[private] stranger than your sympathy;

[lilliana]

Maybe Lilliana’s problem came from that she did all her dreaming during daylight. She had looked up to the clouds and crafted monuments in her mind, had created worlds above her head where she could not go. She filled her waking hours with dreams and so when night came - as it always must - her mind was quiet. Her dreams didn’t come with the dark but the daybreak; her world, the one she knew with Elaina, woke with her and was ready to be explored.

Lilliana’s blue eyes go dull as she looks down, watching the waves that crash past the faint outline of her ankles, that go crashing right past her.

"I do,” she murmurs and blinks back unshed tears. Sometimes, she thinks, that’s what makes this so hard. Lilli can see parts of Malachi in her eldest boy’s lopsided smile; the piercing depth and quiet intelligence sparking behind Yanhua’s blue eyes that remind her so much of Jay, a somberness he has that she longs to tell Elaina about that makes her remember all those lost days trying to make Alvaro smile.

It had been the part of motherhood she hadn’t been prepared for - to look at a child and not only see parts of yourself but others, of the generations that came before.

An ear flicks to her golden cousin before she looks up and it surprises her. Lilli finds it a comfort to know that Marcelo had nightmares too. She has them often enough. There are plenty of nights she wakes up with all those shadows pressing against her throat. What little comfort she found in the revelation leaves quickly enough. What a weight that must have been on his shoulders - to dream about the things that could come for them and the inevitable in knowing that there was no stopping it.

(Was knowing worse than braving the unknown?)

"Poor ‘Celo,” she says quietly. He had been the first lesson of Magic from Aletta - that while it could be considered a gift, it was more apt to be a curse. Her father, if he lost control, could have stripped Paraiso of her trees with his gales. Marcelo could see glimpses of the future but he never knew the precise path taken to get there. Ori was gifted with the sight of things gone, unable to change to things already written in history. Lovelace was timeless, cursed to rise and rise again while the mortal hearts she grew to love would wither and die with the seasons.

Aside from the gift of healing, what about Magic could really be proved a ‘gift’? For everything it gave, it had to take and that rendered equal in the end: nothing.

"Do you think Windskeep has been kind to them?” Lilli whispers over the sea, hoping that it has. Hoping that it still stands and that whatever it suffered during the wars, it thrived now. That they found peace.

At her confession (because what else can this be but an altar? Where else would she ever dare to admit such a thing? Elaina has been the very reason that she has learned to fear love and to know what it is to burn with it), her expression parts to reveal a haunting pain. The journey has been a terrifying one; every bit as tumultuous and wild as she is.

(Thats what happens, though, when you grow a girl instead of raising one. Lilliana had been allowed to bloom alongside the gentle hills of Murmuring Rivers. There had been no fencing that child in. So nobody should be surprised when the May Pole turned into a pyre.)

What Elaina says is the very thing she struggles with. The copper mare had grown up looking at her reflection, looking at the angles and planes of her face for a father she hadn’t known. Now when she stares at herself, there is only the sin. "So that's it, then?” Lilliana asks dryly, "That’s all there is? Doom?” The anger rises briefly - inflecting on the last word before she softens. "Are we the sin or is the sin us?”

She buries the last of it - that rage, that anger that has been festering in her since the night that Lilli went into the Forest and Lilliana came out - before she just buries her face into the warmth of her cousin’s blonde neck. A place just as immortal and beloved to her as the Redwoods that loom behind them. ”I love you,” she croaks, ”I love you so very, very much.”