White witchery
Dec. 16th, 2005 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deviOkay, I just saw the Narnia movie, and let me just say first of all that I really enjoyed it and my inner child clubbed me into submission and I was entirely on the side of the good guys and I didn't even mind all the allegory and I was happy that they won.
Let me also say that I haven't got a copy of The Magician's Nephew handy.
Having said those two things, these are the thoughts that entertained me on the cycle home:
Jadis's Story
When I was born our sun was dying. It had been dying for a long time. It hung red and bloated in our sky, coughing out long tongues of heat and light that scorched our cities and burnt our meagre crops. We had been a magnificent people, we Charnish; we had thought and invented and dreamed and told stories for nigh on a million years; but we couldn't save our star. Every year there was less food and water, less fuel to power the machines that protected us from the elements. My sister and I grew up in the royal court being taught all the wisdom of our world, but by that time, we also needed to learn much of survival, and ruthlessness, and cruelty.
My sister learned faster than I. When she was fifteen she was caught trying to assassinate the king our father. She was to be put to death, but she escaped. We thought she was gone forever, but years later she came to light. She had fled to the ramshackle scatter of villages in the lands we had relinquished because we no longer had the power to govern them, and built them up slowly into an empire of her own.
In the meantime our father had died - it was not I who killed him, but in any case I found myself on the throne. I tried to bring order, but all the time there was famine and feuding, raids by one region on another's foodstores, disease in the remaining water, and it was all I could do to stop my own people killing each other. My sister was unstoppable; she was interested in nothing but conquest.
I met her and begged her to stop fighting and join forces with me. She laughed in my face.
"You don't understand, sister," I said. "Our world is dying. It will soon be dead. If we stopped wasting our remaining wealth and magic on fighting each other, if we put it all together, maybe we could find a way to protect ourselves. Or to leave this place - find a younger world where our people could thrive again."
But my sister closed her ears. She didn't want to look ahead and think about the coming end. All she could think of was this moment, and war - conquering more and more of the planet to claim its resources, though even they would soon be gone.
So I fought back. I had to. She beat me anyway. And one day she came to my capital at the head of her army and stood before my throne. She told me to submit to her.
In that moment I saw it all. My sister's war had destroyed much of the resources we had left. First she would kill me, and then she would continue ruling as a tyrant while all around her the people grew scarcer, hungrier, more desperate, killing each other for scraps of food, sinking into oblivion. I thought of what we once were, our people, and it seemed a crime that we should end with so little dignity, reduced to mere beasts by our hardship.
I heard the battle rage outside the palace walls, men and women screaming. "Well?" my sister demanded.
And with my eyes full of tears, my lips trembling, I spoke the Deplorable Word. In that moment, with no fear or violence or pain, all creatures on my world died.
A little sooner than it otherwise would have, and (I hope) in a little less agony, my beloved world of Charn ended.
This was my sin.
And I was left alone.
*
I made myself walk about in the vast, awful silence, looking at the corpses where they lay, forcing myself to face the magnitude of what I'd done. Trying to convince myself that I was their queen, after all, and sometimes queens have to make terrible choices. Trying and failing. Some time around then, I freely admit, I went a little mad.
When I could no longer find food or water I crept back to the castle and prepared a spell to put myself to sleep. I wondered if anyone would ever come to our world again and see the remains of what we once were. Perhaps I should give them the means of waking me. I was, after all, the only one who remembered and could tell them of our past glories. I prepared a second spell.
"Strike the bell and bide the danger," I wrote as a spasm of guilt passed through me. Let the strangers know what they were getting themselves into, wishing me on their unsuspecting race. I finished the spell and at last, on my dust-covered throne with my ancestors around me, I slept.
And at last someone did strike the bell, and I woke, hungry and raving - it must have been a very, very long time later, because our sun's death-agony was over and it had turned shrunken and cold - and I followed the strangers here to this young world and a chance to make amends.
*
It took hundreds of local years to get the spell working right, but at last I achieved my goal. I put a shield of cold in their sky to protect them from the heat that slowly destroyed Charn. My powers don't stretch across this whole planet, alas, but at least in this land I have frozen time in this perfect wintry moment, frozen the cycle of the seasons, the cycle that brings life but also death - so much death.
The creatures here are countrified savages, animals and earth-folk. They have scarcely a city to their name. My heart aches for Charn, our art, our libraries, our machines that walked and flew and thought, everything that burned up with our sun. These people have no culture to speak of. They don't understand I'm doing this for their own good. They've never felt the terrible killing heat of a solar flare. I am their saviour, but they hate me, so I am alone. Still alone.
I sit on my throne of ice and the cold is balm to my skin which still remembers the scorch of our sun's death-throes. And I think: it must never happen again. It will never happen again. At least, if I can help it, not here.
Let me also say that I haven't got a copy of The Magician's Nephew handy.
Having said those two things, these are the thoughts that entertained me on the cycle home:
Jadis's Story
When I was born our sun was dying. It had been dying for a long time. It hung red and bloated in our sky, coughing out long tongues of heat and light that scorched our cities and burnt our meagre crops. We had been a magnificent people, we Charnish; we had thought and invented and dreamed and told stories for nigh on a million years; but we couldn't save our star. Every year there was less food and water, less fuel to power the machines that protected us from the elements. My sister and I grew up in the royal court being taught all the wisdom of our world, but by that time, we also needed to learn much of survival, and ruthlessness, and cruelty.
My sister learned faster than I. When she was fifteen she was caught trying to assassinate the king our father. She was to be put to death, but she escaped. We thought she was gone forever, but years later she came to light. She had fled to the ramshackle scatter of villages in the lands we had relinquished because we no longer had the power to govern them, and built them up slowly into an empire of her own.
In the meantime our father had died - it was not I who killed him, but in any case I found myself on the throne. I tried to bring order, but all the time there was famine and feuding, raids by one region on another's foodstores, disease in the remaining water, and it was all I could do to stop my own people killing each other. My sister was unstoppable; she was interested in nothing but conquest.
I met her and begged her to stop fighting and join forces with me. She laughed in my face.
"You don't understand, sister," I said. "Our world is dying. It will soon be dead. If we stopped wasting our remaining wealth and magic on fighting each other, if we put it all together, maybe we could find a way to protect ourselves. Or to leave this place - find a younger world where our people could thrive again."
But my sister closed her ears. She didn't want to look ahead and think about the coming end. All she could think of was this moment, and war - conquering more and more of the planet to claim its resources, though even they would soon be gone.
So I fought back. I had to. She beat me anyway. And one day she came to my capital at the head of her army and stood before my throne. She told me to submit to her.
In that moment I saw it all. My sister's war had destroyed much of the resources we had left. First she would kill me, and then she would continue ruling as a tyrant while all around her the people grew scarcer, hungrier, more desperate, killing each other for scraps of food, sinking into oblivion. I thought of what we once were, our people, and it seemed a crime that we should end with so little dignity, reduced to mere beasts by our hardship.
I heard the battle rage outside the palace walls, men and women screaming. "Well?" my sister demanded.
And with my eyes full of tears, my lips trembling, I spoke the Deplorable Word. In that moment, with no fear or violence or pain, all creatures on my world died.
A little sooner than it otherwise would have, and (I hope) in a little less agony, my beloved world of Charn ended.
This was my sin.
And I was left alone.
*
I made myself walk about in the vast, awful silence, looking at the corpses where they lay, forcing myself to face the magnitude of what I'd done. Trying to convince myself that I was their queen, after all, and sometimes queens have to make terrible choices. Trying and failing. Some time around then, I freely admit, I went a little mad.
When I could no longer find food or water I crept back to the castle and prepared a spell to put myself to sleep. I wondered if anyone would ever come to our world again and see the remains of what we once were. Perhaps I should give them the means of waking me. I was, after all, the only one who remembered and could tell them of our past glories. I prepared a second spell.
"Strike the bell and bide the danger," I wrote as a spasm of guilt passed through me. Let the strangers know what they were getting themselves into, wishing me on their unsuspecting race. I finished the spell and at last, on my dust-covered throne with my ancestors around me, I slept.
And at last someone did strike the bell, and I woke, hungry and raving - it must have been a very, very long time later, because our sun's death-agony was over and it had turned shrunken and cold - and I followed the strangers here to this young world and a chance to make amends.
*
It took hundreds of local years to get the spell working right, but at last I achieved my goal. I put a shield of cold in their sky to protect them from the heat that slowly destroyed Charn. My powers don't stretch across this whole planet, alas, but at least in this land I have frozen time in this perfect wintry moment, frozen the cycle of the seasons, the cycle that brings life but also death - so much death.
The creatures here are countrified savages, animals and earth-folk. They have scarcely a city to their name. My heart aches for Charn, our art, our libraries, our machines that walked and flew and thought, everything that burned up with our sun. These people have no culture to speak of. They don't understand I'm doing this for their own good. They've never felt the terrible killing heat of a solar flare. I am their saviour, but they hate me, so I am alone. Still alone.
I sit on my throne of ice and the cold is balm to my skin which still remembers the scorch of our sun's death-throes. And I think: it must never happen again. It will never happen again. At least, if I can help it, not here.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 03:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 08:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 12:39 pm (UTC)Neil Gaiman gets this sort of thing published all the time, but I'm not him :)
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 09:27 am (UTC)There was something so chilling about the dying sun in the first book. It's great the way you've built on this, you could really write a book about the fall of Charn if you wanted to.
Oh and I enjoyed the film too. I was very wary at the start but became more convinced as it went along. Though I wish I'd seen it when I was a child, when I didn't question anything.
I'll refrain from making comments about the extremely well animated beaver fur..
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 12:18 pm (UTC)And it fit in with my apocalypse nightmares as well.
I wasn't expecting to like the beavers, but I thought they were okay. Oh, who am I kidding, I had no sense of adult critical discernment at all in there.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-19 12:25 am (UTC)You too, huh? In a dubiously schadenfreudeish sort of way, it's always cool to find out It's Not Just Me:-)
I thought the story was neat, by the way. Much as I love The Magician's Nephew, I'd never thought of Her that way before.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 09:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 09:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 10:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 10:48 am (UTC)Genius,
Date: 2005-12-16 10:57 am (UTC)Re: Genius,
Date: 2005-12-16 02:34 pm (UTC)Re: Genius,
Date: 2005-12-16 02:42 pm (UTC)I've only seen the trailers, but Tilda Swinton was the best thing about Constantine, plus she can also shorten her name to ~.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 10:58 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-12-16 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-16 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-17 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-17 06:31 pm (UTC)Not that I think taking it upon oneself to euthanise one's entire race is a Nice Thing To Do or anything, l just wanted to think of an explanation for her actions that wasn't just 'mwahahaaa! If I can't rule them I shall kill them all!'
no subject
Date: 2005-12-17 07:58 pm (UTC)I *DO* like the way that in your version, it makes complete sense for Jadis to be keeping Narnia in endless winter. Of course, in LWW, before Lewis had thought of the Magician's Nephew bit, she has a different etymology, being descended from Adam's first wife Lilith, who had giantish blood in her. But you can't really do anything about Lewis's own continuity problems ;-)
What about it never being Christmas??
no subject
Date: 2005-12-17 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-19 02:17 am (UTC)You're bang on the nail with the martyrdom thing. I wanted to play up that whole martyr/saviour angle, as a counterpoint to the Christian allegory stuff.
Re Christmas, perhaps she froze Narnia as it would be at precisely midwinter, not four days after midwinter... but I think Christmas sits uneasily in Narnia in any case. It's like the Lilith thing: it gives the impression that CSL had only just thought up the world and hadn't yet reasoned some things through completely, and I prefer not to think about it.
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Date: 2005-12-19 01:42 am (UTC)Three cheers for excellent writing!
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Date: 2005-12-19 02:19 am (UTC)I'm usually more descriptive and wordy, though, I have to admit.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-27 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-28 02:43 am (UTC)