"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
“I know when you go down all your darkest roads I would have followed all the way to the graveyard.”
“Not from the afterlife, exactly,” she explains, sifting through the dream-like memories of that particular visit. She was well acquainted with death. She has died twice, the real kind of deaths, the kinds that feel infinite. The kind you aren’t supposed to return from. She knows how heavy nothing can feel, she knows how dark endless black can truly be. Because when she had been dead the first two times, there was no afterlife.
There was nothing.
Just her, and the sea, and darkness.
The third and fourth deaths had been courtesy of him, two more twists in their strange story. Her journey in the afterlife that had resulted in her becoming an angel had happened some time in between, but she had not died for it. “I was there when the gates opened,” she ignores the way her heart clenches when her mind wills the memory of Dhumin forward, of his stoic face, and how he had not followed. “I’m not sure what happened. Everything about that time in the afterlife was strange, even compared to the last time I was there.” With Gail, after Carnage had tore open her throat. She is surprised when the thought of her brings with it a flash of guilt; guilt that she is here, and Gail is still trapped there – queen of the underworld, but not a free one.
Lilliana asks who she feels like, and answers that she herself does not know. She angles her head towards her, with a melancholy kind of smile. “I don’t really know anymore, either. There are the things that others say, what they think of me, or what they think I am. Positive or negative, nothing seems to fit.”
She lingers on a pause, searching the copper-colored face of her companion. She could be a selfish, self-centered thing, and sometimes it took her awhile to recognize the emotions that are swimming in another’s eyes. “You seem sadder than when we last spoke,” she comments plainly, but gently, not exactly wanting to pry too deep if it waa not wanted. “Did something happen?”
07-17-2020, 06:14 PM (This post was last modified: 07-17-2020, 06:18 PM by lilliana.)
Lilliana doesn’t know death like Ryatah has. She knows it in one way. Like one of those stories that her mother loved to spin, as one of those legends her father had imparted during their brief time together. In those stories, death was never an ending. It was simply another existence of being, another way of living. In those legends, it was a place to be reunited with loved ones and to find eternal peace.
Death has always darkened the fringes of Lilliana’s life (she doesn’t know about the murder of Kalina, how Malachi paid with his life to defend his daughters) but she doesn’t know what it’s like to have your heart stop beating, for the blood in her veins to grow still. She doesn’t know what those eyes see when the light dims and they turn unseeing.
For all her fables and fantasies, she knows nothing of what Ryatah saw (or didn’t see) on the other side. Knows nothing of the darkness or the sea or the shadows in Eternity.
It’s not the angel mare’s first time there. Is that what made her Divine? Lilliana wonders. The chestnut mare has grown unconventionally quiet but this conversation isn’t like their last. This is Death and Resurrection and Divinities they are speaking of. Of course, Lilli is quiet. What would she have to add? They could return to the idle topics of motherhood - of how Nashua is born to test the skies, of how Yanhua can seem too intangible to hold - but after this?
No.
"You’ve been more than once,” Lilliana murmurs to herself. Her voice - light, lyrical - sounds almost incredulous. When her blue eyes come to rest on the haloed mare again, they are a mixture of admiration and awe. And a question. It never occurred to her that Immortals actually died - she simply thought their blood turned to gold and they stayed pristine, ageless. Like the glowing mare beside her.
It’s a feat, she thinks, that speaks favorably of @[Ryatah].
A tentative smile starts as she looks to meet the darker gaze of the other mare. "I’m glad they don’t fit,” the Taigan mare says, almost fervently. "It would be a shame to define you, I think.” It would be a waste, she thinks. For a mare who has been a former Queen? Who has died more than once? More than that, who had been there when the gates of the Afterlife opened?
Extraordinary might be a word where Lilliana could start but even that word feels paltry in comparison. The red mare decides she likes that there is no word in their known language to describe Ryatah. It seems fitting that she should remain indescribable.
Lilli, however, is perfectly describable.
"I fell in love,” she says quietly - distantly - as they walk. ”And that-,” Lilliana breaks off. Her voice cracks because there is some piece of her that is still so angry (one of many, many emotions she associates with Wolfbane), so furious with herself for allowing this to happen. Because hadn't there always been some part of her that had known? Some warning lingering in the back of her mind that if she ever gave her heart away it would be anything but catastrophic? She should have known, should have learned. "It’s changed everything,” Lilliana admits.
The red mare abruptly looks away, not entirely sure if she is ready to see Ryatah’s reaction and focuses on the empty trail instead.
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven i've got a long list of questions
“I know when you go down all your darkest roads I would have followed all the way to the graveyard.”
“Yes, more than once,” she confirms, thinking briefly on all the times she has been dead. A quick glance to her companion, and she reads the question on her face. She forgets that Beqanna must be strange to those that have not lived here for several lifetimes – through catastrophes and land shifts, through magic being stripped and then practically vomited back. It must sound unbelievable that someone could die more than once, or enter the afterlife without being dead at all. “Death has always refused to keep me. Even when I look for it, even when I’m asking for it.” There had been a time, not so long ago, when she had thought she had wanted to die. She had thought she was no longer afraid of it because this new world was so different from what she was used to, and she was so tired of being a living ghost. She had let the seawater fill her lungs, had choked on the salt of it, and in that peculiar rebirth on the cold floor of his lair, she had realized how much she was not ready to die.
Not yet.
Not when there were still so many different ways she could be broken and remade, not when the magic of Beqanna itself insisted on granting her golden veins and gilded wings.
She would stay, this time, and see this place through to the end – until everything turned to ash and stardust, and there was truly nothing left for her.
The topic shifts to love, and that wretched heart of hers jumps. She knows everything and nothing about love. She knows that she would split herself open and drain herself dry for someone that cannot love her back, just as she knows that she will close herself off the moment real love is offered to her. She’d had a love that had been so beautiful and so solid that it had taken actual effort to dismantle it. And she didn’t stop until she did – didn’t stop until she destroyed the man she claimed to love more than anything, until she pushed away the only soul to ever love her back. She had traded Skellig for reckless, careless romance, and never looked back.
“Love,” she begins, the word soft and familiar in her mouth, and it tastes like so many different things she can hardly single them out (like long-lost jungles and silent pleas to follow her from the afterlife, like an ocean in her lungs and stars on her tongue, or a scarred chest beneath the soft feel of her mouth). “Is a beautiful and terrible thing.” Her dark eyes catch and hold onto the blue of Lilliana’s, a strange, knowing hush to her tone when she adds, “It will destroy you from the inside out if you let it. Sometimes it’s worth it, and sometimes it isn’t.”
07-30-2020, 08:43 PM (This post was last modified: 07-30-2020, 08:47 PM by lilliana.)
More than once, Ryatah says and Lilliana isn't quick enough to hide her shock. More than once? How many times has she died, then? How many ways? What were the different reasons? In the easy companionship of the winged mare, the Taigan is as transparent in her concern. In all the jagged ways that she turns her expression to glass and then tenderly fractures it, revealing all the worry she has for the white mare underneath.
For a moment, she even imagines that her lungs are burning. Like there isn't enough air in them. For a moment, she imagines the brine of Nerine on the tip of her tongue. Odd.
"We're fools to think immortality means never dying," she replies, echoing a memory from her time before Beqanna. Immortality could be borrowed (or found) in the blood of children and descendants. In the memories that others carried of those departed to the Afterlife. In the stars that carried fables and legends and stories, just waiting to be remembered. Immortals had always dreamed up creatures for Lilliana, a mythos that belonged to the realm of dragons and Magicians. It took the shape of a black unicorn, a healer who had warned about those golden veins. That there was a price for living from one end of time to another. Death was cheap, empty payment; immortality required something more permanent.
It required @[Ryatah] still living, walking beside the fiery-red mare of Taiga.
Lilliana grimaces against the shadows as soon the angel mare says it. Love. The other mare speaks, telling her that it is a beautiful and terrible thing. There is beauty in it, she knows. There is adoration in her love for her sons. For them, Lilliana would (and will) sell her soul. There is an endless depth for her capacity to love that has always terrified her but when it comes to her boys, that has never emerged. There had been no terror in the bond her parents had shared; there had been nothing dark there.
(How, then, has she come to this? That she knows the shadows of Taiga aren't empty and the potential for terror lingers behind each mighty Redwood.)
The red mare slows when Ryatah's dark eyes meet hers and the forest around them falls quiet. A lull that creeps in with the fog. This time, it isn't that Lilliana isn't quick enough to catch her reaction. It isn't that she even tries to hide the way her face wants to fall. A leap of faith that she shares with the haloed woman beside her. "Is that why Death refused to keep you?" says the younger one, her voice descending into this quiet they've found and regarding Ryatah behind deep blue eyes. "Because there was nothing left to moor you?"
And all Lilliana thinks of is fire; of all the ways that she has always loved to burn so impossibly bright.
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven i've got a long list of questions
“I know when you go down all your darkest roads I would have followed all the way to the graveyard.”
“Immortality is a strange thing,” she says in response, thinking back on all the ways it has saved and failed her. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to ever think that you are untouchable; to assume that immortality can save you. There’s always something or someone out there that can kill you.” Her daughter, herself, and Carnage – all the ways that she has died, and so many reasons that she should have stayed dead. She did not think it was immortality itself that saves her. There is something stronger, some unbreakable tie that keeps her tethered to the living, that brings her back even when her immortality fails.
“I’m not sure why death has not always kept me,” she answers the mare’s question with a thoughtful frown that crosses her face. “There was one time I was dead for a long time. Several years. Then Beqanna changed; it was ravaged by storms and disasters, and I remember waking up on the beach. But I couldn’t tell you why.” She could only assume it was a sudden surge in the land’s magic that had pushed her onto the shores. She shakes her head, a light laugh breaking against the shadows of the trees. “It’s not like I make a huge difference here, whether I’m dead or alive.”
She does not tell her about Carnage. She does not delve into the details of how he has killed her, brought her back, or almost failed to bring her back. She does not know why but she prefers to keep everything about him sealed inside of her chest, deciding that to try and explain them in a way that someone else could understand would be useless.
Her gaze is cast skyward, searching for the dim light that lay beyond the tops of the trees. She looks back to Lilliana, offering her another smile. “I came to Taiga looking for someone, actually, and I think I need to find him before I change my mind.” She steps forward, and touches her nose to her friend’s shoulder. “Take care, Lilliana. I’m sure that we will meet again soon.”
