In another life, she had been a beloved daughter and a precious sister. She had been a childhood confidant and she had been a girl who grew into her womanhood under the silver gaze of a man who taught her what it was to set someone alight. Lilliana has known love in all its various shades and colors; she has known what it has been the gentle pastels of a sunrise and to be the vivid hues of a sunset.
She has known what it is to be a beginning and what is to be an ending.
Their shared grief is palpable in the air. It is as thick as the lava steam that they pass through and as real as the heat that the copper mare can feel rising from the volcanic ground below them. Wishbone mourns the loss of a friend and her heavy gaze fixes over the shoulder of the dark mare, towards the peak that is rising before them. Her blue eyes fix there because it is always easier to look ahead than it is to fixate on the heartache that lingers between and behind them. They study the intricate cracks in the stone, of the scorched stone that could tell stories about the magma that has pooled and cooled and irrevocably changed the Tephran landscape.
Just as Lilliana has been. Just as @[Wishbone] has been.
Lilliana's heart isn't so different from the ground they tread on. It has been cracked and cooled. It has been hardened and remade and she is still learning the geography of this new terrain. There are parts that are still uncertain and that she is still discovering. Lilliana is still learning about the woman emerging from the faultlines of her fractured heart. Her eyes glance back to the taller woman who leads their ascent and some part of her thinks that she isn't the only one that knows that struggle.
(Not that Lilli knows what is to die or to be reborn. But she knows something of what is to be torn away from her children, to do whatever she could to protect them. To feel infinitely angry that what she had done still hadn't been enough to spare them.)
Her mind goes where it so often does when she thinks of the Curse and the children it sired. She thinks of Nashua and his golden stripes and the broad wings that he has always been so proud of. She thinks of Yanhua and the way that she sometimes catches glimpses of Wolfbane emerging through the corners of his half-cocked grin. She thinks of Aela (and though she will always tell herself that the girl inherited the palomino coat from her aunt, Lilli knows it isn't true) and her chest tightens; her daughter she had given away with the belief that the Curse would never find her.
And if it couldn't find her, it couldn't hurt her as it Nashua and Yanhua.
But it had hurt Lilliana. It left behind scars that she is still learning how to navigate. It's something that she doesn't think another could understand until Wishbone says she does. That she knows how the chestnut feels and the slender mare raises her head, sharing a quiet moment with the other because it is simply enough to know that someone understands.
The Taigan lifts her refined head and though there is weight behind that gentle stare, it rises to meet the fierce amber of Wishbone. (Some part of her wants to apologize that the other knows how this feels; this is not a feeling she would wish upon anyone.)
"It would seem so," says the red woman. The faint edges of a wry smile emerge because this is something Lilliana understands as well. Her hope is such a buoyant thing and it has yet to be swallowed completely by grief or loss or cataclysms. Lilliana's hope is still a thing that has yet to get lost, despite the lands she has wandered.
Wishbone's coaxing smile is the spark needed to ignite the warmth in Lilliana's.
It catches and flickers in the wild blue of her eyes. "Maybe there is peace in the Afterlife," she says thoughtfully. That was something her father - Valerio - had always told her. That in the living that came after, there was no pain. There was nothing to burden a soul that way that this life could drag one down. There was no suffering. But there is a view waiting for them and something in Lilliana - the part of her that always reminded her that she was very much alive - is glancing towards it.
"Though I can't imagine they have anything like this," she whispers as they come to another stop. The clouds break in the distance to reveal her beloved Taiga in the North and there are even glimpses of grey granite from imperial Nerine. The blue of the ocean breaks along a jagged coast and towards the other direction, it is a sea of green and paradise below.
"You did it," Lilliana tells the other, in a voice that traces the edge of awe of the volcano that Wishbone has conquered.
