Prologue
Author's Note: I own only this story!
Prologue
He'd seen this girl before, he knew it. Though the last time he'd seen her in his dreams, she'd worn a black shirt under a black vest and black pants. Tall, fur-lined boots, again in black, had covered almost her entire leg and leather gauntlets had protected her wrists and forearms. A quiver of dark, deadly arrows had rested on her hip, a sword on the other. She'd carried a rune covered bow in one hand, leaving the other to hold the reins of a large white Polar Bear. A Wolf had sat beside her, his shoulders as high as her hip.
Now she wore a ripped white dress and bore only a small dagger at her side. The Polar Bear and her Wolf were gone, replaced by a small red Cardinal. Instead of the hall of ice and snow, she knelt before a frozen pond in a cavern of ice. A tiara of ice covered iron sat on the snow beside her as she reached for her reflection in the ice. Tears dripped from her pale blue eyes, and he remembered that they'd been a brighter blue than his own. Her hair too was different; once white like snow it was gray now, like old straw; it showed clearly how colorless her skin was.
As he watched, powerless in his dream-state, she took her dagger from her belt. Raising it above her head with a shaking hand, she let out a strangled cry and drove it through her reflection, right between the eyes. Then her hand slipped on the knife and she looked at her palm curiously. A red line formed, and a single drop of ruby blood fell onto the ice before her. As more fell, they watched, fascinated, for a shape was forming. When she saw it clearly, she jerked back, crying out again. This time, though, her voice was filled with fear, and it was her cry that woke him.
Lunging upright from the sheets, the teenage boy gasped, the girl's cry echoing in his ears. He stood, throwing his tangled blankets to the end of the bed, and went to the window. The sun was rising above the horizon, and he took in its warmth gratefully. The image her blood had made on the ice left him shaken, for he'd seen what she had feared.
He wondered why she'd feared it, for that image brought great pride to him personally. It was his own personal banner, the flag all his troops flew in his honor. As he thought, the seventeen year old known as the High King of Narnia, King Peter the Proud, Peter the Gold, or just Peter absently played with the edge of a banner hung on his wall. Then he jerked back, for it was the same image he'd seen in his dream. The girl, for whatever reason, feared the silver banner and its red Lion Rampant.
