[private] You will forget, and I won’t remember it

[lilliana]

She doesn’t remember breaking apart.

She doesn’t remember Taiga.

She doesn’t remember what her heart so badly wishes she would.

What she does remember is waking up in the Meadow, staring up at the purple mountains of Hyaline, and not understanding the feeling that the unknown horizon awoke in her. Lilli remembers those conversations with Elena, feeling safe and finally at peace beneath those trees. She knows that in those memories, they had been somewhere they shouldn’t have been but that had been the story of their shared adolescence.

The memories have started to come back since then, especially since meeting with the angel in the Meadow, but they are still out of place and Lilliana still doesn’t know that they are broken because she has died not once, but twice. In the very last moments of her second life, before Gale had killed her, the Curse had worn the shape of its previous host. It might have been the shock, or the repressed trauma associated with her memories of Wolbane, that had broken her powers.

Her Echoes are gone (not that she knows this), but she does know that when she sees Leilan face, she knows him. Like with Ryatah, the memories of previous conversations begin to flood her mind but there is no understanding the order in which they came or the context of them. They are fragmented, brief moments of her history that have begun to torment her because they never reveal enough for her to fully understand them, like now.

”Again,” she repeats slowly, staring up at the tall roan. Her copper head tilted fully back trying to meet his gaze. Leilan, she realizes (remembers), though he hasn’t spoken his name and that makes the chestnut press her lips together in uncertainty. ”We do this often?” she asks, because while the murmurs of the past are there, it remains just beyond her reach.