- it's in the eyes, i can tell you will always be danger -
we had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?
LILLIANA
He is the very vision of something she fears. Lilliana is drowning in the depths of his ocean eyes (a reminder of someone else she has encountered here) before he closes them, hiding the white that had breaking around the rims like waves. Warden tucks his chin to chest and the chestnut mare stands with locked knees and a held breath - a tendril she (unknowingly) holds like it might unravel the rest of her.
What happens next is quick.
It is a flash.
Lilliana knows something is wrong. It’s like he has gone somewhere she can’t know about or even follow. The breath she had been cradling releases when she notices movement from the overo stallion. A twitch of an eyelid. A quiver of his pale lips. The tensing of his shoulders. Subtle things that betray nothing about what is happening beneath his two-toned skin, subtle things that give nothing away.
He blinks and wherever his soul has flown, it comes back to his body. He exhales - a gust of demanding air - and he looks at Lilliana. Her head tilts slightly though she says nothing. It seems like the pegasus has come crashing back into his body and she isn’t sure if there are any words that could be considered comforting.
Only his face wracks with guilt like a coastline.
No, he says and something wrecks in her, too. Catching a memory is no easy thing and for every one that Lilliana has ever found (at least deliberately), it has been through touch and elaborated through storytelling. It - like her - is practiced and controlled. This is a tsunami, something that roars in her ears before she finally succumbs and sinks to the bottom of it.
There are glimmers and gleams. She doesn’t stand in the future (she can’t, not when the woman is so closely bound to the past) that Warden knows. But there are the proud ledges on the horizon. Nerine. Lilliana knows that. Another flash and the memory catches on something hard. Bone. White on red. Only this time there are no wounds to ease, there is no place her healing can that it might alleviate some of the pain that Brazen carried through the years.
There is nothing at all.
No, she furiously echoes back. Anger that stems from being ripped from her children (She thinks of them, Nashua and Yanhua, still needing their mother when she had been stolen. She thinks of the child she hadn't been given the chance to raise. She thinks of Neverwhere and Eurwen and finally, Brazen. Everything that they have endured in the last year.)
She is all rage and finds a voice that had been devoid in Pangea, when she had hidden in caverns and wept in the dark. The stallion is turning away from her and showing his back - an angle that Lilliana is far too familiar with - when they stand on Tephra again.
"No,” she tells him flatly (though she wants to shout, to scream, to curse). Her mind is running from the altered memory but threatens to spill from her eyes, instead.
"Take it back,” Lilliana says. It’s not a memory. Something in her knows that much. Was this a manipulation of her mind? Had her memories mangled with him in some way? There are other things lingering beneath the surface of the antlered stallion and Lilli is wary of all them. "Change it back. You don't get to ruin them."
@[Warden]
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind