C.S. Lewis ends The Last Battle the way only he could: by making death sound like waking up.

If you have never read the Chronicles of Narnia, here is what you need to know. Seven children, across seven books, have traveled in and out of a world called Narnia, a wonderful land ruled by Aslan, a great lion who is thinly veiled as Christ. They have fought battles, met talking animals, and been sent back to their ordinary lives again and again when their time in Narnia was finished.

In The Last Battle, the final book, Narnia itself comes to an end. The old world passes away. And the children, who have just been in a terrible railway accident back in England, find themselves standing in a new Narnia, brighter and more real than anything they have ever seen. They do not yet know what has happened to them.

Then Aslan tells them.

“Then Aslan turned to them and said: ‘You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.’

Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’

‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed?’ Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them. ‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

The line that’s stayed with me: “The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

In this passage, Lewis takes the thing we fear most, death, and reframes it as graduation day. “The term is over: the holidays have begun.” Life as we know it becomes the title page of n even greater story that never ends.

Lewis is not pretending death does not hurt, but he’s insisting it isn’t the end. On the contrary, it’s the beginning of something greater than we know, a life where every chapter is better than the one before.

For those of us who know the Author, that promise is not fiction.