Ahead.
She only looks ahead. Lilliana looks past the battered form of the old gelding. Her blue eyes look above the tired lines of his withers. Above and away from where the somber shades of night banner out from his neck and tail. (It’s all a lie, anyway. He is nothing. He can be anything.) The copper mare thinks for a moment that she might actually reach it.
Perhaps her ancestors have taken pity on her, this lost Legacy child. This daughter of Summer left to bloom and then wilt on foreign soil. Maybe Legado fuels her flying gallop (she doesn’t feel her hooves touch the sand, her ears are dull to the sound of galloping strides). Her mind, oddly, isn’t rushing with thoughts.
There is no plan.
There is no plot or scheme.
It all happens so fast.
Aela is there and then-
gone.
Wolfbane is forgotten. He no longer exists in the wreckage of her own fears. This one. Her greatest one.
Her heart hammers faster than she runs. No. Her mind races. No. No. No. Wildly, desperately, her blues search down the shoreline but the shadow evaporates, taking any trace of her daughter with it. The petite hoofprints are there - frantic, frenzied, terror scripted in each one until the ocean washes it away. Lilli’s eyes grow wide in the absence of her child and until an answer (an explanation?) in the form of a lioness.
The tawny creature growls and snarls something at the skinwalker but Lilliana hears none of it. The world is there and gone, mare and lion swallowed by the darkness. Stay close. There is nothing. Oblivion. Is this what she has been looking for? Peace? Is this the Eternity that Ryatah had spoken of?
Light.
The world opens and yields Nerine. It’s been a year but Lilliana would recognize those ringing ledges of freedom anywhere, especially after Pangea. She stumbles and then struggles to find her balance again. There is no finding it when she meets the pale blue eyes of the Nerinian Queen. Her gaze doesn’t stay on the sun-scarred lines of her face for long when there are new ones on her sides.
The attack of the Northern monarch was common gossip, even to a Pangean captive.
"Nev,” she breathes, uttering the word somewhere between relief and despair, joy and agony. It hangs on her heart and sinks it further down. Her slender head turns to the shifter, ”Beryl,” Lilli remembers. Leilan’s lion child. "The dark - do you know where it took her?” There is urgency in her voice and it borders on pleading.
And then she stops, pauses while her ears flick forward and back. A too-thin Lilliana shifts, recognizing the net that has been cast. Magic. Like the Mist from Beyond, like the Fog from the Mountain. "What’s happening?” she whispers, turning her attention back to @[Neverwhere].
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions
thought we could tie this all together?