I do.
Lilliana fights the urge of feeling her dark mouth curl into a scowl. She resists that (temptingly) brilliant flare of anger that wants to disappoint Celina by telling her that the child she carries does not belong to her shape-shifting sire. Oh, the words come so close; they burn at the tip of her tongue and the copper mare has to swallow the barb down where it smolders in her lungs instead.
It brings her back to an improbable position - an almost perfect mirror image of the canyon wall that Celina has Lilliana backing towards.
What happens if her child is born dark and constellation-marked instead of golden and striped? It’s not something she intends to find out. Her child is just that - as Nash and Yan are - hers. But the rhetorical question that Celina answers forces her to consider something; if Wolfbane comes lurking again as he had with Nashua and Yanhua, what then? If the child isn’t golden and striped, Lilliana thinks she sees the answer to that question reflecting back at her from the green eyes of her pale approacher.
That terror is about to catch her until a sound comes trickling to a slender auburn ear.
A river that runs nearby - that water that Celina had been searching for in this dusty wasteland - ripples laughter as it bleeds out of Pangea like a vein. Play along, the current giggles. Lilliana has spent years trying to prove Underworld wrong - that she is not the pretty little fool he had once accused her of being - and she wonders if that might actually help her now. She needs to get out of Pangea and she has no intention of crossing paths with Wolfbane. So what if the river is carrying an answer?
The red mare trembles because the sharp-toothed girl is too close and looks down, diverting her blue-eyed gaze to the dry ground instead of the encroaching Celina. "Of course it’s his,” she seethes - low and angry. States it like a begrudging fact that she accepts.
Lilliana shakes harder and harder (though she keeps to herself that she has already seen Ruth - who is the chestnut mare without her secrets?) and the mention of Neverwhere makes her head abruptly turn away from the pale girl in an attempt to hide her wince, like the words of her missing friend inflicted physical harm. (They do - her barrel tightens from a cramp that comes low from her stomach, a moment of searing pain that she dulls with her light.)
When the cramp lessens, the red mare glares to Celina who prettily shrugs her shoulders like it hardly matters to her. Why should it? Why should it matter to Celina at all?
Recalling (and recoiling from) the way that the iridescent girl had come lurking in with the Taigan fog one morning not long after her striped sire arrived, Lilliana quietly asks: "I take it you’re looking for your father?” Finding Celina here only fuels her desire to get out of Pangea. Maybe, she could make it matter. "I’d take you to him,” a bold lie from what was once such a bold girl comes out as a casual shrug, "but I’m stuck here.”
She wants out and gone from this canyon country and Lilliana thinks she sees her chance. They could slip out of Pangea together and then the copper mare could slip away from @[Celina] to.. well, she'd figured that part of the plan out when it came.
Play along, the river gurgles a reminder in the distance.
"I’m sure you understand.”
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions