Susan's Sunrise

Magpie Tale #309

Susan wakes from the dream, only to realize it is a nightmare.

She had been playing chess with Lucy by the well of Cair Paravel. A nonsensical place for a chess game, but that was dreams for you. Lucy had moved her silver queen with emeralds on the crown and Susan had just picked up her golden knight with ruby eyes when she looked up into Lucy’s eyes. Lucy’s bright, laughing, living eyes. Then she remembered. Lucy was dead, along with Edmund and Peter and all of them.

With the feel of the heavy knight still in her hand, Susan fumbles her way to the window. Throwing open the curtains she stares out desperately trying to banish the dream and replace it with anything else.

The sky is dark, mirroring her thoughts as tears run down her cheeks. It isn’t fair that all her family died on one day leaving her alone. How she misses them! If only she could have them back. She would listen their stories of Narnia without reminding them it was just all a game. Before she had wanted them to see reality, but now she remembers the pain in their eyes when she corrected them and it seems cruel. If believing in Narnia could bring them all back she’d do it. She looks down at her empty hands as tears splatter down.

Courage gentle queen.

Had she heard something? As she looks up again, the first rays of the sun light up the sky with a gentle yellow, through yellow was a poor word to describe the pure light. If glory was a color, perhaps that would be it. For the light was glorious.

Like the sun rising up over the Eastern Sea at Cair Paravel. She stops the thought habitually and then pauses. Hadn’t she just been wishing her family and Narnia back? Why not think about it? Of course it was just a game, but her siblings had loved it. Wouldn’t having what they loved be a little like having them? Besides she had been part of the game once.

So she thinks about sunrises at Cair Paravel and the way the mermaids splashed though the sun’s reflection and the way Lucy would dance with the fauns and how everyone listened to Edmund’s counsels and Peter would drop everything to aide one of his subjects and… and how she herself loved the talking beasts and the dryads and the feasts they had all joined in together. Susan is amazed at how vivid and lifelike the memories are. After all, they were just games, though she wishes they were more.

As the sun rises, a great ball of white she can’t look at, throwing gold about like Lucy’s hair or a lion’s mane, she feels something. The dead weight of the chess piece is gone. But something rises in her heart with the sun. Hope, a rebirth, a second chance. For the first time in months she can think of her family without agonizing pain. Of course the memories are bittersweet, but she will remember. She’ll even remember Narnia and love them again through it.