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

13. Sanctuary

archenland // year 1022
prompt: "cozy blankets"
word count: 2,019

xXx

Aravis knew she was dreaming.

She knew the ghostly grip of cold, pale stone; of sightless effigies standing high over the caverns of the dead. She knew the shapes of bare trees wavering in the corners of her vision, an icy wind blowing reckless and cruel outside the hall of unforgiving stone.

Yet still the chill of the tomb invaded her skin, freezing down to the pit in her stomach.

Still she shrieked as her father's strong hands pulled her away from the mound, still her child-voice ricocheted unheeded off ancient walls, still everything inside her lurched for the boy lying at the bottom of that fresh cut grave, draped in richly dyed fabrics, littered with trinkets of gold.

Her brother.

Her world.

Still that heavy, guttural scrape of stone over stone rumbled under her feet, through her bones, inside her skull, the giant slab grinding into place on the ropes of six slaves to seal his sarcophagus.

To seal him in forever.

"No, stop, please!" The cry ripped like a scream from her throat, rough and raw through the flood of tears. "Don't leave him here, father, you can't! You can't leave him!"

But no one listened.

Strong hands guided her firmly, forcefully out toward the icy grey of the outside world, and with one last burst of wild desperation she ripped her arms free and lunged backward, barreling blindly through the sea of hands that reached out to stop her and plunging down into the grave that should never have held his young body.

Her hand struck the beaded embroidery of Alamar's ceremonial tunic just as the hollow roar reached a crescendo and the suffocating stone slab settled into place overhead with a crunch that cast her into pitch blackness like the grip of death itself.

Aravis bolted awake with a gasp.

A pocket of air caught sharply in her throat, heart pounding with a painful fury against her ribcage as the chill of the night struck her skin, clammy with sweat under heavy blankets.

She coughed with a shudder and drew a long, shaky breath, glancing down to find Cor still asleep beside her, shafts of pale moonlight falling silvery across peaceful features and curling golden locks splayed out over the pillow.

The Princess of Archenland breathed out again, waiting for her violent heartbeat to calm before throwing back the covers and slipping out onto the icy stone floor, not so very unlike that of a tomb, the frigid air of late October in the mountains engulfing her as she wandered to the glittering window.

Sweat turned to ice on her skin, and she gripped her own arms as if she could tear off the offending flesh, as if she could crawl out of her body and into any other life, into a life before they'd put her brother in the ground, before the haunting grief had clawed its way into her chest and made its home there.

Before it had been real.

Before she had allowed her father to pull her out through the pillars of that pale stone hall, out onto the desolate hillside and down to the house she had once called a home.

For a moment she was no longer gazing out over Anvard's moonbathed towers and the dim misty orange of the forest beyond, but over pale, bare fields, up to the distant slope where the monolithic stones of the family burial mound stood, up to the box of cold stone where her best friend lay alone, side by side only with the dry bones of ancestors he'd never met. A resting place she would now never share.