𝐑𝐔𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 || Narnia x Zombie AU

Chapter Six: Death Itself

A/N: Happy Halloween my Narnian friends! I can't believe we're already at the end of October (and very nearly at the end of Ruination)!

This chapter is especially dedicated to Abby (abbisarts), for being my loyal beta reader, as well as one of my best friends. Thank you for all your thoughtful encouragement, for staying up to 3am while I frantically finish chapters, for your amazing reviews that FFN just isn't built to handle, for understanding the details and themes that most people don't notice, and for all the other lovely things you do that make my writer heart feel very very loved. You're the Jewel to my Tirian and I love you the mostest!

NOW THAT WE'VE GOTTEN THAT GUSH FEST OUT OF THE WAY, it's further up and further in (to the chapter)!

xXx

Hysterical sobs echoed off cruel tunnel walls, hitching and gasping as Lucy's voice twisted and the chamber threw her anguished cries back at her.

Bones and sinew of skeletal corpses lay mangled on the floor, damp stone leeching the last of the heat from her body, but she didn't care. If anything had still been shambling through these halls, she would have been dead a long time ago.

Instead there was only the bang and rattle of the cell door as Edmund's body crashed into it, hands outstretched, grasping, dripping, fingernails chipped and split from carving at the iron rods, the face that had once belonged to her brother snarling pale behind its cage.

Nothing mattered anymore.

Edmund was gone.

The world had ended.

And yet her cries hitched on, stomach churning, throat tightening, lungs burning.

She was still here.

And that was worse.

Time had long since abandoned all meaning, the shadowy flickering caves and the gurgling screeches that were almost words dug so deeply into Lucy's skin that she almost forgot how she'd come here in the first place. There was nothing before this. Nothing after. Until hurried footsteps echoed in the hall above, and a shadow blocked out the dim light from the stairwell.

A sob caught in her throat.

"Lucy?"

Peter's clear voice brought a fresh wave of numbness washing through her.

The footsteps quickened.

"Lu?"

She tried to form words, but only another cry escaped her, and then his figure rushed into the torchlight and pulled up short.

A horrible silence engulfed the hollow chamber; all except for Edmund's teeth on iron bars as he smashed into them again and drove a sharp inhuman squeal from his lungs.

"What— what—" Peter's voice caught, and he stammered incoherently for several moments before he tried again, voice thick. "What happened here? Lu, what's going…?"

She wanted to scream, she wanted to shout at him, white hot fury burst inside her chest she hadn't even realized had been bubbling all this time; we should have brought the cordial, you should have let me take it! I could have healed him, I should have healed him!

But even as she dragged herself to her feet, the vengeance drained out of her, leaving only the cold and the smallness and the emptiness, and she stumbled blindly into Peter's arms.

Warm, strong hands clutched at her back as if somehow to protect her, but the heartbeat pounding under her salty cheek was about to explode.

"I'm sorry," she choked out, "I'm sorry, I— I couldn't stop it— I tried, I tried, I—"