[open] Everything about me seems to have changed || Any at all ||

[lilliana]

He doesn’t even look down. His attention is held captive by the knife-tailed warrior as Lilliana is by him. Her plan - her hope - that by pleading with him might deter him from Ruth falls away in pieces, slips through the cracks in her fractured soul to the frozen ground and Lilliana feels herself hollowing out. Her hope starts to vanish like the Taigan fog when it greets sunlight, as it burns away with the daylight of reality. Wolfbane, Lilli wants to plead with him again, as if saying his name one more time might break a curse that she knows nothing of. As if it might dissipate the insanity she had once told him she had been running from. (He - it - has caught her. It had caught up to her in the end.) Everything falls apart to the ground and that is where that vivid, electric blue-eyed gaze goes. It drops to the snow beneath their hooves as it gleams under radiating moonglow. (If this were any other night, she might have admired the sheen, adored the way the light refracted and glimmered like a reflection of the night sky above them.) There is intent as she looks to, letting herself fall away piece by piece and withdraw to the place into herself that she had long ago created - a secret hideaway where Lilliana had only known to survive. She remembers another time looking at the frosted ground. She remembers wondering if he intended to use it as the canvas to leave His message - to use their lifeblood as a message of warning to her mother and the others. Lilliana remembers contemplating what it was to die; who would make her family smile is their beacon was no longer there to torchlight their way. (’Go,’ is all her blonde cousin had said. 'No,’ Lilli had whispered back, ‘I won’t leave you with him.’) ”I think that’s enough,” Wolfbane hisses behind her. "Leave us be and let the brat go home.” Lilliana looks up slowly, her blue eyes seeking Fiorina before meeting her gaze - before Lilliana silently conveys her intent. (His green eyes rest on Elena and she is powerless. There is nothing she can do to stop him. Lilliana is frozen beside her cousin, quaking with the knowledge that there is nothing she can do to save her. What match are two yearlings against a demon? ”I was simply collecting what was owed to me,” the antlered stallion hisses in response to the silver Regent.) "Don’t act the hero,” Wolfbane says and Lilliana agrees with him. The chestnut mare had grown up with Guardian angels waiting in her wings and looking at Fiorina - she can’t bear to look at Ruth just yet - there is a knife twist in her gut that says that the warrior before her would try to be exactly that. It’s exactly what she is afraid of. "No harm is coming to either of these mares today. If she won’t go with you freely, then they are leaving with me. Find some other prey.” ("You will leave. Now. This is the last time you step upon the lands of my family and leave unscathed,” threatens the gilded stallion. Valerio had stood over them all - imperial in his stance - and every inch the Guardian that Lilliana had always imagined, striding in at the exactly the right moment to drive the intruder away.) Lilli finally looks to Ruth who stands guarded, who wraps herself in her dark wings and the copper mare desperately wishes she could enfold the girl in her embrace. She wishes she could tell her that it will be alright. Her past and present are colliding together and it takes everything in her to battle them both.(A perfect storm combines and spins in her mind - remembering what she couldn't do then and what she could do now.) At this moment, Lilliana only knows that she wants Ruth as far from Wolfbane as she can. (”Woah, you're a fire,” says a spindle-legged golden child with dark downy feathers on her wings. Lilliana laughs, reminded of another sunglow-hued filly. The memory ripples, replaced by another golden girl of a similar age who smiles at Lilli. "Have you heard of tulips? They grow up through the snow so you don’t even have to wait for spring,” her cousin elaborates.) It has something that has haunted her for her entire life, wondering what had happened to them that day if her parents hadn’t intervened. There is a part of her that knows - that even if they had fought back, Lilli and Elena would have become another casualty to His list. They would be another story of warning for future Legacy generations - like the stories of the demise of Zamier, Benjamin, and Shiri. Fiorina would intervene on their behalf but Lilliana is done being a damsel in distress - it is something she has never wanted to be so when a tentacle strokes her cheek, Lilliana doesn’t move. She decides. Her decision comes out in a plume of silver smoke, barely visible in the dark. ”He’s an old friend,” (Liar, says a voice from within.) The crimson mare gives a nonchalant shrug of her slender shoulders (as nonchalant as one can be while entwined and wrapped up in tentacles) and there is a stubborn hold to her chin when she looks back to the armored mare. She can’t look at Ruth. (Home. It is the western shore where the sea crashes against the Redwood forest. It is a glimpse of impossibly tall trees. It is a glimpse of the lonely, gray cliffs of Nerine. Of a spotted mare, of a red one with bone armor, of a bald-faced one - the ones who make up the nucleus of her days in Nerine. ) Lilliana is pulled back and she doesn’t fight it; what night remains them is dissolved into a melting of gold and copper. Go, she wants to plead with them. She had failed her cousin that day but she won’t fail Ruth. Fiorina could get them both back to Taiga or Nerine, wherever she wanted to take them. She just needs to take the chance.  The chestnut doesn’t smile but there is nothing in her voice that trembles, nothing that gives away her lie. (What is one more?), "We’ll be fine,” Lilliana responds. As if nothing about this is out of the ordinary, as if she isn’t afraid, as if she isn’t battling the corridors of her mind and memories. Lilliana - true to her nature - looks up to @[Wolfbane]. LILLIANA and its harder than you think telling dreams from one another

art by the day of shadow