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LEAVING NARNIA, I knew none of this was going to be easy. I knew a year at sea would test me. I knew tracking a decades-old trail left by the chimæras would likely be impossible, but I still did it. Despite knowing this voyage was going to be the hardest thing I've ever done, I still sailed. Because after being torn from their home and enslaved 1400 years ago, the chimæras deserve to know their hiding is over. That their freedom has been won again. And I knew I was the only one who could tell them. With the mark on my hand, I was the only one they'd believe.
Despite knowing this — my impossible task — it tears me apart to know that after almost six months of searching past Narnia's borders, I'm still in the same spot I was three years ago.
I have no leads, no ideas, and no way of reaching them. And I'm scared that I never will. It terrifies me to think an entire species will never taste this freedom. That their lives were spent in fear and hiding and nothing more.
The salted wind shears across my cheeks, sea spray coating my knotted hair.
I remember something I was told once so long ago. To accept what's happened and forgive myself as best I can for it. I can remember the way he said it, with his hands grasping my face and his fierce, broken voice and eyes that were soft like powdered snow over the plains. I can remember the way his breath felt over my skin, the way he smelled — like underground and earth and so faintly of fire. I remember how it felt like the sky was breaking over me, just like it does now. I remember it all.
I close my eyes.
The sounds of the waves crashing against the hull fade to trees in the wind. I can feel the connection, just as the way it was.
Stay, please.
He smiled — one I miss seeing so much I fear I might've forgotten entirely. He hugged me and kissed my forehead. And he told me without knowing at all our fate, "I wasn't planning on leaving."
No one ever really does, I realize now. The world simply has its own desires, and one of them happens to be the gap of a thousand worlds between Edmund Pevensie and me.
I hold onto the tether made real again in my mind, hoping I might remember how it feels before it disappears again. Pulling it close to my heart as if it might make this memory last forever. As if keeping hold of it means it'll never fade or waver.
If I focus, I can see bubbles float past my vision, hear my heartbeat in the water around me, see the distorted reflection of the trees and a boy above me. I can feel him pulling just as he used to in a way that said, "here I am. I'm here."
Only he didn't do it that day at the spring outside the How. He couldn't have. We'd only just learned about the bridge between us and had no idea how to use it.
