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It is her name; or maybe the name for the kind of thing she is, for she has never known another creature like herself.
He would not permit it.
Ages pass while she watches from her cave; humans on their nimble legs, dryads with their shapely limbs and carved faces, mermaids armored in fish scales and sharp teeth. None are quite like her, and she waits, nursing her lonely, sweet, fragile hope.
A Witch comes, and for a moment she wonders; for a moment her hope flares, bright as the midsummer sun, that here she has found another, a thing like unto her.
But no. The Witch is merely a witch, a bundle of pretension and delusion seated in a shell of magic, its crust thin and brittle as ice.
Lamia lets the cold seep into her blood, and burrows deep into her cave, and sleeps.
.
She awakens, her cold blood running thick and slow as syrup in her veins, and yet, she knows: another has come.
It takes time, time for her blood to warm alongside the land (for they are of a piece, she and this land, are they not?), time before she can leave her cave, and make her way up into the hills above.
This is well, for it takes the Queen time too. Time to fight her battles alongside her siblings. Time to arrive at the castle.
Time to select those who will serve her, protect her, guide her.
Love her.
Lamia is first in line.
.
She loves many things about her Queen Susan: the gentleness of her spirit and the bone-dry edge of her wit, all the more unexpected for it; her eye for beauty, for talent, for usefulness in others; the emotions worn on her sleeve, her chest torn open to display her beating, bleeding heart to all who would touch it.
And, as she grows into a woman, the loveliness of her face, its delicate lines and inviting lips, the way her white teeth press into them as she thinks. Her body, in all its sinuous, graceful lines; the soft place where neck meets shoulder, and the fragile bones there, that Lamia longs to set her mouth to. The swell of her breasts, all tipped in rose, begging to be fondled, to be sucked and teased. The curve of her ribs, and the hollow of her waistline below, the hipbones carved like perfect handholds. And most of all, Lamia loves her legs, the length of them, the arc and curve, the velvet softness of her inner thighs such a startling contrast to the firm muscle in her flanks, her calves, the beauty that is her ankles and the slim arch of her feet.
To say nothing of what lies between those legs, a paradise of nectar, the scent of which drives Lamia from her mind.
To serve Susan is to love her; to love her is to worship her, and Lamia desires no other gods.
.
At times, people dare to hurt Susan.
King Lune of Archenland makes a jest, a lighthearted nothing that the young Queen only blinks at, and laughs her sparkling laugh, as though there is no wound in being dismissed, slighted, condescended to; only Lamia sees her private tears dashed away, her misgivings, the uncertainty with which she bites down on those beautiful lips until they bleed.
That night, Lamia whispers into the sleeping ear of Lord Bar, and sets a plan in motion that will end with a child in exile, a father bereft.
Many years later Prince Rabadash will dare lay ungentle hands on Susan’s person; will smear her with insults and the vilest threats, he who is unfit to touch the toe of her filthiest boot.
Susan may seek to forget, and Aslan may forgive; Lamia does neither. Every child Rabadash gets on a woman does not live to be born, and his line ends with his name, ignominious, lost, trampled deep down into the dust.
.
Susan leaves.
Or, rather, she does not leave, for such a word invokes agency, choice, desire.
No, Lamia’s Susan is stolen, and though she weeps and rages and rends the deep places of Narnia apart in her searching, she cannot find her.
Once more, there is nothing in Narnia like her; nothing so beautiful and deadly. Nothing as soaked to the bone in longing, or as wrung out of faith.
There are other queens who follow, but none of them are Susan, and Lamia spites them for it, bitter tears burning the earth; pretty and gentle and proud they may be, but none are right, none are her.
And so they bear fewer and fewer children, until one day she looks up and finds the Queen is no longer Narnian, no longer even a thing worth her spite.
Worn with fury and limp with tragedy, Lamia retreats, and sleeps once more.
.
When she wakes, Susan has returned, and for a golden spell of sunlight days, all the world rights itself, the cracks in the deep places closing.
Overflowing with joy, Lamia cannot bring herself to mind all the things that are wrong, this second time around; she does not mind Susan’s face, voice, body, all those balanced once more on the girlish edge between child and woman; she does not mind her Queen’s confusion, her distance from the land and from Lamia, for her core remains the same, buried in her deepest depths, only waiting. Only lacking the time to reemerge, to flower once more into the idol of Lamia’s devotion.
She does not even mind the boy, the ridiculous prince with his flowing hair and night-dark eyes, the charming smile and murmured words that lure Susan into his orbit, the mouth that tempts her into clumsy kisses.
Lamia, after all, knows temptation better than any.
And when Aslan closes the door in the air behind Susan for the final time, Lamia feels the pieces of her heart peel away like shed scales, each one a memory she cannot regain, a touch she can no longer feel, a whispered word she cannot hear.
In their lonely, hollow place grow the shards of grief, and resentment, and rage, piercing her like fangs.
In their place grows vengeance.
.
The ridiculous boy grows into an absurd King, pathetically lonely, and Lamia keeps a watchful eye, for there’s a strange sort of kinship in being Susan’s lost lovers; Lamia mourns, and watches him mourn; clings to her memories like treasures and sees him cling to Susan’s bow, her horn, all those simple objects she once blessed with her touch.
Lamia needs no objects for that, no talismans to recall her touch; she has skin, and scales, and the red of her hair, all bearing the imprint of her Queen’s fingers, her breath, her lips.
For years, they mourn, separate and yet together, for all she has never, will never, speak with him. She grows fond of watching him walk the beaches, staring out to sea, up at the stars, into the depths of the woods, always waiting, always wondering if his match will one day return to him.
Lamia knows what it is to wait alone; this, she thinks, is better.
.
The King betrays her Queen, and Lamia hisses her rage, heaping curses upon him, upon the star-bride he brings to Narnia, as though any glow could replace the glory of Susan.
That he so dares does not shock her. No; Lamia’s acquaintance with men is long and ugly, filled with disgrace, with an understanding of the crimes they are capable of, the lies they happily tell themselves to survive. Has she, too, not grieved? Has she, too, not been driven to the edges of madness in her loneliness, in the loss of all that mattered in her life? And yet, she has endured it. She has not given in, not sought some cheap simulacrum in which to bury herself, a graveyard for her first, truest, purest love. No; she is stronger than he, stronger than any of them, these liars and thieves, these fickle-hearted traitors.
Still, she is surprised to find it makes her sad, a tide of grief for that last bit of something she had shared with another welling up within her. Even as she plots anew, in her caverns beneath the ground; even as it washes away the last fragments of her loving, lonesome, shattered heart.
.
In time, the King’s star-bride swells with his child.
In the land below, Lamia remembers her beloved Queen’s banner, the duplicitous red lion running rampant on Narnia’s verdant green field.
She hides her fangs behind red hair and red lips, clothes herself in green, and waits.