[private] it was dead long ago; wishbone

[lilliana]

Say no more, comes from Wishbone and so Lilliana doesn't.

Her blue eyes glance towards the landscape of Tephra below, to the haze of the Taigan forest that she can catch glimpses of in the distance. When the black-and-gold mare suggests that they keep moving, Lilliana does because this is something she has understood throughout her entire life; in Beyond and in Beqanna. The life that she had left behind her had troubles as well and that was how she had escaped them. There had been a father who had never returned, a home that disappeared behind a magical mist, of a family that she had dearly loved and hadn't wanted to be parted from.

But she had come to Beqanna and she had told herself: Keep moving. Keep going forward.

There is an underlying strength she finds in Wishbone's voice and the chestnut mare is glad for it. If Lilliana had spoken right then, she didn't think her voice could hold such certainty (though it never had where it concerned the palomino pegasus). She follows the long-legged mare as they continue to climb towards the peak of the volcano, the one that Wishbone had never scaled with Wolfbane. The knowledge of that never-memory lodges in her thought and Lilliana is grateful for the quiet that settles between them.

Much like @[Wishbone], the Taigan pushes her emotions into the rocky terrain. The burn that comes from the exertion of their trek is a welcome balm to the colors of her thoughts. But where the other mare is looking to soften her grief, Lilliana wants to forget it. She wants to bury it so far deep beneath the ground that one would never know the pain that lurks beneath the fire-bright coat of the smaller woman. She wants to be as she was; she wants to be who she was the day that he had descended from the sky and smiled at her.

She knows now, though. There is no recovering that girl any more than there is the friend that Wishbone mourns.

The quiet - one that had become filled with their footfalls, with the calls of tropical birds, of their sighs as they climbed higher and higher - fades away as the elevation calls them higher. Her guide decides to share more, to fill the silence with a story and Lilliana listens because this is the side of the story that she never knew. This is her heart halving itself in ways that surprises even her; that she could hurt for the children who grew up under the shadow of a curse (and for her boys, for Nashua and Yanhua because that curse had come to Taiga) while the other side has found relief at its end.

He was so different from the Bane that I knew.

(Who did she know? The Curse? Had there even been a trace of the one that Wishbone speaks of? Or had some entity saw the grief for the loss of her old life written so clearly across her face that it knew how easy she would be to lead into the temptation of a new one?)

When they finally stop, when the elegant mare asks her how she had known the former Commandant, Lilliana thinks it's fitting that the air around them reeks of sulfur and brimstone.

"I wanted to hate him," she confesses. But she can't. Something else that she is incapable of. (Neverwhere had thought her heart was never-ending well of forgiveness and while Lilliana doesn't think she is capable of that, she knows can't keep carrying around the stones of anger and fury and rage through her immortality. It will tire her quickly when she is still so young in the face of it. When there is still an infinity yet to come.)

How does she explain? What does she say? Does she dare to show?

"He was known as the Commandant when I first met him," she explains to Wishbone. "He took control of Taiga alongside his wife, Lepis." They had been rulers before that, she had learned. Maybe that was part of the history that the other mare knew. They had reigned in Loess, once upon a time. But the rest of the story isn't unique: a too-young mare wanders the meadow and meets a too-handsome stallion. It's the setting of a story that is never bound to end well; only in this one, there is a Curse and Lilliana is left to wonder why they had ever crossed paths at all. "I thought I was in love with him."

('I didn't mean to fall in love with him,' she had told Elena one night in Taiga. And her cousin - her beautiful, blazing cousin who had so often been Lilli's torchbearer - had only said: 'We never do.')

"I'm sorry," she says quietly because she knows what it is to grieve a friend. Because it was something Wishbone had shared with her earlier in their conversation when Lilliana had shared that Neverwhere was missing. Because she knows what it is to ache at the memory of someone. "for the loss of your friend."