Chapter Text
An apple tree stands, roots firmly planted in the soft mud at the side of the river. She is not the oldest tree (though she isn't far from it) and she is important, she knows, perhaps the most important tree in Narnia itself outside of that gold-walled Garden where her forebear stands at the centre of all.
Her first memory is the coronation of King Frank and Queen Helen, and the second is her duty, intoned gravely by Aslan to the new Narnians all around. She will be a Shield against the darkness and the evil in this world. She must stand strong.
Aslan instructs the Boy, the one who planted her seed in that bank by the river, to pluck an apple from her branches. She is young, still, barely an hour old, but the lingering Magic from the Creation has helped her grow tall, even in that short time. The Boy approaches, and she dips a slender bough a little lower so that he may take a fruit more easily.
She never forgets that first apple she gives. For many years there is an echo in her limbs of a tree in another world, and she wonders, sometimes, if her mother in the Garden remembers her in the same way. (A long while later, she will feel it in her deepest rings when that tree is felled by a great storm and she will shudder and close her eyes tightly. That year her branches will remain bare of fruit and of leaves until the next spring, when the grief is a little less sharp.)
"Hold fast, dear one," Aslan tells her, once the children have gone and the King and Queen are off governing and the Talking Beasts and creatures are deciding their own business. "You must be as strong as you are able, for as long as you can bear."
She slips out of her tree and stands beside Aslan. She has been aware, before this, of all the goings on around her, but it is a very different kind of awareness to feeling grass beneath her bare feet, to seeing with her own pair of eyes those soft, tawny ones set into a solemn face.
"Why are you sad, Aslan?" She asks.
His voice is melodious and melancholy both. "I had hoped that this world might remain innocent a little longer than it did, and that I should not have to place this burden on your shoulders so early." He sighs, great and heavy.
She hums lightly, looks up at the pale blue sky. It's the first time it's been this colour - a touch of purple casting it periwinkle like the flowers sprouting up in the dewy grass nearby.
"This world is vast," she replies. "It is fresh and new and far more of it unsullied than not and that will remain so for many years. Besides," she says gently, "it cannot be a burden if my duty is what I was already made to do, just as any other creature's duty to live and grow and love is no burden."
A rumble of a laugh. "You are wise, child."
"You made me so, Aslan."
He shakes his head. "Nay, little one. I did not make you. You are the first child of Narnia herself and daughter of the Garden, where all that is Good will eventually come to dwell." This sends a thrill through her, and she raises her chin. To be the first new thing to grow from the soil after the Creation is not something to be easily forgotten.
"I see," she cocks her head. "And more will follow?"
"Indeed. This land will change, the creatures in it shall beget children, and when their time comes they will join me in the Garden. Your path, and that of your fellow spirits - your sisters and brothers and cousins who dwell in the trees and rivers and oceans - shall be a little longer."
She nods. "I understand, Aslan."
His eyes pierce her own. "You will have to weather many storms before you can rest, for the evils will not be easily held at bay."
"I can bear it, Aslan. Already, my roots run deep." She holds her shoulders back, her head high. "I will stand firm.
He smiles, she thinks, as much as a lion can smile, at least.
"Good," he says. "Let me breathe on you, and you shall feel stronger still." He does, and the warm breath of the Lion sets her sap thrumming. She'd already felt so very alive, being new to the world, but this is something different again. If she'd seen lightning before, or known what it was, she would have said it felt like she could channel a strike of it without so much as a branch splitting.
She smiles, closes her eyes, and when she opens them again Aslan is gone.
For a while she stands there, turns in a circle taking in all she can see of Narnia - its green green hills and valleys, distant mountains and sparkling rivers, all the other trees, the creatures filling the place and a lantern atop an iron post. It's glorious, and all of it hers to protect.