serendipity - narnia

chapter 12

Chapter 12
And So It Ends, But Just For Now

Fifteen years later, during the glorious Golden Age, the five guardians of Narnia rode through the forest in pursuit of a White Stag. Edmund slowed his horse down and Dahlia stopped beside him, watching as the others galloped off through the wood.

"Alright there, Ed?" Dahlia asked with a smile, looking over her shoulder where the other Pevensies had disappeared.

"Yeah, don't worry about me," Edmund said, leaning forward to pat Philip's mane. "Are you alright, Philip?" His horse nodded, turning his head to look at the king.

"I'm not as young as I once was." Dahlia's horse, Charlotte, let out a laugh.

"That makes two of you," she said to Philip.

"Hey!" Dahlia cried, offended.

"Oh not you, dear. I meant Edmund." Dahlia snorted. Edmund started to defend himself when Susan, Peter, and Lucy rode back into the clearing.

"Come on, you two. Dahlia you're supposed to get him to hurry up, not stop with him," Susan said as she slowed her horse to a stop.

"What did he say again, Susan?" Lucy asked, smirking at Edmund.

"You girls wait in the castle, I'll get the stag myself!" Susan replied in a deep, mocking voice. Edmund glared playfully at Dahlia when she laughed. Then something seemed to catch Peter's eye.

"What's this?" he asked, hopping off his horse. His siblings and Dahlia did the same, joining him as he examined a vine-covered post in the center of the clearing. "It seems familiar."

"As if from a dream," Susan added, watching a flame flicker within a box at the top of the post.

"Or a dream of a dream," Lucy muttered, looking around the clearing. "Spare Oom!" Lucy ran off through the trees, her siblings trailing after her. Dahlia hung back; a nagging feeling at the back of her mind told her that she couldn't go with them.

"Aren't you going to follow them, dear?" Charlotte asked. Dahlia shook her head, patting Charlotte's mane sadly.

"Not this time." Moments later Dahlia fell to the ground, unconscious. The five horses circled her body; Charlotte gently nudged the mage with her nose, concerned. They were confused not only by Dahlia's sudden collapse, but by the fact that she looked as she did when the Pevensies first arrived in Narnia fifteen years before.

The horses moved aside as the dryads of the forest came forward, lifting Dahlia's body into the air and carrying her to the Stone Table. Her own magic took over and she floated above its cracked surface. A few years down the line, in the dark times following the end of the Golden Age, the Narnians built Aslan's How to protect the body of their mage until she woke up. But Dahlia wouldn't wake, at least not until the Pevensies came back to Narnia.

Because the Deep Magic had attached their souls fifteen years prior, Dahlia's soul had nothing to hold on to once the Pevensies were gone. And so there she remained within the stone walls of the How, never aging and never moving for over a thousand years.

Waiting for the return of the kings and queens of old.