- it's in the eyes, i can tell you will always be danger -
we had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?
LILLIANA
Something happens to Lilliana when Beryl goes. She owes the girl a great debt of gratitude. If she were not Immortal, at the very least, she would owe the shadowchaser her life. It’s something that she might owe for Aela. The palomino dissolves in a haze of them and leaves the chestnut mare staring at the open space she had been.
All the open light suddenly seemed too bright. Almost overwhelming.
Lilliana simply stares at it, losing herself somewhere along the lines of the anguish of her missing daughter and the disbelief that she was finally home. Neverwhere calls her back with a snort and Lilli blinks, trying to chase the shadows from her blue eyes. "I know their Dame,” the red mare says. "Aquaria. She has abilities tied to the water.” She forces herself to blink again because otherwise, she will think of her time on those white, sandy beaches. She will remember Aquaria commanding the sea, harnessing something unpredictable, and turning it into entertainment for her boys.
Her mind is turning to fast and Neverwhere reminds her to slow down.
"You’re right,” she says softly and her fleeting sense of purpose makes her seem smaller, frailer than she had been moments before. If Brennen needed something, it would best to ask him directly. If there was something they needed from Ischia, Lilliana wouldn’t be the one to make the journey. Not now, anyway.
Not when, "I don’t even know if I can make it home.” The red mare admits to her friend, filling up the open space between them where Beryl had been. There would be a debt owed to the girl but Neverwhere is one of Lilliana’s oldest friends and at this moment, she doesn’t feel the pretense to keep up appearances. Not here. She feels no shame in admitting to Nev that she feels much like she looks. Tired. Wan. Almost empty.
She reaches out to the dappled Queen and rests her slender head across the back of the Nerinian. The world has started to skew again, tilt a little this way and that. Neverwhere helps steady it.
"Do you think there could be two of you to help me back to Taiga?” she tries to tease because Lilliana still wants to grasp onto something of her old self.
And then there is silence.
And then there is more.
And then finally, Lilliana says something.
"How?” she chokes the word out from behind @[Neverwhere]. "If it can’t be killed, how can it be stopped?” The world starts to spin again and she presses her eyes shut. "I don’t know if we can stop him,” she whispers. "I tried, Nev.” Lilliana says because it feels important to say. That somebody knows this. She hadn’t thought that he would come back after the Field. She had thought that after everything that had happened - that once he had gotten what he wanted - that would have been the end of it.
Instead, it seemed like Nashua and Yanhua had been the start of everything.
You tried, she doesn’t say. She tried, the deep pink (angry) gouges on Neverwhere’s flank remind her when Lilliana finally opens her eyes.
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind