It's been so long since someone has held her this close. At first, she mistakes the ferocity of Neverwhere's embrace. She thinks of the weeks and months alone in Pangea, hiding away in caverns and crevices. She thinks of the Wind that she learned had a whole different way of howling in the Wasteland. There was a mourning in it that she has never heard before.
Despite the brilliant Nerinian sunshine and the iron-brine filling her noise, she returns to Pangea in her thoughts. She returns to despair and desperation. She returns to hollowing herself out because that is the only way she knows to prevent from overfilling the emotions associated with her captivity. She'd turn into a chalice, fill to the brim with the wine of agony and Lilliana doesn't doubt that Neverwhere would choke on it. It is easier to be empty; it easier to feel nothing.
Lilliana, who has wished for so many things, wishes for only that at this moment.
Until Neverwhere tells her something she has always needed to hear. Something in the years and the wandering that she has needed to know. Something she lost somewhere between Murmuring Rivers and Paraiso and Culloden.
(Home isn't a place, Lilli. Malachi had once told her. Home is a feeling. It is a knowing from the hearts around you. An echo from the heartbeats reaching out.) Where moments ago Lilliana had wanted to feel nothing but the absence of her missing child, of the year she lost for Nashua and Yanhua, something stirs between the beats of her heart. @[Neverwhere] has always seemed like the fiercest parts of a storm to Lilli. She is the dark barrelling clouds. She is that tenacious burst of cold wind that dares the world to be anything but wind-worn. She is the erosion that stone should be wary of. Neverwhere is not stone at all. She is the Wind.
Neverwhere lends her spirit - a gust of resilience - into Lilliana and there is flickering within. A not-yet dead ember that almost sparks to life.
(Almost but not quite. Not yet.)
Her attempt at humor kindles something else between the two mares. Where there were two was now four (though Lilliana will always think the world could use more Neverwhere's) embracing the invisible. They are the mirror-image of the Khaleesi and yet the Lie lacks something. Lilli turns to look the Truth in her piercing blue eyes. "How-," she wants to know though the answer taints the air with the smell of copper. Magic. She glances sharply to the two when a third appears, when she appears. Lilliana had studied her reflection many times. She has peered in still lakesides and bubbling creeks. She has tried the frothing waves and the frigid winter rapids searching for it. What stands in front of her is not the shattered reflection she so often sees. This is what she looks like? If desolation could take a shape, it would be fire-gold? It would be here?
She's looking at herself - a Lie - but it's so easy for her to hear the truth in Wolfbane's words then. Haunted Lilliana can't share her ghost, not when Neverwhere is facing one of her. The dappled woman can't hear the way that his words echo within her. That she was weak and injured. That she was a game to be played.
(A Cursed needed a Catalyst and what better one than Lilli? What better than the child born between the lines of her parent's heartbreak? A girl who had come into this world bright and shining, wanting nothing more than to ease the sorrow that she had been created from.)
An ear flicks towards her friend. Neverwhere is speaking though she is far more aware of the way that she has pulled away from her. It's like an ache where she had been, another acute loss suffered this day. The Nerinian reaches towards her Reflection and something changes at that moment. The duplicates disappear and in their absorption, Never gains something. The winged-marked mare recoils from the false Taigan and strikes out as the copy finally dissipates. Their world returns to what it is should be; just the two of them. While the one darkens with sweat, the other only stares at her with disbelief.
She can't think of anything she could do.
Until she can.
Lilliana thinks of the way she feels the world around them. Like Yanhua does. Like Aela will.
"What happened? W-what did I- it do?"
Remember when our songs were just like prayers
Like gospel hymns that you caught in the air?