AND YESTERDAY, I TRIED TO PRAY /
BUT I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO SAY /
I'M TOO SAD TO CRY /
If Warden is the Watcher, who is Lilliana?
She has taken her father's title - called herself Guardian - but she feels like a girl playing pretend. The crown of branches she wears on her brow feels borrowed and she can't quite help looking back into her past, as if Valerio might come blowing in on a windstorm. As if Ichiro might step from the shadows of history and cast judgment on this descendant: on a girl who lost her path some time ago and found a title instead.
Lilliana has tried on the masks - of her ancestors, of her immediate family - and they always come crashing to the ground. She had none of Aletta's unwavering certainty; none of Valero's faith that their gods would put things to rights. The girl who had been born of those two souls repeated the facts, like she might find a sliver of her old self between the truths: You are the fourth child of five. You were born in Murmuring Rivers. You are the daughter of a Guardian and a Regent. You are a mother to five. You are a friend to many. You are a Taigan.
(How many times has she repeated this to herself? How many times has she said this? Because the truth was that Lilli went into this Forest one night and got lost. The truth is Lilli never found her way out.)
Warden comes closer and Lilliana keeps looking away because her sadness is something that she has never learned how to share. She feels like a sinner, confiding to the Watcher what she has. There isn't another that she has confessed to, told at how hard it is to exist in a world where Brazen doesn't. There isn't anyone else that she has told of how she is a newborn in the eyes of Immortals - a blink, barely a decade - and Lilliana already feels as if she has seen ten lifetimes.
It's a heaviness that even Leonidas seems to feel as lingers above, balancing in the bare branches. He floats down but drifts up again, watchful of the horned pegasus that draws near his bonded.
"Maybe I was," she says to the Watcher. It's the part of her that echoes with distant anger, the parts that wonder why good souls leave this life far too young, why there are paths cross that shouldn't, why hearts like Warden are given visions of things that they can't change. The part of Lilliana that had refused to acquiesce to Warden's vision of Brazen's death still rails against it; there are visions of a little boy in Taiga - tobiano and flaxen-haired, blue-eyed and bone-armored like his mother - playing with two older foals. Turning her slender head to where the pegasus approaches, Lilliana finally looks at him. "She wasn't alone." It's one (small) silver lining in a dark they both share; one small beacon of hope and Lilliana will always drift towards the light, always a moth to the flame, always wanting to burn as Icarus had.
What he intones in the dark resonates clearly to Lilliana: the future always comes.
But she isn't thinking of her mother or her iron-clad confidence. She isn't thinking of the way that Aletta perceived the world. (Aletta saw the world in clear brush strokes: black and white. There was or there wasn't. When she had found Lilliana in Taiga staring into the empty spaces and aching for her lost child, wanting to vanish into the fog, the gray mare had told her: 'This ends, now. There is no in-between. There is only living or dying. And you are alive.') She is remembering the gray stallion from the field - Larva - who had claimed that he had returned from the Afterlife.
"Magic has a price," she says slowly, as if warning herself. "But if there was a way to break the cycle...," she doesn't finish. Ever since the Mountain had called her and forced a choice upon her - either Craft or Anatomy - Lilliana has avoided it. She had drawn upon every other available outlet to save Brazen; the Mountain had been where she drew the line.
If the gates between this world and the next were hazy, if there was a way to bring Brazen back, "would you do it?"
too sad to cry - sasha sloan
image credit to footybandit
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind