im always dragging this horse around

[lilliana]

The first word she says in the Afterlife is, "No." 

It shouldn't be any surprise that the one who had always been her champion - who had always tried to shield her from every misstep as a child, who had watched his sister stumble and struggle in the land of the Living - is the first one to greet her. He couldn't catch her on the other side but on this one, Malachi is the first one to greet her. He couldn't be with her before but he could be with her now and her brother is eager to make up for all the lost years between them.

Stunned and suddenly blinded by the presence of light, she thinks that his dappled skin should have gone silver by now.

And yet here he is, as familiar to her as the day that she had left him on the Pass after they had argued.

"Lilli," he urges her gently. The chestnut buries herself into the muscled crook of his neck. "No." she says again, like if she keeps her eyes closed, she can remain blind to the truth that is so painfully obvious now. (How does she still fit against him so easily? Had he always been this tall when he had been alive? Or has she always been this small?) But where she had once felt emotions so acutely alive and held on to them, they are far easier to let go here. Pressing her copper eyelids closed, she takes a deep breath and steps back from her brother.

When her blue eyes open, they meet his dark mocha ones; brother and sister look at each other, two halves of the same smile finding one another. Her only stills a moment. "I'm sorry," she says. "For that last time," and her mind travels back to remember the bitter cold of the mountains, the furious heat of their anger. The quiet that settles between the siblings makes her wonder if Malachi's memory followed hers. "I should have-," Lilliana starts quietly and Malachi doesn't let her finish. "Come with us?" The Andalusian lifts his silver head and motions it towards a path, moving them away from this topic.

They had both ended up here, she decides. It doesn't matter the path they took.

Time, as it does in the Beyond, passes differently here and Lilliana doesn't know if it hours or days or weeks that pass here. The slender mare falls into step with her brother and makes the choice she hadn't when they had been both alive. She decides to follow him. And while he leads her away from the hills, they speak of many things. Lovely things (their children and all the ways the family that the family has grown, how Aletta had found their father, how Jay learned to speak to the stars). Terrible things (Malachi tells her how he and Kalina died, their lives given so that their twins could live).

They talk until there is a veil ahead, a haze not unlike the Taigan fog. She slows when Malachi does and looks over to where he stands regarding her. Finally, he asks: "Do you want to go home?"

Shouldn't the answer be easy? Shouldn't it be yes?
(But her mind can't conjure the word into a single place, to a single soul.)

"The choice is yours," he tells her before pressing a fleeting kiss to her forehead, and then Malachi vanishes into it, leaving the chestnut to gaze into a rift between worlds.

@[Neverwhere]