Beqanna
[private] stranger than your sympathy; - Printable Version

+- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum)
+-- Forum: OOC (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=24)
+--- Forum: Archive (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=81)
+---- Forum: Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=98)
+----- Forum: Nerine (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=91)
+------ Forum: Taiga (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=86)
+------ Thread: [private] stranger than your sympathy; (/showthread.php?tid=26688)

Pages: 1 2 3

stranger than your sympathy; - lilliana - 04-23-2020


Sometimes she dreams of places long gone. Sometimes she dreams of faces that are no longer there. Sometimes she dreams of things that just don’t exist.

It’s the first ones that trouble her, the ones that give her heart a fresh ache and make her sharply raise her head when she startles awake. She doesn’t know if the things she dreams - the memories - slip away from her. Lilliana doesn’t know if while her mind should be resting, it goes searching for answers through its dark corners.

(There won’t be any answers to find, she would say. But how does one reason with the dark side of the moon, ask it to shine when there is simply no light to be found?)

Some things she can explain. But the chance of projecting her own emptiness to her sons is a mistake that she will not make.

Slipping into the voidless pitch of a Taigan night, Lilliana decides to let her thoughts roam. Where her legs go is of little concern to her when it's the tightrope she’s walking that distracts her. A balancing act with her, always. Always teetering from side to another, with a looming (beautiful) view of the world below her.

Autumn storms have run their course through the forest again and the ground is moist, making her hoofsteps almost silent.

It’s endlessly dark. The mighty Redwoods command strong outlines against the inky veil and it’s only the call from the coastline that brings her back to herself. The ocean. The water raking itself over the crushed granite, a steady, rolling thunder from places unknown - a siren song drifting through the ancient wood.

When she stumbles down the path and meets the shoreline, the chestnut mare wades to her knees and lets the prickling sensation overtake her. Lilliana focuses on that. The bracing bite that comes wave after wave, chilling her legs. She wishes the frigid ocean water could numb the rest of her.

It’s a lovely thought - if only for a moment - to think about feeling nothing at all.

LILLIANA

all that i'm after is a life full of laughter
(as long as i'm laughing with you)


art by vhitany

RE: stranger than your sympathy; - Elaina - 04-23-2020


she's a wild wild woman


She doesn't want to be here.

The only thing holding her here is Lilli. This is not home, and she would only stay as long as she had to. This is not the same Beqanna she has left. There is no Kensa, the Hyaline mountains do not sing her name. Elaina is here to find her crimson cousin and her alone. Taiga is not her home, has never been her home, and neither was Beqanna. (The only thing here that was home was her cousin with blue bells for eyes.) She didn't want to be here. She didn't belong here.

“I think it’s a lot to ask to belong anywhere.” In the moment, Michael had sounded so wise, but as she stands in the forest of Taiga, in Beqanna, Elaina knows more than ever that Terrastella is is where she belongs—and here, she does not. She looks different, she is older, she no longer has wind blown hair from Hyaline mountains, but instead there are wildflowers tangled in her mane and her skin smells like sea salt. Her eyes are no longer fire, but instead are bright like a blue sky day. She thinks back to those words and thinks perhaps, maybe Michael was not as wise as he had seemed with his golden skin soaked in ocean water and sand clinging to him frantically. She thinks now though, that maybe it was just that somber smile and those bright eyes that made him appear to be so.

"I know that look, what are you thinking of?”
“Is it wrong to say too many things?”

Maybe it is wrong, as she sifts through the trees and the fog. She knows this land as well as she knows Terrastella, Hyaline, Paraiso, and so many others. Taiga had never been her home, but it always contained that red haired fragment of her heart. They had carved out a portion of the forest, replicating a fort they had spent far too much time in when they had been younger. A fort that has long overgrown with moss and time. She moves gracefully, over fallen logs through the blindingly dark night. It is a dance she knows all too well.

“I’’ll tell you, but only after you dance with me.”
“A dance for a name then, but you will have to teach me.”

And she had. Under the stars in the embers of the bonfire, Elaina had moved her feet and twirled body, rolled her hips and lost herself to the music that felt liked fire in her veins. That same fire ignites her now. It singes and burns and Elaina can feel it spreading slowly from her limbs to her spine, to her heart, and it blazes there, inside her chest until she can no longer feel the cold air.

“By Her hand, come inside.”
“Thank you, it is a cold day.”

A chilling autumn breeze brushes by her, running its hand fragment with pine though those creamy locks. It is strange being back here, the earthquake rolling down her spine tells her as much. But, Elaina knows, this is not about her, there is something else. There are flowers as she passes the same ones that grow in the gardens on her own home, the same one Elaina had planted because they reminded her so much of Lilli and where Lilli had chosen to stay.

“So you must be a member of Dusk? Or am I severely lost?”
“Yes, this is the one and only Dusk Court.”

She thinks back to that day in the portal. The words spat between each other had stung. They rest on a heart so scared that Elaina cannot tell you which they are. There is still a bitter taste upon her tongue from the own words she had spoken from hurt and shame. There is the sound of crashing waves echoing through the trees and Elaina thinks maybe this is it, maybe she has found her. But Elaina is used to disappointment, it settles comfortably in her heart like a familiar friend you wish would just go away. And perhaps, this time, it finally listened, for it rids itself against her heart and hope bursts forward as a girl of red hair appears within her sight.

“I found you.”
“I’m glad you did.”

This is one of the manny things they have in common, everyone can always find them at the end of the world with an ocean laid out before them like ill thought out plans. She finds Lilli just as he had found her only days earlier, hugging to the ocean like a lifeline. There are a lot of thing she could say in this moment, as she comes out from the trees to see her cousin standing there looking out across the ocean. She could say she was sorry, for upsetting her the last time they saw each other. She could promise her that everything was going to get better. She could tell her how much she loved her, how much Lilli meant to her.

“You look so dramatic, Lilli.”

Of course, she chooses none of the earlier options.

“You’ve always had a gift for staring longingly across vast expanses of water.” Elaina says coming to rest at her cousin’s side, blinking matching blue eyes in her direction. It is only then the fire cools in her chest and she feels the chill of the sea air. She can taste the salt on her tongue and if she blinks for a second too long, she thinks she is back home, instead of here. Even if she closes her though, she can feel Lilli’s presence beside her, and that is what always brings her back.

“Lilli, you’re my best friend, you know that right?”
"Your mine too. I couldn't do this without you, Elaina. I'd be lost without you.”

She doesn't want to be here.


Elaina; there's a voice calling me back
tried to keep her quiet, but she's screaming inside me

@lilliana

(just your casual pop up post)

RE: stranger than your sympathy; - lilliana - 04-25-2020

”How dare you.”

The words come tumbling from her dark mouth, falling down like Tower of Babel must have when they forgot to listen, when they forgot to hear. The world around them is quiet, drowned out by the gloom and Taigan clime. The world around them is dark but Lilliana can see it - the thing that comes creeping through the fog.

(There is so little light and it is so inevitably dim. From what the stars relent, she knows that luster. She knows that hue of gold. It’s the exact reason why Craft was chosen to live, why Anatomy was left to die.)

Her crimson ears pin, bury themselves into the thick of her red mane that has started to curl from the ocean moisture.

She has given and given; she says nothing when he stalks through the outskirts of these woods. Lilliana gives no warning to the other Taigan’s who call this place home, gives no word of warning to Neverwhere in the North of the thing that is lingering in the boundaries of her kingdom. When he comes, he brightens the eyes of her boys and so she just smiles. Lilliana says nothing when she sees the pale iridescent sheen of his youngest daughter lurking the fog. She looks away. She hides her shock when her eldest boy comes home with a bright red feather as a token, when he beams at her that he’s like the man from her stories. He has a feather too.

Lilliana keeps giving until there is nothing left.
She keeps quiet for the sake of her boys - the only light left shining in this darkness.

(Her fault, she knows. It’s her fault. She and the stars and Wolfbane should have never crossed paths. The stars should have stayed firmly put in the sky.)

A scowl burns its way across her fine features and her blue eyes are fire; what little light there is can be found burning there instead.

The chestnut mare sharply turns towards the shadowed thing and her mind gone blank, rages.

”You don’t get to say that. Not to-,”

It’s the words that come next, soothing like midsummer storms after long and humid days. It’s a language she knows. The language of dreamers. There are many things that can be manipulated. But never this. Lilliana had grown up speaking this language and apart from Kagerus, the only other tongue who might know it better than her is, "@[Elaina]?”

Lilli takes in the proud contours, the limited gilt shining through the darkness and she knows. "Oh Gods,” she chokes. Fumbling forward, desperate to close the gap between their sides, she says it again. "Oh, Gods.” It’s the cornsilk of her mane that her dark mouth finds first, then the assurance of her graceful neck. There is warmth coming from her, a brine that stings her nostrils in different ways than her Taigan beaches do. Elaina, so achingly solid and familiar beneath her touch, feels so deliriously solid in a world that she’s turned upside down.

"I’m sorry,” she murmurs, fervently quiet. "I am so, so sorry.”


LILLIANA

all that i'm after is a life full of laughter
(as long as i'm laughing with you)


art by vhitany

RE: stranger than your sympathy; - Elaina - 04-27-2020


she's a wild wild woman


Elaina has known love.

Oh has Elaina known love.

It was found in the laughter and the warmth of sitting together with a girl of crimson. Found in the glacial blue eyes of her grandmother that shares with her granddaughter stories of times so long ago that Elaina feels dizzy when she thinks of it. It is the quiet whisper between her and Ori as they think Marcelo is asleep as they should be, and it winds down to the little smile on his face letting Elaina know that he was anything but. It is found in the meadow as she stands between her parents, looking for the first evening star in the sky. Maybe she should have realized this sooner, but there is still that part of Elaina that never really left that little fort in Paraiso, sitting with her cousin beside her.

It is found in this moment, Elaina recognizes it in the way her heart swells and nearly batters down her rib cage with it. And Lilli is tucked within her in a moment. She and Lilli had both left home, but Elaina had lacked all of Lilli’s grace, that beautiful buoyancy that took her from Beyond to Beqanna, keeping her afloat. Meanwhile, Elaina had crashed on its shores like a shipwreck, bits of herself left behind to mark her passing by. Arriving in each new place not entirely whole and already sinking.

“Not to who?” She asks with an expression of mock surprise. “To you?” Elaina asks, pulling away to look her cousin in the eyes and bump against her shoulder playfully. “I’ve seen you fall face first into a mud puddle Lilli, and you’ve seen me with the bee sting the size of a rock on my nose,” she says, the memories are easy to grab here, so much easier than back in Dusk, so much easier with Lilli beside her now. She doesn't feel as foggy, her thoughts are sharp and clear. “I think I get to say whatever I want,” she says with a cheeky smirk, that same bold and brazen look in those eyes that has always dared Lilli to say something otherwise.

There is so many things to say, retorts she could make, but Lilli makes Elaina soft like gold she so resembles and she instantly melts into the ruby red that is Lilli as gold was always supposed to do. Every second matters here when she knows she cannot stay, and every second feels eternal.

(“It was me who always needed you.”)

These words echo back to her as Lilli apologizes. “I am sorry too,” she says. And so that dance they know so well begins again with the utterance of that apology. It is a dance they have done time and time again.

“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry.”

But these steps in their dance are made from stronger rhythms and Elaina lets Lilli pull her in for the turn before she is let go, and this time, Elaina doesn't reach her hands back out for Lilli to lead her. The music fades away until there is only the hum of starlight to fill an empty ballroom.

It had been one of those night where a breath hung in the air like puffs of smoke and lingered for a while before disappearing with a starlit breeze. That is when they had found each other again.

Tonight is not that much different.

“Lilli,” she says, because she has imagined what she would say here a hundred times. “You were right, everything you said,” she says, the words are falling out like it would to a priest in confession. “I need to be more careful, and everything else, all the mistakes I have made,” she says, and tries to keep her voice from cracking beneath the weight of what she is going to say next. “You have always protected me, since I’ve known you, but—I cant let you protect me anymore,” she says and she wants to cry in this moment, but Elaina, stubborn, stubborn Elaina will not let those tears fall as she looks to Lilli with something like winter in her eyes. So she does something else instead, something else, but all too familiar. She presses her golden forehead against Lilli’s own and breathes. “I don't think I have ever said thank you,” she admits, her heart is heavy, it falls in her chest like and anchor to water. “Thank you,” she says. “But,” she pulls away. “You have others you need to protect now,” she says, Lilli’s boys come to mind with a smile. “I need to do this on my own now, without knowing you will catch me when I fall.” Because Elaina, for all her fire, has found herself at times reduced to ash, but Lilli has always provided the spark to bring that fire roaring back to life, and without her, Elaina only has herself to keep those embers glowing bright.

Elaina; there's a voice calling me back
tried to keep her quiet, but she's screaming inside me

@lilliana

RE: stranger than your sympathy; - lilliana - 04-28-2020

There is a moment of very real anger burning behind Lilli’s eyes. When her head had sharply turned, what she had expected and what she received were two very different things. The latter is a gift. The latter is a savior. If only the fog surrounding them could dissipate as easily, as quickly as her fury did.

It’s shock that runs through her, a far more chilling thing than the icy ocean current. A laugh chokes in her throat and almost turns to ash where her rage had been. Instead it just blossoms between them, a sound that hitches somewhere between her heart and their last meeting. Elaina bumps her shoulder and Lilliana presses into it, finding a steadiness that she doesn’t often find these days. It’s always one extreme or the other - too much or too little.

"I was always a klutz,” the chestnut says sardonically. The smile that follows is tight but it doesn’t matter. Her blue eyes are lovingly resting on Elaina’s ghost-like form, just as haunting as ever (how many times has Lilli burned that image behind her eyes?). She always likened her cousin to a beacon but in this moment, Lilli wonders if she is more of a sword. Whatever the years have done to either of them, the palomino mare carves them away with clear-cut ease. "And you always had your head in the flowers,” Lilli says hoarsely, remembering all those open meadows and the wild array of color in spring.

Of the days they spent chasing down dreams and spring.

Tonight, for a few hours at least, the world holds a bit of Magic again.

The rhythm of the waves below them seem to echo the words that the pair already imagine in their minds. Lilliana has already said her apology (and she will say it again and again and again) and in the echoing cadence of their shared youth, Elaina apologizes too. That wraps around Lilli’s heart - making it ache - and the light touch against her blonde neck is a practiced response. It’s one that she’s done a thousand times from when their troubles had simply been skinned knees and tangled briars in their manes.

Another brisk wave laps against their legs, sharpening her senses and Lilliana pulls away.

In the chill of the evening, the chestnut says: "Always.” There is nothing that Elaina can do, can say that won’t be forgiven. (Hasn’t there always been something about her fiery cousin that lingered between sin and salvation, making her a religion all her own?) "Except that,” Lilli replies. Isn’t that what they were apologizing for, really? Lilliana who always seemed to be apologizing for failing to keep her family together, Elaina who always apologized for trying to put more time and distance besides the six feet that separated her from Benjamin and Beylani.

Lilliana is listening but in this moment, Elaina might as well be speaking the language of the waves. Each word crashes against her heart but all she hears is a loud roar in her ears.

I can’t let you protect me anymore.

"You’ve always been a cliff dancer,” the copper mare says with a release of silver smoke. Her blue eyes look to an expanse of dark sea, an edge where she has always pictured Elaina waiting on some shoreline. The warmth of her is here, though. Turning her head with the weight of that distance between them, Lilliana offers a small smile. She won’t promise anything just yet. They’ve made them and broken them.. How many times now? Two? Three times?

If they go down this road, she is certain, there will be a fourth time.

(And how does she tell you, @[Elaina], of the other promises she made? She hadn't been able to keep those ones, either.)

"Do you remember," Lilli asks, "when you were afraid of the dark?”


LILLIANA

all that i'm after is a life full of laughter
(as long as i'm laughing with you)


art by vhitany

RE: stranger than your sympathy; - Elaina - 04-29-2020


she's a wild wild woman


The lavender that grew around Murmuring Rivers, that had always caught in her and Lilli’s manes. She remembers the smallest smiles Alvaro, her dark, brooding cousin would give her as she closed her eyes for their games of hide and seek and he didn't think she would notice. Her mother’s sweet humming that could soothe even the darkest of hearts if only they would listen. Her father and his stern face that would soften as he took his only daughter for a day of play at Windskeep’s glistening lake. She remembers huddling together with her many cousins as Valerio would gather the children around for a wild tale of Legado the Great or Ichiro the Fierce.

She wonders, for a brief moment, what it would be like if they could go back to those times.
But they are gone already, they were gone when they were in them.
Too fleeting.

She is a drop of sunlight, a phenomena, because the sun is not supposed to exist where the moon does, but Elaina is here all the same. And Lilli laughs. Lilli laughs and Elaina knows she is in love with that sound, the beauty of it, the melody. It is more beautiful than any song Elaina could possibly sing, Lilli is so much more than Elaina could ever be and she should be envious, she should rage against her crimson, burn with jealousy until she turns green. But all she can do is bathe into the laughter that rings from Lilli that puts the stars to shame. Elaina can only ever, will only ever show true, wonderful love towards her cousin.

“Only because you told me to try to find some buttercups to put in Alvaro’s mane!” Elaina accuses with a quick smile and a bout of ready laughter that is so easy to find. How long has it been since she has laughed like this? Bonfires, dancing, shadows, spinning, racing, twirling, breathing, smoke, starlight. “I will still find you.” All come to mind.

Lilli would no doubt argue with Elaina until she were blue in the face if she uttered this thought allowed, but Elaina feels it to be true all the same. Lilli owed her no apology, and that stubborn, stubborn girl will stand by that until the sun truly falls from the sky and lands up her golden coat rather than just providing the illusion of so. But any hard edges, any sharp corners soften the moment she feels Lilli’s touch upon her.

The cold of the water is only thing that snaps her from the comfortable trace she felt herself dipping into. “Reminds me of the time we decided to swim in the lake after dark,” she says with a laugh. Sneaking out, Lilli from her meadow, Elaina from her cavern. She laughs at the memory before another one sparks her. Liam and Tarian doing the same action. The twins swimming at night when Elaina had caught them. ‘You know there are sharks in there,’ she has said. Tarian had scowled and Liam had placed his wing on his head, a mock dorsal fin. Simple, simple times, even then she would consider it so. With the threat of Ostere looming over their heads and Elaina in love with a man with a years too old and far too wrong for her.

“Only someone fearless could tell their loved ones they are wrong,” Elaina says to her, appreciates her for what her crimson cousin is. Lilli has given Elaina far more than she ever deserved. Had given it so freely, so beautifully and Elaina will forever be eternally grateful.

She laughs then, she cant help it. “Because I always knew the view was better.” It is a silly excuse, a childish excuse, but one she uses all the same. Elaina has always loved danger, but Elaina needs to learn to balance herself first. The palomino follows with her own blue eyes out over the darkened water.

When she was afraid of the dark?
Elaina so desperately wants to tell her that she still is.
And that, that was the problem with so many things.

“Yes,” she says laughing again, huddling ever closer to her cousin. “You asked me what I had to be afraid of,” she says, and in truth, back then, there had been nothing she could not face. But now, Elaina remembers shadows creeping upon her as she tries to light her way through them. “I wish I could be more like you, Lilli.” It is something she has always thought, always known, but this may be the first time she has ever spoken it.

“You’re my best friend.” It is not a confession, it cant be, when they both already know how true it is.

Elaina; there's a voice calling me back
tried to keep her quiet, but she's screaming inside me


RE: stranger than your sympathy; - lilliana - 05-01-2020







you got a cold hard truth
i got a bottle of whiskey but i got no proof


She’s about to make @[Elaina] promise no more ledge-dancing. No more windwalking.

Lilliana stands with her delicate head pressed reverently into her cousin's neck and she wants so badly to ask that if she can’t be there to catch her, then she can’t fall. Asking Lilli not to want to protect Elaina is like asking her to stop daring danger; her golden cousin has always been the wildest and brightest places of a blazing sunset, the dazzling light a star gives as it burns its way down to earth.

To ask Elaina to not do these things is to ask her to stop being the very things she loves about her.

She can almost sense her remembering days long gone, days when they stood in lakes and rivers and dreamt about the days they would see oceans instead. Her cousin seems to recall days long gone and in this quiet moment, they seem almost desperate to resurrect it. Days of putting flowers in their manes, teasing Alvaro to light up his serious eyes. The copper mare swears she feels the last of that lost childhood washing out to sea in the frigid current breaking against their ankles but she smiles for Elaina. She will always smile for her cousin. (She still smells like May sunshine, spring grass after all this time.)

It’s physically painful to pull away and the cold night air bites at her, brisk and chill and strong. An ear stays on her while Lilliana looks out, searching the fog for the shadowed outline of waves rolling in. The chestnut is quiet, contemplative while Elaina speaks of how only someone fearless could tell someone they love that they are wrong, that the views from the edge of the world are the most breathtaking.

And she isn’t wrong.

Elaina huddles her palomino form against hers and Lilli finds herself pressing her side into the blonde girl, reaching for her again because this is her cousin and to not reach for has been a habit that she will never outgrow, never be able to unlearn. It’s instinct at this point - Elaina remains as she always has to Lilli. Blood of her blood, bone of her bone and something more. Gales and storms and hurricanes rage in the blood of them both and it seems to only quiet when she comes near, as if the call of their bloodline is the only thing able to drown out generations of  noise that sings through them both.

Can she ask Elaina to be more careful on her edges? Years apart and what does she know of her cousin’s shadows? Of the heights she climbs?

Elaina says she wants to be more like her and Lilliana finally lets out a long, slow breath.

"Don’t be like me,” she laments. "You don’t..,” and the Taigan tears herself apart, wondering what she reveals, hating herself that she has to catch herself here too. In her oldest and perhaps most purest of bonds. Her voice drops again, not low but light, weightless on a cold autumn breeze. "They’re not coming back, Elaina.” 

Her eyes burn. Lilli blinks them and finds tears building, finds them blurring an already foggy horizon. "Marcelo. Ori. Malachi. Kalina and Roland. Jay. Brielle. Alvaro. Broch. Aislynn. Kildare and Liam and Tarian and the girls..,” your parents, she can’t find the heart to say. My father.

”No matter what happens, they’re never coming back.”

Lifting her eyes to a small crack in the sky, a place where the fog has parted reveals a few silent stars. "I need to know you'll be okay,” she whispers. Lilliana never knew what became of the rest of her family; now that she sees Elaina here, feels her beside her, she knows that she can’t bear to spend a lifetime wondering what happened to her too. Wondering if Frostbane or Ostere or Underworld had caught her in the end. Wondering if something worse managed to find her instead.


  LILLIANA






therapy session lmao

RE: stranger than your sympathy; - Elaina - 05-03-2020


she's a wild wild woman


Elaina walks on ledges she doesn't even know are there. It had been seen in the way she had traced the Denocte’s face, in the way she had spoken to the tiger like a friend, and in the way she has given her heart to far too many with only expecting their friendship and their own love in return. She will insist to Lilli until she is blue in the face that she is safe, that she stays on solid ground, even as she is tumbling down a cliff side and into the sea. She will say she promises and break it in a heartbeat without even realizing it.

She knows it is an impossible request, such a difficult one for her to ask of her crimson cousin. But Elaina must ask it all the same because more than wanting Lilli to always be there with her, more than anything, she wants Lilli to leave her behind if she must. Elaina would throw herself into the shadows if it meant Lilli’s happiness and peace. Elaina would do anything, give anything, be anything for her cousin. It was never a difficult choice, it wasn't a choice at all really. It was what the golden girl always was for her cousin.

It was not Lilli’s responsibility to keep Elaina from playing with fire.
Elaina loved the burn of flames, the suffocation of smoke, and the smoldering of embers far too much to ever truly give it up.

Elaina will burn again and again. It is in her nature, it is what fires do.

They blaze.
They burn.
They die.

She remembers the good times just as she remembers the bad. They are intertwined in her, shadowing her golden coat. (Shadows, she thinks of him and her heart chills, but whether it was lust or fear, she still doesn't know.) "Such brave little fillies,” he had said, ice in voice and snow in his lungs, and cold on his words. Elaina can remember it still, had realized that monsters are too good at following you home. You did not need a basket full of goodies and red hood to tempt them. But then he had spoken again, as Valerio and Aletta had looked to him with teeth bared and muscles tensed. "I was simply collecting what was promised to me” And he had turned to her then, with frozen hazel eyes and a glacier hidden in his voice. And Elaina, for the first time felt not fear, but fire.

And she had been ignited.

Elaina will always love when Lilli smiles. She smiles like it is dawn of stolen sunshine that hums a soft glow and it warms her as if the rays were folding around her heart in a close embrace. She knows why she smiles right now, it is because of her, and the palomino is eternally grateful, the debt she owes her cousin grows another mile. She wishes she could stay in this moment, but Elaina is not Taiga, she is not Hyaline, and she is not Beqanna anymore. There is the taste of salt on her lips and summer blue sky in her eyes and wildflowers tickling her nose.

She doesn't want to be here.

Why does the coast seem so different without him? She wonders for a moment as a shadow passes over and she wishes for his chills, his shadows, those impossibly bright eyes. She wishes for him and she knows it is wrong. But he is forgotten as Lilli presses close to her side and The ghost of her mother passes over face in the frame of the smile on her face and she looks so much Beylani in this moment.

They have been many things to many people. Between the two of them, Elaina and Lilli have had many roles. Daughter, lover, healer, politician, diplomat, friend, mother, goddaughter, niece, granddaughter, traitor, liar, heartbreaker. The list goes on and on, but Elaina can only see Lilli, crimson and comely in front of her. Titles are just titles, and while they do not disappear, Elaina grows blind to them, her own and Lilli’s. It is just as they always have been.

Lilliana sighs and worry spills over her bones like cold ocean water.

“I know that,” she says, bitterness on her tongue, fire billowing in her belly as smoke fills her lungs. How often has she heard those words? Since her mother’s chest rose and fell that final time. When soldiers returned home only to die in the arms of their lovers. When her dad sacrificed himself for her. Everybody is trying to bury their ghosts. She remembers Brielle saying to Malachi and she thinks maybe that this is the only true thing that was ever said across the valley of thistle and lavender. “I’m sorry,” she says like a shattered whisper. “I’ve stopped waiting,” she admits. There is some guilt in her voice as blue eyes turn away from Lilli in shame. Always they had spoken of their family and their love for them, but Elaina has learned that she has been lying to herself. In truth, she let them go a long time ago. “The moment I left for Windskeep.” It is difficult to admit, but she feels she must do it all the same. “Have you, Lilli? Have you stopped?” She asks, in a voice that demands an honest answer. “Or are you still looking back?”

“I am not so easy to shatter.” Her voice was a soft cover of silk, smooth and quiet as it wrapped around her. Chipped, broken in places, scratched, these are all things Elaina was, is, but she is not entirely broken, not yet. “And you, I need to know you will be okay,” she says sincerely. “Malachi and Kalina may have told us to guard our hearts,” she says. “But Lilli, protect your courage, look after your happiness, and defend your kindness,” she says, lessons she needs to learn for herself. “Hearts can be such fickle things after all.”

Elaina; there's a voice calling me back
tried to keep her quiet, but she's screaming inside me


RE: stranger than your sympathy; - lilliana - 05-04-2020



you got a cold hard truth
i got a bottle of whiskey but i got no proof

Elaina loves the burn and Lilliana only remembers the blaze. Maybe the flower child was always destined for hellfire, then. Elaina had loved the smoke and smolder and Lilliana had been distracted by the brilliance of the inferno.

"I know you do,” the chestnut mare relents.

She feels almost foolish for her admission. Of course, Elaina knows. If there is any other soul in this world that knows about loss and the never-ending absence of a soul, it would be her. Elaina who had heard her father shout run! while he used his last moments of his life to protect her. (His golden daughter appears to have done exactly that - run and run and run.)

There has been no stopping her cousin when her mind is made up; when she sets her sights on something. She runs straight for it. (And how that worries Lilli - always, forever, endlessly.)

Lilliana has never identified herself as an orphan but when they stand there together in the biting breeze and the frigid ocean, as the bitterness billows out of her cousin in silver plumes of smoke, what is she? How many years has her father been gone? How many has it been since she has last seen her mother? And for the rest of her family - her brothers and sisters, her nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles and multiple cousins?

That has perhaps been the hardest part to resign herself with. That there had once been so many of them and now as far as Lilliana knows, it is herself (and her boys) and Elaina. It feels like they are part of a dying Legacy, a setting sun and she doesn't quite know how to let that warmth go.

Where Elaina’s words come sharp and shattered, Lilli’s come out soft and together. The counterbalance to bear the weight of what her cousin has just said. "Don’t be,” she says, ”I just.. I don’t think I know.. how.” The truth makes her lean into her palomino shadow, makes her want to dissolve with the fog around them. "I keep looking for them,” she admits, "And I’m afraid to stop. That if I do…,” that they are really gone.

She turns her head to watch for Elaina’s reaction, fully aware that she is making this admission to an orphan. To somebody who watched her mother waste away and who had to run - to leave behind the only family she had left in pursuit of what? Of Aletta and a band of mares and foals? She wonders, sometimes, if Marcelo and his second sight knew this. He knew what Elaina was running from and what she was heading towards.

(Had he seen the rest, then, too? Is that why he had been so quiet with his prophecies?)

The copper mare looks down to the waves and decides that if there is a moment for damning, it may as well be now.

Lifting her head up, she says her gospel truth. The most open and direct Lilliana has been with another soul in years. "I had to choose to save a life. Between two mares.” Her voice becomes haunted with that memory, remembering Anatomy dancing on those ledges she is so afraid that Elaina loves. Remembering Craft and a shade of gold not quite right but so achingly close to the one of the mare she stands beside.

"I chose the one that looked like you,” she confesses. It worked out in the end (sort of - kingdom politics being what they are). They survived but Lilliana still stays riddled with that guilt, of wondering what would have happened if Anatomy hadn’t been on the other side.

And then perhaps the most damning of all, that feeling she has kept so deep, dark and buried. She had never wanted to let it see the light again (that had been the problem the first time). It’s something so twisted and mangled now, bent and warped that she no longer knows what the beginning was. "I didn’t mean to fall in love with him.”

It’s an admission that gets lost in the fog.

It’s not an empty admission; it's full of so many other things that she can’t bring herself to say. Elaina will know the confession though, recognize it for what it is. Will remember the girl who agonized at night in Culloden, the young mare who had conflict lining her face underneath the starlight in Hyaline.

It matters to her, to share it here because it has changed her so much and in this moment, Lilliana desperately (selfishly) needs to know some things don't change. Won't change. That whatever Hell she has brought upon herself, it can't exist here. Not between them.

"You don’t shatter, @[Elaina].” These words don’t fall so heavy, don’t feel so burdened by all the other thoughts trying to take precedence in her mind. "I’ve always thought you a Phoenix.” There had never been anything brittle or breaking about the blonde mare at her side. It’s something that Lilli has so desperately wished she could emulate - the poise and the posture that comes from her daring.

Her ears flick back as she raises her head, turning to eye her cousin.

"You sound just like him, you know.” The advice that Elaina gives could have come just as easily as Valerio. The gold mare brings his specter here and as Lilliana lifts her slender head, she thinks that the palomino is a credit to their blood. Every bit as an heir and holder of it as Malachi or Alvaro. "He’d be proud of you,” she thinks out loud.

Another break in the clouds above reveals another sliver of stars and that's where Lilli looks. Her mother had once offered her an entire night sky and while Lilliana might not have that, the copper mare gives what she has. "Pick one,” her head lifts, pointing to the dim galaxies above them. "It’ll stay here for a little while but they move,” and the Taigan mare looks down to Earth, back to Elaina. "So it will follow you, too.”

Wherever Elaina goes, with whatever shadows she dances with.

It sparks a thought and Lilliana thinks that perhaps, she should make a star. Maybe her heart - a thing that burns and blazes and beams like hers does - should have never been earthbound. A heart for a star might be a fair trade.

It could be a light for them to both to follow.

    LILLIANA



2018 called - it wanted its posting length back

RE: stranger than your sympathy; - Elaina - 05-06-2020


she's a wild wild woman


When she had been little, when she had been small, Elaina had dreamed of castles next to the sea and princes with green eyes and intricate crowns. She had dreamed of stars on earth made from flowers and spiders making webs of silver. Her mind had churned, a library of ideas and images. Elaina’s dream had known no earthly bounds. She had dreamed of being a princess of these dreams, where her mother was queen and her father was king. She had been a little moth, flying about in search of the cold light of heaven. She should have kept flapping her wings, this little moth, and she might have found the sky.

Of course, Elaina is grown now, and she has found the sky. She has found it, and she can define it and tell you why it’s blue.

There is a shadow of a smile on her face, the only hint that she is still sorry for the bitterness that raced to meet Lilli’s concern like a head on collision. “It is nothing to be proud of, unfortunately,” she says. Elaina has made an art of leaving. She makes it look like some sort of masterpiece, when really it is just crayon scribbles on a canvas.

Elaina can see the pillars of salt behind Lilli a mile long, punishments of blue eyes looking back over her shoulder for the people who have never even tried to follow them. She wonders what sort of destruction you leave when you look to far ahead, if there is disaster ahead of Elaina as long as Lilli’s trail of salt. “It is not easy,” she admits. “Look to your boys, Lilli,” she offers.

As if she can read Lilli’s thoughts then, Elaina says something else. “Marcelo had nightmares at times, so fierce that only Ori could soothe him,” she says darkly. “He told me some, finding me in the Bridge, your mother winning the battle, but so many things he kept quiet, saying he couldn't remember, but I never believed him,” she says. “I would catch him whispering with Ori, both with worried expressions on their faces.” She furrows that heart shaped brow of hers, squinting blue eyes. She leans into her, and Elaina lets out a comfortable sigh, which floats into the too-dark sky like smoke, which is watched carefully with too-blue eyes.

Elaina hangs onto her cousin’s words as she speaks, her attention fully onto her, waiting for what was to come next, but knowing that whatever she said could never change what Elaina believed about her. Lilli is perhaps one of the most wonderful things in her world, even still. She was so unique and beautiful and interesting that she could make Elaina dizzy when she thinks about her too much. The chestnut holds a very large and very obvious piece of her heart that Elaina knows will never be replaced by anything else.

Elaina has her own secrets, like how she bites her lower lip instead of telling Lilli that without her at her side she feels like a ship without its anchor and when she looks out she can no longer see land. Up ahead is just a blue, blue horizon. She wants to tell her, but she feels the guilt from Lilli, sees it even, and Elaina cannot bare to strand Lilli with her in the middle of the ocean. Elaina doesn't saying anything, she offers all she can through blue eyes and a gentle touch to the chestnut girl’s cheek.

That is not the end of her secret. She didn't mean to fall in love with him, and oh this Elaina, oh how this is what Elaina knows. Those pale locks glow even in the darkness as she watches Lilli’s face for any subtle expressions. “We never do. You don't know it’s a sin until it’s already engulfed you. Eve thought the apple would open her eyes, only to doom us all.” Whether she says this to comfort Lilli or to comfort herself, Elaina is not entirely sure. Yes, if anyone knows, it is Elaina, she always did have a habit of flying too close to the sun even while knowing it would burn her. Elaina has tried so hard to fly with paper wings only to end up falling more times than she has soared.

“To burn to ash and rise from it stronger than before,” she says with a laugh. While Lilli has found traits of Elaina to emulate, Elaina has done the same searching for the similar kind of grace that comes with turning a cheek, the kind of resilience it is to keep holding onto hope, and what sort of strength her cousin must possess to stand here as she is.

She laughs then, feeling that freedom that she only truly experiences with her crimson cousin. Elaina knows the exact him she spoke of. The golden girl says nothing, but she flashes a wild smile in her direction. “And you,” she finally adds to Valerio’s daughter, knowing this with her entire heart to be true.

Elaina instinctively looks up as the stars appear. “Hmm,” Elaina ponders with Lilli’s request as she considers before motioning her head upwards towards a star off to the side near the clouds. “How about that one,” a pause as she moves to the star to the left of it. “And that one, so it has a friend, a cousin, a sister,” she says because in truth, Lilli has always been so much more than a friend or a cousin. Lilli was her sister, her flame.

And Elaina will look for these stars as she dances in the arms of a shadow man. She will look for these stars when her star horse sings her another lullaby, and she will look for these stars when she and her friend spent the night speaking truths and hiding wishes.

“I promise to always find you, Lilli.” A foolish promise, but one she makes again and again as she rests her golden head on her cousin’s shoulder. “I love you.”

Elaina; there's a voice calling me back
tried to keep her quiet, but she's screaming inside me