The New Narnia- Chapter 44 (Patreon)

Chapter 44: A Chapter From The Big Book of Cruel Miracles

Gentle Reader,

What you are about to read is a most unpleasant, but revealing tale.  It might be best to not read this, and learn of the poor little changeling girl thrown down the well.  Perhaps an afternoon playing outside with friends and family might be an order; perhaps with a particularly friendly dog.

But if you insist...

“Help me, God,” the girl whispered in her desperation.  She had said it countless times, but God never answered. The only reply in those caverns was the echoing of her own voice.  Exhausted and on the verge of collapse, her tiny voice was so quiet that not even her echoes answered her anymore.

She’d been supposed to die.  Supposed to drown in that well that the nuns had pitched her down.  “A second baptism,” the old gnarled nun had told her.  “Then you just take a wee breath and you’ll float away to wherever changelings go.  Won’t that be nice?”

She imagined the monstrous woman had been smiling when she said that, but the sack she’d been tied up in had been closed shut.  Not many people could swim back then, but the nuns were taking no chances with this one.

The girl was a ‘changeling’.  The common folk believed that meant she wasn’t human.  That she was some faerie homunculus that was left in place when a real baby was stolen by the Fair Folk.  She was guilty of the crime of not beng human.  The only thing this poor girl was born guilty of was being born strange and weak in a hard world and not having the common courtesy to die.

Two mismatched eyes, one green and one blue was considered a bad omen. No chubby cheeks or pleasantly plump baby fat either. She was boney and long limbed, but did not grow no matter how much she ate.  She did not get taller, nor heavier.  Had she not teethed and finally talked, she might have been thought to be frozen in time.  A child with the frame of an adult but the stature of a toddler.  

Weak too.  Even as her mind grew her body stubbornly resisted.  Straining to walk most times, and crawling the rest.  Diapers never exchanged for chamber pots or the bushes because her body never alerted her to the need.  Eventually, she was just left naked and outside most days.

Like a dog.

The birth of a happy and giggling baby sister sealed her fate.  Squalling and plump and healthy and adorable.

The girl was a child who would never grow up, never aid with chores, never marry, and never leave. And since this was an era where medical knowledge could be generously referred to “undeveloped” she was branded  a changeling.  The term “genetic disorder” had not yet been invented.  It made more sense in this world that something from another (non-Chrisitan) plane of existence had taken the real baby girl and switched her with this strange approximation of a human being.

As a final mercy, she was left with the nuns.  They’d look after her.  They’d teach her to read and pray.  They’d show her mercy and love.  Clothe her.  Feed her.  Teach her.  Train her as best as she could.  She may have no use on a near barren plot of land just outside a village, but the nunnery could still use her as an example of God’s mercy and the charity that His children were to show the unfortunate.

For a time, this was true.  The girl aged and matured, if not grew.  She learned her letters.  She learned to eat, and save for her eyes, she seemed more and more a tiny adult than a misshapen child.  For a time, the girl was happy.

That was before the well water became poisoned.  That was before the Mother Superior died before the girl might take her final vows.  That was before the girl learned a terrible truth about humanity: That Old Religion is no match for even older superstitions.

She was a changeling.  The nunnery’s sudden reversal of fortune was because they had nurtured a changeling for so long; on the verge of making her one of them.  The girl was not of this world and this was God’s punishment for consorting with a heathen fairy bastard. For the well to be cleansed and Mother Superior to exit purgatory, the girl must be expelled:  From the convent. From this world.  From this life.

In a less civilized time, she would have been burned at the stake.  Being tied up naked in a sack full of rocks was more merciful, and less gruesome than a witch burning or smashing her brains in with an iron hammer.  The girl had committed no crime worthy of such pain.

Her only crime was not belonging anywhere.

There was pain though.  Lots of it.  The girl never hit water.  Instead her body dropped down down down into darkness and landed on hard and cold stone.  The rocks in the bag crunching into her frail frame.  Yet she lived.  Lived in agony as her body was bruised and bleeding.

Only some cruel miracle saw her live through it instead of snapping her neck or spine instantly.  She hadn’t even the strength or coordination to curl up in a ball or try to catch herself, smacking against the hard surface of the cavern as if she were a discarded doll.

That might have been the thing that drew out her death.  No ability to try to catch her self.  No tensing tendons to rip or bracing bones to snap.  For a time, she called out meekly for help.  First for the God she had read so much about, and then anyone else who might listen.  Surely she was Daniel and this was her lion’s den.  If the meek were supposed to inherit the earth, then who was meeker than her?  Where was her inheritance?

In and out of consciousness she drifted. Time lost meaning.  Minutes were hours were seconds were days.  She did not sleep or rest as much as lose the concept of herself and who she was. She did not dream nor die, merely ceased to be as she was for a time.

Eventually, though she had neither sun nor moon nor stars to tell her how long, she was able to crawl out of the bag, bloodied and wretched, but alive.  And through the depths and darkness she crawled and clawed and dragged herself onward; not knowing where she was going, but some

“Please,” she whispered into the nothingness.  “Don’t let me die. Not like this.  Not like this.”  She dragged herself through muck and mire.  With no light to show her, she only knew it wasn’t her own blood that started to drench her by the chill that it gave.  

For a brief time it was a mercy.  The cold numbed her pain, and seeped into her.  Numbing her.  Making her forget that anything below her shoulders existed for a time.  How long, she could not say.  Minutes became hours became seconds became days.  When you can barely crawl and have no light and only ever widening and jagged rocky walls to guide you, time and space less and less meaningful.

What was meaningful was the chill and how her bones started to shake and shiver.  Hell was full of fire, but ice could be just as painful.  Any extreme could be hell.  

Only her sloshing through the shallow water made any sounds.  Eventually even her teeth stopped chattering.

It was almost over.  So sad yet appropriate that the final moments of her life would be blackness with nothing but blackness ahead.  Soon her strength would give out and she’d be unable to even crawl.  The bits of muck and water beneath her would either freeze her or drown her.

A single tear dripped out from her eye.  Her blue one, and landed in the shallow mire just beneath her head.

LIGHT!

Blue, dazzling, sparkling light as if made by a tiny thousand stars spread out from her.  An electric wildfire spreading out in every direction around her.  A wave of color and dazzling beauty that the not-so-little girl had never seen before.  

She had not gone to Heaven, Gentle Reader; nor had that particular drop down the well placed her anywhere on Earth.  But as a poet and playwright would later have one of his characters say: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Picture of you will: A land of dreams; one of fantasy and magic that only the youngest and most innocent among us can access and only while they slumber.  A land of impossible happiness that is always shifting and swirling in a mist that wipes the land clean with the first rays of sunshine that bring about wakefulness.  A twilight land. A gentle land.  A blank and ever self-cleaning canvas in reality in which the minds of the innocent finger paint and experiment.

Yet this land had never had a waking visitor before, yet alone a physical one.  And purity can be sullied and corrupted by the slightest irregularity.

In that flash of electric blue, as if the sun was shining from behind one eye, the girl ceased to be as she was.  And so did the caverns and caves.  The canvas was no longer, and would never again, be completely blank.

It engulfed her.  It absorbed her. It became her.  It took from her.  And it wanted more.  She was pulled under, living but having never truly lived.  Thirsting for love, but only hearing of it.  Being told she was different.

A blank patch on reality itself, made of the stuff of dreams and reactive to vibrant imaginations of those who managed to visit in dreams, but ultimately malleable.  A bitter and hurt not-quite-woman-not-quite-child who had never gotten to truly experience either womanhood or childhood, who was starved for love and attention, and considered cursed because she could neither look the babe nor grow to adulthood.

Thus, was Malacus and its twisted and mad goddess born.