[private] i had a name but they took it from me

[lilliana]

She knows Ryatah’s face, but somehow, Lilliana knows something is wrong.

For a moment, she simply stands there. Her blue eyes widen - especially when the silver angel calls her Lilli - because the only ones who had ever called her that had been her family. Those outside the band from Murmuring Rivers had always addressed her as Lilliana. It was only when she had gotten away from Aletta’s dark, watchful gaze that the young chestnut had begun to truly blossom; those who encountered Valerio’s youngest daughter then were greeted with a warm smile and asked to call her Lilli.

Ryatah hadn’t been in Murmuring Rivers, had she?
Or had she met her later, after they had ventured to Culloden?

The memories begin to return, brief flashes of insight that make no sense to her. She remembers the doe and her fawn, but the setting remains hazy. There are other memories, something about Ryatah, of looking like an angel and not feeling like one, and so the copper woman peers up to the other mare haloed in an ethereal glow. There had been no angels in the Beyond, and when the familiar glittering light of her halo graces the confused planes of her face, more memories come. She remembers a forest where the trees stood so tall that it seemed like they could pierce the sky.

Her heart wants her to know that place so badly that the sudden yearning in her chest overwhelms her. But the parts of her that remember dying, that remember the heartache and the loss that is buried there, pushes what she might know of it away. Lilliana gets stuck in the middle instead, trying to remember and trying to understand the emotions at war within her. She very nearly forgets the Meadow - the same one where she first laid eyes on Wolfbane, not far from where she had first met Brazen and evaded wolves with Neverwhere - until Ryatah reminds her of where she is standing.

Lilliana closes her eyes because nothing about this makes sense, and there is something about being in the dark that makes all this easier somehow. ”I was there just yesterday,” she murmurs. And yet she knows that isn’t right, because how could she have just been in another place - another land entirely (and how does she know that?) - when she is here now? Bits and pieces of her first, second, and now third life begin to converge together, making no sense to the mare who could only recall fragments of her first one this morning.

”But now I’m here,” she says, opening her eyes and looking at Ryatah again, almost afraid to say more. Tephra, the thought comes. It’s volcano emerges in her mind, and suddenly, there are thoughts about Warden and Wishbone and going to Tephra because -

That doesn’t come.

Only more confusion does.

”Ryatah, what am I doing here?” she asks in a voice barely above a whisper, "I was in Tephra, before the Pass. Before the Night came and it stayed too long."

@Ryatah