pevensie¹Where stories live. Discover now