𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐑𝐎𝐏𝐘 || A Narnian Autumn Writing Challenge (Oneshot Book)

10. True Things

england // september 16, 1903
prompt: "leaves"
word count: 1,680

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Polly poked her tongue out between pursed lips, squinting as she tied away the last stem of the leafy circlet in her hands, and Digory smirked to himself as he watched from the forest floor where he lay back on his elbows under a canopy of fluttering green leaves, just beginning to turn yellow.

"That looks a little Narnian, doesn't it?"

Polly glanced up and quickly back down to the crown in her hands, lifting it onto the tips of her fingers and turning it to examine the carefully interwoven stems and long grasses—not so very unlike the patterns the dwarfs had crafted into fresh-grown silver and gold.

She smiled, that familiar fond smile that always twitched irresistibly at her lips whenever he mentioned Narnia. "I suppose it does."

Digory's mother had only taught Polly to make crowns out if the long-stemmed flowers in the back garden yesterday, but she'd already moved on to the significantly more challenging task of weaving leaves, perhaps in the spirit of the rapidly approaching autumn as the summer hols began to draw to a close.

Soon she would have to go back to her stuffy London school, but it was always in the last few days of her visit that she dug herself in deepest to the wildest parts of the countryside.

She sighed contentedly. "You know, sometimes I forget all of this came from those adventures with the rings."

Digory cocked his head, turning onto his side and propping a leg up as he leaned on one elbow. "We would still have been friends, though. We were friends before you even met my uncle."

"Yes, but... if it weren't for that terrible queen, or jumping through the wrong pool, we would never have found Narnia. Or Aslan. And we would never have gone up to the garden, or gotten that apple for your mother. And— well, you know."

She flushed a little, and Digory smirked. As abrasive as she could be at times, Polly was still too tender-hearted to say his mother would probably have died without it. And then where would they be?

"You can say it. I don't mind. She's alive, and she'll outlive us all, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, you're right. It would all have been different, if not for Narnia."

Polly laid the circlet of yellowing leaves on her lap and picked up another from the pile heaped beside her on the mossy fallen log. "Have you ever thought about telling her? About Narnia, I mean? She seems like the sort who might understand, if anyone could."

"'Course I've thought about it. Plenty of times. I want to, of course, but... I don't know, it just feels like the sort of thing you can't ever really explain, no matter how hard you try." He nodded to her, raising his eyebrows. "Be honest, would you believe it if you hadn't been there? If I told you I'd vanished clean out of the world, and met a witch who could turn iron doors to dust, and talked to a Lion, and grew a tree out of a piece of toffee, and rode on the back of a winged horse?"

She nibbled the inside of her lip for a moment. "Well, when you put it that way... I suppose you'd look madder than your uncle. But... I do hope I would at least try to believe."

Digory smiled.

"It's alright, though," she added. "As long as we both know, I suppose that's something."