- it's in the eyes, i can tell you will always be danger -
we had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?
LILLIANA
She trembles.
Lilliana stands lost somewhere between the past and the future. Some part of her mind can rationalize that this the present - that she is standing here with a stranger in a reality that constantly tests and trials (her, him, Neverwhere, Brazen, all of them. Sometimes she thinks all she sees is struggle). Her mind had fled to the safest place it could go, back to the place she had been born. Where the rivers had run swift and the laughter that echoed had been bright. From her siblings and cousins, from the streams and creeks that shared in their foalhood antics.
So some part of her - that one that always seems lost, the one that had seen searching - flees to the past.
Malachi tells her that there is always the hope that tomorrow will be a better day. For one beautiful, blissful moment, she had been looking up at him and even though his smile was fatigued, Lilliana had believed him. The days they had spent traveling - trying to find sanctuary - were tiring. The dappled stallion was a father of five and yet he still found time to comfort his youngest sister.
She is still trembling when she comes back to the present. She is still looking up but there is a bitter disappointment when she glances up. Lilliana is staring into the storm-gaze of Warden. Not Malachi. And like so many things in Lilliana’s life, there is no explanation for this either. There is no reason to seeing what will become of Brazen; it just another facet of this life (this reality) that strangles her once fire-bright spirit. The spark turns again to an ember, a flickering thing among the shadows.
The Taigan mare doesn’t say anything at first. There are flames licking at the back of her throat and scorching her tongue. Lilliana knows that if she says something, it might raze them both. Warden doesn’t deserve her anger. She reminds herself that once upon a time, she wouldn’t have acted this way. She wouldn’t have been this way at all. In another time, Lilli might have tried to convince Warden that there was a reason or a purpose to what they had both shared.
Some things for Lilliana, however, do not change. Even drowning in her despair, there is still his to consider before her own. His spiraling horns turn away from her and the chestnut mare quietly says, "I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-,” she stops herself because this is a lie. She had meant to hurt him. In a white flash of panic, she had thought that he was intentionally hurting her and so she had harmed him in return.
Her gaze drops again when she remembers. Brazen. The bone-armored mare is one of the pillars that holds Lilliana together and this knowledge that @[Warden] has shared starts to crumble her infantile strength that had barely begun to grow. The image hits her again and again. Brazen - who is fierce, who is tenacious - becomes absolutely nothing at all.
Those blue eyes stare absently at the ground and she reminds herself that this is the present. She is standing in Tephra, simmering emotions below the silhouette of its volcano. A foreshadowing, perhaps, that one day she too will erupt.
"How am I supposed to tell her?” she faintly asks them both. The knowing is the worst, he says.
And Lilliana, who has stopped trembling, disagrees.
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind