Why do her legs suddenly feel as if they have been filled with lead?
Why does each step forward feel harder to take than the last? Forward is all she has ever known. Forward is what she has always told herself: forward, onward, keep going. Never look back. Her hoofsteps are suppressed by the layer of snow beneath her and she walks forward, away from Larva who only smiles at her like his mentions of death and the Afterlife are commonplace, attempting to close the distance between herself and the others.
The atmosphere changes the closer she gets. Moments ago, it had been full of electricity and firestorm crackling. The air around them has become charged and it feels the closer she gets to the source, the more it intensifies. It’s only when she speaks does she reveal her precarious position. Halfway between the striped stallion and the golden child, there had been many things she had hoped for.
When his swings split and shift, when they change into tentacles, all her hopes die away.
This is a nightmare reincarnated and panic mingles with adrenaline as it crashes through her veins. There is a moment where she dances - where her feet come up and back - as she looks around. Larva, it seems, needs no time to contemplate his actions. He does something she has never seen before of how one might react to danger (perhaps her first dose of reality) - he flees. He rears and then fades into night.
She has no time to process the shock of that. Ruth screams - a cry that rips her apart - and the copper mare urgently takes another step towards her, looking for the girl. No, some distant part of her thinks. This is not happening. This cannot be real. This feels like some twisted magic of the Mountain - a reality that shouldn't exist. Panic rises in the frantic beating of her heart and in the tense way she holds herself. As she watches as Ruth valiantly tries to rise despite the tentacle that Wolfbane has ensnared her with.
Fear threatens to freeze her into place but a tentacle does that well enough.
It wraps around her neck with precision and accuracy. It binds but not so tightly that it chokes her. She does, however, feel inevitability in its grip. Fiorina - the plated mare - makes quick work of the shapeshifter’s craft. Wolfbane’s tentacles are torn apart, limb by wriggling limb, as the dark mare uses her tail to slice through the tentacle that holds Ruth down on the ground.
Ruth.
Her eyes fall to the palomino filly. She hears the fury and the alarm in the child’s cry as she calls out for Lilliana. There is ire in Ruth’s voice - venom that sugarcoats her fear - and for a moment, all she can hear is Elena. Another cry from another golden girl that still echoes down the years to where she now stands.
(‘You killed him! You murdered my father and yet you still stand,’ her cousin seethes. ‘You don’t deserve to stand there.’)
For Ruth, for Fiorina and even Wolfbane - she has to do something.
Fiorina is coming towards her with a still moving tentacle dangling from her serrated smile and Lilliana sees the determination glinting in her black eyes. She won’t stop. She will slice and cut and fight - she will continue on and on and on. Fiorina is every inch the fearless warrior that she carries herself as. If this had been something as simple as a faceless evil, some unknown entity with the intent to harm and destroy and cause chaos, she would have let her continue lunging forward with those razorblade teeth.
But it is not.
Wolfbane, at the very least, has been her friend. And there are other things she knows - she has seen him adjust his shoulders as easily as a horse might exhale. He has a skill that affords him the advantage of the unknown. He could slither behind them back to Taiga as a snake. He might take the form of an eagle that sits on a waiting branch. He could be as cunning as a fox that lurks in the edges of shadows. This fight between Fiorina and Wolfbane could continue on and on - bloodcurdling violence that makes her sick to the soul - with a multitude of possibilities. Lilliana, with that realization weighing heavy, searches for a way to spare all of them.
So she moves.
One step back is followed by another and another. Her steps are high and unsteady. She doesn’t need the tentacle wrapped around her neck to remind her where she stands but the last clue is the warmth of his hide that penetrates through the darkness when she finally stops, placing herself between the skinwalker and dark mare. "Wolfbane,” she says with a voice that hardly rises above a whisper. "Bane,” she asks before Lilliana glances over her shoulder, raising her blue eyes to plead with his.
"Please.”
LILLIANA
and i was in love with all the things i believed i was
@[Wolfbane]