Lilliana doesn’t know death like Ryatah has. She knows it in one way. Like one of those stories that her mother loved to spin, as one of those legends her father had imparted during their brief time together. In those stories, death was never an ending. It was simply another existence of being, another way of living. In those legends, it was a place to be reunited with loved ones and to find eternal peace.

Death has always darkened the fringes of Lilliana’s life (she doesn’t know about the murder of Kalina, how Malachi paid with his life to defend his daughters) but she doesn’t know what it’s like to have your heart stop beating, for the blood in her veins to grow still. She doesn’t know what those eyes see when the light dims and they turn unseeing.

For all her fables and fantasies, she knows nothing of what Ryatah saw (or didn’t see) on the other side. Knows nothing of the darkness or the sea or the shadows in Eternity.

It’s not the angel mare’s first time there. Is that what made her Divine? Lilliana wonders. The chestnut mare has grown unconventionally quiet but this conversation isn’t like their last. This is Death and Resurrection and Divinities they are speaking of. Of course, Lilli is quiet. What would she have to add? They could return to the idle topics of motherhood - of how Nashua is born to test the skies, of how Yanhua can seem too intangible to hold - but after this?

No.

"You’ve been more than once,” Lilliana murmurs to herself. Her voice - light, lyrical - sounds almost incredulous. When her blue eyes come to rest on the haloed mare again, they are a mixture of admiration and awe. And a question. It never occurred to her that Immortals actually died - she simply thought their blood turned to gold and they stayed pristine, ageless. Like the glowing mare beside her.

It’s a feat, she thinks, that speaks favorably of @[Ryatah].

A tentative smile starts as she looks to meet the darker gaze of the other mare. "I’m glad they don’t fit,” the Taigan mare says, almost fervently. "It would be a shame to define you, I think.” It would be a waste, she thinks. For a mare who has been a former Queen? Who has died more than once? More than that, who had been there when the gates of the Afterlife opened?

Extraordinary might be a word where Lilliana could start but even that word feels paltry in comparison. The red mare decides she likes that there is no word in their known language to describe Ryatah. It seems fitting that she should remain indescribable.

Lilli, however, is perfectly describable.

"I fell in love,” she says quietly - distantly - as they walk. ”And that-,” Lilliana breaks off. Her voice cracks because there is some piece of her that is still so angry (one of many, many emotions she associates with Wolfbane), so furious with herself for allowing this to happen. Because hadn't there always been some part of her that had known? Some warning lingering in the back of her mind that if she ever gave her heart away it would be anything but catastrophic? She should have known, should have learned. "It’s changed everything,” Lilliana admits.

The red mare abruptly looks away, not entirely sure if she is ready to see Ryatah’s reaction and focuses on the empty trail instead.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions

More than once, Ryatah says and Lilliana isn't quick enough to hide her shock. More than once? How many times has she died, then? How many ways? What were the different reasons? In the easy companionship of the winged mare, the Taigan is as transparent in her concern. In all the jagged ways that she turns her expression to glass and then tenderly fractures it, revealing all the worry she has for the white mare underneath.

For a moment, she even imagines that her lungs are burning. Like there isn't enough air in them. For a moment, she imagines the brine of Nerine on the tip of her tongue. Odd.

"We're fools to think immortality means never dying," she replies, echoing a memory from her time before Beqanna. Immortality could be borrowed (or found) in the blood of children and descendants. In the memories that others carried of those departed to the Afterlife. In the stars that carried fables and legends and stories, just waiting to be remembered. Immortals had always dreamed up creatures for Lilliana, a mythos that belonged to the realm of dragons and Magicians. It took the shape of a black unicorn, a healer who had warned about those golden veins. That there was a price for living from one end of time to another. Death was cheap, empty payment; immortality required something more permanent.

It required @[Ryatah] still living, walking beside the fiery-red mare of Taiga.

Lilliana grimaces against the shadows as soon the angel mare says it. Love. The other mare speaks, telling her that it is a beautiful and terrible thing. There is beauty in it, she knows. There is adoration in her love for her sons. For them, Lilliana would (and will) sell her soul. There is an endless depth for her capacity to love that has always terrified her but when it comes to her boys, that has never emerged. There had been no terror in the bond her parents had shared; there had been nothing dark there.

(How, then, has she come to this? That she knows the shadows of Taiga aren't empty and the potential for terror lingers behind each mighty Redwood.)

The red mare slows when Ryatah's dark eyes meet hers and the forest around them falls quiet. A lull that creeps in with the fog. This time, it isn't that Lilliana isn't quick enough to catch her reaction. It isn't that she even tries to hide the way her face wants to fall. A leap of faith that she shares with the haloed woman beside her. "Is that why Death refused to keep you?" says the younger one, her voice descending into this quiet they've found and regarding Ryatah behind deep blue eyes. "Because there was nothing left to moor you?"

And all Lilliana thinks of is fire; of all the ways that she has always loved to burn so impossibly bright.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions