Only it’s not Aslan who punishes them it’s Shift. Full of remorse, King Tirian and Jewel willingly accept Aslan’s punishment. A troop of more Calormenes arrive on the scene immediately thereafter and arrest King Tirian in Aslan’s Name. When the King and Jewel arrive, they fall into a fit of passion at the sight of a Calormene soldier beating a talking horse and end up killing him.

He sends Roonwitm a loyal centaur, to gather his army and sets off himself with the unicorn Jewel to confront the tree murderers. But when a tree spirit stumbles into his presence and reports that her kind is being chopped down in Aslan’s Name by Calormene soldiers and then falls down dead herself, King Tirian is beside himself with anger. King Tirian hears this news as well and hopes it to be true.

Puzzle, who is very simple-minded and eager to please his bully of a friend, goes along with the ruse, and word gets around Narnia that Aslan is back. They find a lion’s skin floating in a river, and Shift convinces Puzzle to put it on and pretend to be Aslan. It begins with two talking animals: a donkey named Puzzle and an ape named Shift. The Last Battle is the only book in the series that starts off in Narnia. As I’ll explain in the reflection, I think Susan was Lewis’s last and, perhaps, most important lesson. Lewis had in mind, but I do think his faithful readers know he was a careful teacher, profoundly concerned with the interior life of his readers. So what is the point? Well, far be it from me to know exactly what C.S. “They’re all missing the point!” I thought. Perhaps the most pointed (and dramatic) was a short story called The Problem of Susan by Neil Gaiman, in which the author imagines her as a grown-up with all sorts of psychological problems. In my hunt to learn more, I was somewhat dismayed to find so much criticism of C.S. She is “left out,” so to speak, of their glorious ending, and I was worried about how to handle that with my sons. As you’ll see from the story summary below, her path does not follow that of her siblings or any of the other friends of Narnia. Though I had read it more than once as an adult, I was still searching for something new about Susan. Lewis with my five- and six-year-old sons, I spent some time reviewing the storyline.

Narnia the last battle