After All

After All

Prologue

"This looks familiar," High King Peter told his siblings.

"As if from a dream," Queen Lucy replied.

"Or a dream of a dream," Queen Susan added.

"The Spare Oom," Queen Lucy murmured, looking around. She ran through the trees, calling, "Come on!"

"Lucy!" High King Peter called.

"Not again," Queen Susan could be heard as they moved through thick pine trees.

"These aren't branches," High King Peter realized a moment later.

"They're coats," Queen Susan gasped, shocked.

Then the four tumbled out onto a hard wood floor and looked around. The door to the room they were suddenly in opened and an old man entered. He looked up and saw them on the floor. "What were you all doing in the wardrobe?" he asked, a knowing smile on his face.

"You wouldn't believe us if we told you, Professor," Peter told him.

The Professor tossed the blonde a cricket ball, and said, "Try me."

That was how the Pevensies came to know the Professor's story of Narnia. And that was how the Professor came to know the High Kings and Queens of the land he had seen born.

That was also how Evelyn came to see Aslan again. He gave her a choice. The Princess could return to England as well, and never see Narnia nor the High King again. She could stay in Narnia, bear the High King's child, grow old, and die there. Or she could enter a cycle of age. She would return to fifteen years old, and grow to the same age she was at that moment again. Then she would go back to fifteen and grow older once more. The cycle would continue until the High King returned to Narnia. She could protect the country she loved, but she was told then that she would not be able to save the crown or her unborn baby.

"The cycle. I choose the cycle of age. My people will need the guidance I can give them, and I can protect Narnia from the shadows. Besides, the Kings and Queens will need someone who saw everything happen when they were gone when they return," she told him, though a tear slid from her eye as she rested one hand on her stomach. She would never get to see her beautiful child.

"You will, my gold one. But it is not his time to come into the world," Aslan told her.

"Then I will have a son someday?" she asked. He nodded and she buried her face in his mane. "I choose the cycle, Aslan," she said, straightening. The hard set determination in her eyes made the Great Lion's heart both hurt and proud.

"Then it is so," he breathed on her, and suddenly she was fifteen once more. But she remembered the eighteen years she'd already spent in Narnia.

And that was how Evelyn came to be known as Evelyn the Shadow, Princess of Old and Guardian of the Legend.