[private] a reason to shine, lilliana

[lilliana]

Had her panic not been rising with each heartbeat, she might have delighted more in Yadigar than she did peering up into the pointed face of Ghaul. Each moment she stood there, the shadows that dwelled in the corners of her mind started to unravel. They started to roam through and stain each (and every) thought.

Darkness.
That was all she saw.

He speaks of snatching and stealing for visits and parts of her wants to rage in anger. She has two yearlings in Taiga without their mother. It almost snarls out of her - there is nothing about a visit in this. It’s when she looks down to Yadigar again - listens to his lovely chirps - that she reminds herself that she was prepared to do the same thing.

The crime she would accuse Ghaul of is the same she is guilty of herself. His son at his side is physical proof of that and had her mind not been filling with those shadows, as if it wasn’t rolling with thunderclouds and realization flashing like lightning strikes in her mind, she would have been sick.

@[Ghaul] is looking at her as she staring at him, both looking for answers that Lilliana doesn’t need anymore answers to. His physical presence answers everything.

The Pangean leader is careful in his words and Lilliana can feel the fear creeping everywhere. Whatever she has suffered in Pangea, this realization is by far the worst thing that could happen. A punishment not inflicted by the East or any other nation, not by some demon from her past. "You were stolen in retribution for stripping Taiga of her entities,” the Taigan says with just as careful measure. Without Craft and Anatomy, it had left the Redwoods bare of any protection.

"You were to come to Nerine for another year,” and she does look down to Yadigar now, feeling the full weight of that sentence. The boy is trying to make sense of the conversation and Lilliana has no explanation to give him; there has never been any sense in this. There has never been anything but darkness and chaos there and now it was unleashed in Nerine.

It was with Neverwhere, with Brazen and Ruthless and Eurwen and Fiorina. With the new generation born the previous spring. With her boys.

"Please,” she starts and once the words start coming, they pour out. "You have to let me go. I need to go to Nerine. There is a monster there, Ghaul. A real one.” Looking at him, begging him as she promised she would never do again. His boy is gone but there is something in her pleading blue eyes that say the chaos does not simply belong to just Nerine; it is all of Beqanna.

And Lilliana, perhaps as foolish as ever, is still trying to find that shred of humanity.

What will you do? a voice taunts, reminding her of her attempt to protect Ruth and Fiorina. How powerless she had felt with her sons, trying to defend Nashua and Yanhua from their fathers' spite. How she had thought she could still outrun him. Ghaul, though, might be able to do something. "Or if you could go. You could go North and warn them. Please.”