- 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 storms around and she steels herself when Warden approaches. There are warning signs flaring in the back of her mind - run, run, run! - her blood hums in her delicate ears. This is not her first time dealing with anger that burns from the eyes and so she smolders him back. She lifts her head, determined not to give up the ground she is standing on.
She is no Tephran - no, she is like her Redwoods. She is rooted and firm and unyielding. She can handle the fury of this storm. Let him rage, she thinks. Let him fury. He blusters forward with all the grace of a hurricane, sending emotions whipping around him like a gale.
What was he so angry about? He was the one who had warped her mind. He was the one who taken something beloved and tried to destroy it. (Though something in the back of her mind is whirling too, asking: why Brazen?) The painted pegasus doesn’t stop coming. He doesn’t halt or yield despite how she grounds herself to this spot. She’s a stupid woman, she knows. She’s a stupid woman not to run.
Lilliana should have turned and left nothing of herself for him to see.
(She’s promised herself that it’s not something she will ever do again.)
Lilliana burns back at him, fueled off his fire. "There is always a choice,” she seethes, not understanding what he’d done was involuntary. Her mind jumps to the worst - that he has toyed with her mind because he could. Because he was more powerful than her. "Stay out of my memories,” she blazes. Her emotions - a wildfire at this point - show around the whites of her marked ankles, from the gold of her tattoo.
Her mind - still lingering on the edge of ruin and demise - swings back at Warden.
The chestnut mare thinks of the most terrifying thing she can. The first memory is bright and brilliant, radiant like new-fallen snow. It’s a pale man who smiles with destruction in his green eyes and Lilliana remembers how afraid she had been - barely a year old - frozen into place by fear with Elena beside her. There are other things: the serrated glint of kelpie teeth in the spring sunshine as Celina lurches forward. The helpless cry of a child on a cold, winter night who screams her name - 'Lilliana!’ The dark stallion who lingered on the other side of a sand dune, staining it with blood and his tears as he tears himself apart. 'Is this enough, Mother? Is this enough?’
Warden calls (dismisses) her a fool. He tells her not to speak of things she does not understand. Like this is all above her.
It makes her angrier and so she pushes back again, glaring up into his monsoon eyes.
The second wave is forceful, stronger than the first. Lilliana fills it with the very thing he’d disarmed her with. Brazen.
She shows a fearsome face made of bone, one that might intimidate some but not Lilliana (at least not then). "I’m still figuring this place out,” explains a much younger Lilli, one much more optimistic than this guarded woman. "Would you like some company while you figure things out? I can’t promise I’ll be much help,” Brazen laughs, "but I can probably make things more interesting.”
Lilliana sends wave after wave of memory at Warden. Brazen - strong, fierce, alive - as the two of them ventured into Pangea. The bone-armored mare walking quietly near Brinly on the pebbled beaches of Nerine. The way that Brazen watched after the lost mares - Lilliana included - when they arrived haunted and still looked over their shoulders for the ghosts behind them. Brazen teaching Nashua how to fight - a sharp pivot, a clash of hoof - and comparing her own horns with Yanhua with a playful grin.
Let @[Warden] see that what he toys with is not something to be toyed with at all. She hopes that when the flood of memories leaves him, he might feel something similar to what she had felt. Helpless. Desolate. Agony. She hopes that they crash over him and leave him empty. She hopes-
And then the memories stop.
The future always comes.
Only it is not Warden who says it. Another memory dawns from the back of her mind. It’s a gray stallion, dressed in the dappled hues of their mother with her dark neverending eyes. He looks tired, defeated and yet he smiles to the girl who asks: 'But why, Malachi? Why won’t she speak to me?’ The stallion had smiled - an indulgent, lopsided grin that let him get away with anything as a colt - and said, 'Give her time, Lillibird. Keep a listening ear and a waiting smile.’ A pause as he looks towards to the setting sun and where the sky had already turned into a canvas of pastels with a few shimmering stars, waiting in the midnight eaves. 'The future always comes,’ he says, 'and there is always the hope that tomorrow will be a better day.’
Her anger is gone when she blinks again, but she is left with something worse. Distressed and disturbed with her ears hidden beneath the curls of her copper mane and her sides heaving like she has done the very thing she swore she wouldn't. How was he doing this?
But more importantly, she has to know: "Why?”
i'm sorry, apparently my characters love giving you novels
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind