remember when our songs were just like prayers?
like gospel hymns you caught in the air
She clenches her jaw and keeps to herself what she might have said.
In another time.
It's what she tells herself - will continue to tell herself - now and in the days that will come. When her mind wants to wander down the paths not taken and the decisions already made, she will remember @[Warden]. (She has always been good at borrowing Elena's golden courage. And maybe that has been her problem. What was burrowed eventually has to be returned. There is none of that gilded glory here. It is all darkness and desolation between them. Maybe in the days that come, she'll borrow Warden's certainty. When her heart wants to twinge and twist in her chest between beats, she'll remember this moment. She'll remember forsaking her old faith, shedding it in exchange for the certainty that the antlered stallion exudes. She has never had that, has never known that, and now she thinks it comes from hoping.)
She isn't alone. She knows that. She is a mother of three and for them, she'd bleed herself dry for a shred of the stoic way that Warden stands before her. All Lilliana does is bleed and bleed and bleed, giving everything away without question and never asking who takes from her. There is Neverwhere and Brazen and Eurwen to think of.
Lilliana tries to catch her expression against the shadows because she can feel her face fall (and she loathes herself for that). It breaks apart at the mention of Brazen. He speaks of her death in the future - something always hazy, something she has never been able to conjure clearly - as an absolute. The future finally comes. It finally comes as something she can see and this is what it reveals: desolation, agony, death.
The chestnut mare doesn't need to tell him that she wished she hadn't seen it. She has never known her future or what it might hold (back when it had been a bright, beautiful thing; back when even if it had been a beautiful disaster, there might be some joy, some happiness, some light to find). The red mare of Taiga - fire-flecked and flame-marked - is not invincible. She may be Immortal but she is not immune to the pain that this knowledge brings. Lilliana feels it acutely, a visceral ache in her chest that doesn't leave her. That will keep her company all the way back to North and stay through the days and nights, weeks and months to come.
"She won't be alone," the copper mare tells him. It doesn't change or alter futures. She'll try to find a way to heal her. She'll try to find a way to stop this, her quiet resolution says. It will just be done without everything she has ever believed in. It will just be done without the guidance of everything she has been taught to look to.
"Lilliana," she tells the Dark so that Warden doesn't have to stand in it alone.
(Something in her soul turns to dusk, a setting sun before finally falling into the velvet embrace of night.)
"And you won't be alone with that grief." Lilliana has seen this ending with him. A burden that is shared between them. There is weight behind her eyes - a phantom bruising behind the sky blue - when they raise to meet his ocean-like ones. He is the only one that will know what this has taken from her; the first who will see the metamorphosis from the woman who apologized before. If what comes to pass what they have seen, they will both share that grief. Alone in that, together.
"What is done, is done," she tells him.
Because there is no changing the way they met.
well now we are formal with a touch of appreciative.