The quiet cove that encompassed Brazen's statue was sacred.
(Nothing much remains sacred to Lilliana anymore; she forsook the stars beneath the summit of Tephra's volcano, the River stopped murmuring to her some time ago and the wind - the wind, her birthright - the silence from the wind makes her angrier than she will ever admit to anyone.)
On the pyre of all the things she has sacrificed over the years, it leaves behind something else that burns more intensely: family.
It's a shell. She knows it is hollow and devoid of the soul that once inhabited it. There is nothing left of Brazen in the stone-sculpture that was left behind. But for Lilliana, it had been a quiet place to grieve and to mourn; it had been a place to bring flowers with Reave and share the memories of his birth mother with him. It had been a spot where she had hoped that over time, they both might have found some closure. The little glen could stand as a testament to Brazen's memory; that had been Lilliana's hope, anyway.
And it gets snatched up in moments, taken away by a pair of clutching talons.
She is already on her way by the time the first visions come. They obscure her sight and they are different, somehow, from the memories she projects. This isn't something tinged with emotional residue (though Lilliana is furious as she canters across the Nerinian grasslands). There is no sound - no gull cries coming from the coast, no scent of salt lingering from the nearby sea. It is just the emptiness of the moorlands, coming in frantic waves that send her hoofbeats racing faster into Nerine.
Lilliana - who shares a similar coloring and blue eyes with her adopted son - doesn't look so different from the colt when she comes to stand behind him.
Her mane is tangled and unkempt, with a stray twig entwined in one of her curls. The chestnut's sides are still racing though she has stopped and a thin film of sweat has darkened her neck and flanks. Her gaze, though, remains bright and clear, as angry as a winter squall as she looks at Popinjay.
"There are other ways of getting our attention," the words come clipped from the Taigan. Some part of her even doubts that the little bay mare even had a purpose for abducting Brazen. (She remembers Popinjay as a filly. There are memories of her romping through Taiga with Celina and that life feels like another era. Aten and Lethia's adopted daughter always seemed wild to her, free-spirited that made her think of those who linger too close on cliffsides, who swim into the undertow just for the sake of challenging the tide. Reckless.)
She lifts her head, granting the younger bay a moment to explain.
@[Popinjay] Lilli says give us back our rock - you got plenty