Excuse me, Mr. Lewis, sir.
what the fuck.
You give us two pages about the end of a world that could have been a whole other novel.

This is a place with magic, and not just magic, but Magic - the kind reserved for Aslan and the king beyond the sea - the Deep Magic.

Who is Jadis' sister? She's never given a name, but she led an army in an uprising at the end of the world. Jadis says she was an oathbreaker - that she used the Deep Magic when they'd agreed not to - and a rebel. But Jadis seats herself in the hall of images at the very end, the portion where the faces of the images become cruel, so

she's of this long line of rulers with Deep Magic, but they've been getting steadily worse as a monarchy, and she had the cruelest face of all. Jadis would have spared her sister's life if she'd yielded the throne?

So who was really on the throne of Charn? Was is Jadis who stood in the palace gateway at the very last, who sat among the rulers in the hall of images? Or was it her sister, who used the Deep Magic as the last option open to her when Jadis would not see reason and instead let the people be slaughtered, and led an army up the palace steps to supplant Jadis?

And this hall of images - Jadis wasn't supposed to be there at all, not in the course of whatever "normal" way images were added to it. SHE cast the spells on the hall so that she would join them. The narration in the hall indicates that they all looked like the most brilliant waxworks ever seen - because they were. They were images only. Jadis was the only

living creature in that room. The bell was installed by Jadis in order to give her an out from her own spells. It wasn't there always - why would it be? It's a hall of IMAGES.

So how did her spells in the hall come upon her? And what fueled it? As soon as the Deplorable Word has slaughtered every living thing in the world - all that life force - where did it go? Did it all whirl up into a mist from the bones of people and animals and plants, and the Deep Magic drawn from the leylines of the world settle on the only living thing

left to take advantage of it, the bell ringing softly from the hall as the wind of it drew past toward Jadis on the palace steps, and her, looking out with satisfaction and cruel triumph, feeling the weight of her victory, suddenly hear that little bell's voice and drift

like a ghost herself now in a dead world, back to the hall of images, her mind already clouding with a sleep driven by life and death and Magic, and just... have a seat. To sit for a thousand years.

Who was the rightful queen? What would have happened to Charn if her sister had won? Does it matter? Whether it was a dead world when Polly and Digory wandered into it, or whether it was still bustling with the turn of wheels and the shouts of enslaved peoples in the streets, it wouldn't have been a good place.

Polly says it twice when they arrive: "I don't like it." We like to think that Jadis is The Greatest Evil to ever be, and perhaps that's true in Narnia, but for Charn? She was just another one of the cruel line of monarchs. We want her sister to be better, to be a light against Jadis' dark sky, but judging from the hall of images, would she have been?

Charn is truly a horror story, hidden in the pages of a children's book, and I'm RABID for Lewis to have written more - anything more - about it.

Jesse Toldness and I once started writing a "serial numbers filed off" fanfic about it, but never got far

It's a set of pages that's just so FULL of potential, and I think about Charn... all the goddamned time. It's one of those things I just come back to every few years.

I love this sort of deconstruction and potential. It's so fabulous