[private] it was dead long ago; wishbone

[lilliana]

Lilliana gives a small nod at the apology of Neverwhere's disappearance (though it explains why she is here today - if Warden has seen anything pertaining to the bald-faced mare). It's not something she had meant to share. Her worries about the former Khaleesi have remained solely her own because who would she have shared them with? Leilan had his responsibilities and if he had noticed that Neverwhere was missing (because what did the Ice Dragon ever miss in all his roamings?), it wasn't something he had mentioned to her.

And then Brazen had died in childbirth.

She could share it with Yanhua or Nashua, she had supposed. But the chestnut has always been careful with her children and has always tried to keep her doubts to herself. Nashua had his conflicted responsibilities to the Isle and his young family and Yanhua had his dreams for Taiga, a growing family of his own, and Amarine and Borderline to concern himself with.

But Wishbone's company does her well today.

Not only is the chestnut mare cliff dancing again (a past-time from her old life), some of her struggles lessen enough that Lilliana can appreciate the breathtaking views from the Tephran volcano. She can admire the way that the land falls away to reveal corners of Beqanna that she has never seen from this height (it makes her almost dream of having wings again). Her muscles start to light in protest the higher they climb, but something in her relishes it.

It's been some time that Lilliana has challenged anything - even herself.

The chestnut follows after the black-and-gold trailblazer, wishing that the topic they had arrived at wasn't so heavy. But Nerine's history had become intertwined with Taiga; Taiga had become intertwined with Loess; they all had become caught in the ring of fire that Pangea had summoned. It all fits together and so Lilliana tries to explain the way that so many lives had been caught in the inferno.

There is the mention of Ghaul, the fire-bringer and Dominus of Pangea. There is the mention of Neverwhere, Khaleesi of Nerine. There is the mention of Lepis and Oceane, Queens of the South.

(There is a name that she doesn't say. It is always a name she is always careful not to say and only those who know her would understand why).

"Lepis perished in the flames," Lilliana says quietly while they gaze upon the vibrant green that is the Tephra jungle below them. "As did Ghaul." Grief flickers across her blue eyes as she continues to trace the jungle vegetation below, forcing them to not drift towards the South. "There were others but their names have been lost to the fires."

Maybe it's because of how comfortable she has become with @[Wishbone]. Maybe it was because that Lilliana had already let down her guard to share the devastation in Nerine and Taiga with her. But he comes drifting into her memories, as warm and welcoming as a summer wind.

Wishbone had known him? (And suddenly, it clicks into place. Her best friend, she had said. He had told her that his father had been a guard in this place once.) Her open expression becomes restrained - like she is protecting herself from the harm of her own memories - before it slips and pain darkens her blue eyes.

All this time, she realizes, and this still hurts.

Some part of her wants to spit his name out; to curse it as much as the rumors claimed the white-winged pegasus to be. It is her eldest son - always exploring Nashua - who comes back to Taiga with stories from Elio and Gale about what the Wolfbane of Loess had been like. That before his decline, he had been a good man. (And if this is a balm for her oldest child, she allows him to have it because she can't bear any more suffering in regards to the shapeshifter.) She owes nothing to the horrible entity that separated her from their daughter and yet, she can't bring herself to tell his (possibly oldest?) friend that he is dead. Not unkindly.

Her voice catches as she tries to explain because some things remain. 

"They said there was a curse."

[Wishbone]

it's a mystery to me

we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.

The circle of life continues; they are born, they live, they die, and their world continues to move through the cosmos. Wishbone knows it is difficult to predict when Death will shadow one’s face and whisper to the heart “you can rest now,” but she understands that it almost always will come. Their fragile bodies stretch towards life with every fiber; sometimes they are ready and sometimes they are not. Wishbone certainly hadn’t been ready for Death — she had fought against the saltwater and she had pressed against the weight of Ivar above her — yet she had spent time in the Afterlife nonetheless.

She keeps her eyes on the swathe of Tephra below them as Lilliana gives the names of the fallen. Wishbone imagines them (Ghaul, Lepis, those whose faces were too damaged to comprehend) in that gray world now, and again she wonders if it looks different to them than it had to her. She had been unwilling to see Death’s face, but if they had relaxed into the flames, then maybe their Afterlife is full of color. She recognizes Lepis’s name. They had been about the same age — young and vibrant — and they had blossomed into leadership roles in their youth. Wishbone can’t say they had been friends, and their encounters had only ever been political, but she can acknowledge the thread of grief that winds against her heart. Regret, too; she wishes she could have known Lepis on a deeper level.

Silence falls between the pair of them. The quiet is heavy and thick, a knot of emotions and memories that dwells between them like a sleeping behemoth. It makes Wishbone feel choked even in the cool, thin air that their altitude provides. Slowly, her amber eyes turn to Lilliana’s face. While the red mare looks at the world below them, Wishbone can see the grief that twists the color of her sky-blue eyes a few shades darker. Dread begins to pour into her, a cold waterfall filling her from her toes to the very brim of her head.

“They said there was a curse.”

Those six words are the catalyst that solidifies the dread and turns it into the heavy weight of grief.

Those six words are the only confirmation she needs to know that he had been in Loess during the fire.

Wishbone’s breath audibly catches in her throat as she looks at the profile of Lilliana’s slender face. There has only ever been one curse that the obsidian mare has known about, and her suspicions had been confirmed the last time she had seen Wolfbane. How many times had they huddled together beneath the shading fronds of Tephra’s undergrowth, shrinking into each other’s sides while Longclaw stormed from beach-to-beach? How often had she swam too far or climbed too high or ran too fast to keep the shadows from darkening Wolfbane’s eyes, to keep the echo of his father’s raging voice from reaching his ears? She had seen that darkness in Longclaw, and then she had seen it in Wolfbane.

And then she hadn’t seen him again. “Say no more.” Her voice is an echo — a whisper — and the noise of a breeze almost carries it away. Wishbone’s ears flatten into the knots of her mane, a feeble attempt to dissuade her mind from thinking about his shimmering gold-and-blue frame turning to ash beneath the tongues of flame. She had wondered when the curse would finally claim his soul along with his mind. Hadn’t Longclaw burned in the mouth of his own fire, sweeping the stain of the curse off the face of their world? And yet, the blood of a father will still run thick, even when he has fallen. It seems fitting that Wolfbane would fade at the hand of a fiery Death, just as his father did, and she almost smiles.

She sucks in a slow, smooth breath to compensate for the way her heart feels tight yet swollen. It calms her slightly, this cold rush of air into her chest, and Wishbone turns her face back toward the view of the treetops. “Let’s keep walking,” she says, and her voice is sturdy this time. The circle of life continues; they are born, they live, they die, and their world continues to move through the cosmos. She can only hope Wolfbane had been ready to die, so his Afterlife might be full of far more colors than hers had.

As they turn back onto the trail, Wishbone says, “The curse is in his family. Wolfbane and I grew up together, and we spent a lot of time protecting each other from his father.” Longclaw had been a guard for Tephra, but who he was off-duty was far different from who he was greeting strangers or patrolling the borders. “The last time I saw him” — her throat feels swollen, the hand of grief clasping beneath her jaw, and so her voice comes out even rougher than normal — “I knew the curse had found him. He was so different from the Bane I knew, and I had seen that darkness before.” She had still slept under the winter sky with him, even when she could almost hear the voices whispering lies into his ears. When dawn rose, he was gone, and as a long list of others, she hasn’t seen him since.

The steep incline of their path burns her muscles, and Wishbone wills it to burn the sadness out of her. She wants it to consume her; each step she takes closer to the summit is a movement she hopes will make the memories of Wolfbane turn to something gentle and sweet (instead of the red-hot pain they feel like now). Yet, she cannot erase the sight of Lilliana’s own grief darkening her eyes. Her newfound companion has been feeling the sting of Wolfbane’s death since the fires burned. “How did you know Wolfbane, Lilliana?” Perhaps it will ease their pain, to share the weight of grief between one another.

credit to eliza of adoxography.

@[lilliana]

[lilliana]

Say no more, comes from Wishbone and so Lilliana doesn't.

Her blue eyes glance towards the landscape of Tephra below, to the haze of the Taigan forest that she can catch glimpses of in the distance. When the black-and-gold mare suggests that they keep moving, Lilliana does because this is something she has understood throughout her entire life; in Beyond and in Beqanna. The life that she had left behind her had troubles as well and that was how she had escaped them. There had been a father who had never returned, a home that disappeared behind a magical mist, of a family that she had dearly loved and hadn't wanted to be parted from.

But she had come to Beqanna and she had told herself: Keep moving. Keep going forward.

There is an underlying strength she finds in Wishbone's voice and the chestnut mare is glad for it. If Lilliana had spoken right then, she didn't think her voice could hold such certainty (though it never had where it concerned the palomino pegasus). She follows the long-legged mare as they continue to climb towards the peak of the volcano, the one that Wishbone had never scaled with Wolfbane. The knowledge of that never-memory lodges in her thought and Lilliana is grateful for the quiet that settles between them.

Much like @[Wishbone], the Taigan pushes her emotions into the rocky terrain. The burn that comes from the exertion of their trek is a welcome balm to the colors of her thoughts. But where the other mare is looking to soften her grief, Lilliana wants to forget it. She wants to bury it so far deep beneath the ground that one would never know the pain that lurks beneath the fire-bright coat of the smaller woman. She wants to be as she was; she wants to be who she was the day that he had descended from the sky and smiled at her.

She knows now, though. There is no recovering that girl any more than there is the friend that Wishbone mourns.

The quiet - one that had become filled with their footfalls, with the calls of tropical birds, of their sighs as they climbed higher and higher - fades away as the elevation calls them higher. Her guide decides to share more, to fill the silence with a story and Lilliana listens because this is the side of the story that she never knew. This is her heart halving itself in ways that surprises even her; that she could hurt for the children who grew up under the shadow of a curse (and for her boys, for Nashua and Yanhua because that curse had come to Taiga) while the other side has found relief at its end.

He was so different from the Bane that I knew.

(Who did she know? The Curse? Had there even been a trace of the one that Wishbone speaks of? Or had some entity saw the grief for the loss of her old life written so clearly across her face that it knew how easy she would be to lead into the temptation of a new one?)

When they finally stop, when the elegant mare asks her how she had known the former Commandant, Lilliana thinks it's fitting that the air around them reeks of sulfur and brimstone.

"I wanted to hate him," she confesses. But she can't. Something else that she is incapable of. (Neverwhere had thought her heart was never-ending well of forgiveness and while Lilliana doesn't think she is capable of that, she knows can't keep carrying around the stones of anger and fury and rage through her immortality. It will tire her quickly when she is still so young in the face of it. When there is still an infinity yet to come.)

How does she explain? What does she say? Does she dare to show?

"He was known as the Commandant when I first met him," she explains to Wishbone. "He took control of Taiga alongside his wife, Lepis." They had been rulers before that, she had learned. Maybe that was part of the history that the other mare knew. They had reigned in Loess, once upon a time. But the rest of the story isn't unique: a too-young mare wanders the meadow and meets a too-handsome stallion. It's the setting of a story that is never bound to end well; only in this one, there is a Curse and Lilliana is left to wonder why they had ever crossed paths at all. "I thought I was in love with him."

('I didn't mean to fall in love with him,' she had told Elena one night in Taiga. And her cousin - her beautiful, blazing cousin who had so often been Lilli's torchbearer - had only said: 'We never do.')

"I'm sorry," she says quietly because she knows what it is to grieve a friend. Because it was something Wishbone had shared with her earlier in their conversation when Lilliana had shared that Neverwhere was missing. Because she knows what it is to ache at the memory of someone. "for the loss of your friend."

[Wishbone]

it's a mystery to me

we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.

Wishbone thinks there was only one other time where she felt this broken. In those chaotic seconds before she faded into the watery arms of Death, she had thought of her daughters. Their pale faces flashed through the shadows of the Ischian sea, too young to understand why their mother had gone for a walk with their father and never come back. She had felt her heart break then — a sharp pain in her chest that splintered across the rest of her body until she was consumed in it. She had drowned in the ocean’s waves that day, but perhaps more than that she had drowned in the sorrow of her failure at motherhood, at becoming someone important, at being loved.

She cannot say she has recovered from that loss, but she knows this grief is familiar. Her daughters are not dead, but she has spent enough time searching for them to know that they may as well be. And that breaks her just as well as Wolfbane. For all the fractures that ruin her heart, for all the heartstrings that have been snapped, Wishbone’s spirit remains a twisting column of flame rising in the darkness. It whispers the same words Lilliana had told herself: Keep moving; keep going forward.

It seems they are both masters of listening to their inner voices; as they push their emotions into the blackened earth with each step, Wishbone feels camaraderie blossom between them.

The gold-marked woman listens to Lilliana quietly, only breaking her silence with the huffs of thin air she breathes. Wishbone isn’t surprised to hear that Lepis had been his wife and co-ruler. She had heard rumors about their romance in the brisk moments of gossip but the distance of the Beyond, the distractions of Ivar, pregnancy and the Plague, and her death had never given her the chance to confirm it. It does make her wonder — which of the colorful flighted faces of Beqanna might his children be?

Deeper than that (a question she wouldn’t dare to ask aloud or even consider beyond her subconscious) she wonders what their children might’ve looked like.

Wishbone almost laughs, not because she finds Lilliana’s explanation comical but rather because she relates to it. She had thought she loved Ivar and she had given him twin daughters with colors from the sea, but she had been a too-young mare meeting a too-handsome stallion. She firmly believes she hates Ivar now — not just in the sense of wanting to hate him, but in actually burning with anger at the thought of seeing his ridiculous scaled face again.

“I know how you feel,” she says, and instead of laughing her voice is soft and genuine. Does she dare share exactly how she understands Lilliana’s torture? It seems like her body might truly fall apart if she tried to explain a sad story along the several others they have shared on this walk. So Wishbone conceals it for now, tucking into her mind for another day (and without really thinking about it, she assumes they will see each other again).

Instead, she turns her face slightly to catch Lilliana’s eyes. “And I appreciate your condolences.” Yet another mutual story they can share — the loss of a friend, whisked away by the roughened hands of Time and Life. “It seems we have a lot in common, Lilliana,” she says with a smile that brightens like the sun after a thunderstorm. It seems to be the pattern of her life — a thunderstorm and then that ever-persistent optimism — and Wishbone relishes in the gentle coaxing warmth that positivity brings into the cold pieces of her broken heart.

credit to eliza of adoxography.

@[lilliana]

[lilliana]

In another life, she had been a beloved daughter and a precious sister. She had been a childhood confidant and she had been a girl who grew into her womanhood under the silver gaze of a man who taught her what it was to set someone alight. Lilliana has known love in all its various shades and colors; she has known what it has been the gentle pastels of a sunrise and to be the vivid hues of a sunset.

She has known what it is to be a beginning and what is to be an ending.

Their shared grief is palpable in the air. It is as thick as the lava steam that they pass through and as real as the heat that the copper mare can feel rising from the volcanic ground below them. Wishbone mourns the loss of a friend and her heavy gaze fixes over the shoulder of the dark mare, towards the peak that is rising before them. Her blue eyes fix there because it is always easier to look ahead than it is to fixate on the heartache that lingers between and behind them. They study the intricate cracks in the stone, of the scorched stone that could tell stories about the magma that has pooled and cooled and irrevocably changed the Tephran landscape.

Just as Lilliana has been. Just as @[Wishbone] has been.

Lilliana's heart isn't so different from the ground they tread on. It has been cracked and cooled. It has been hardened and remade and she is still learning the geography of this new terrain. There are parts that are still uncertain and that she is still discovering. Lilliana is still learning about the woman emerging from the faultlines of her fractured heart. Her eyes glance back to the taller woman who leads their ascent and some part of her thinks that she isn't the only one that knows that struggle.

(Not that Lilli knows what is to die or to be reborn. But she knows something of what is to be torn away from her children, to do whatever she could to protect them. To feel infinitely angry that what she had done still hadn't been enough to spare them.)

Her mind goes where it so often does when she thinks of the Curse and the children it sired. She thinks of Nashua and his golden stripes and the broad wings that he has always been so proud of. She thinks of Yanhua and the way that she sometimes catches glimpses of Wolfbane emerging through the corners of his half-cocked grin. She thinks of Aela (and though she will always tell herself that the girl inherited the palomino coat from her aunt, Lilli knows it isn't true) and her chest tightens; her daughter she had given away with the belief that the Curse would never find her.

And if it couldn't find her, it couldn't hurt her as it Nashua and Yanhua.

But it had hurt Lilliana. It left behind scars that she is still learning how to navigate. It's something that she doesn't think another could understand until Wishbone says she does. That she knows how the chestnut feels and the slender mare raises her head, sharing a quiet moment with the other because it is simply enough to know that someone understands.

The Taigan lifts her refined head and though there is weight behind that gentle stare, it rises to meet the fierce amber of Wishbone. (Some part of her wants to apologize that the other knows how this feels; this is not a feeling she would wish upon anyone.)

"It would seem so," says the red woman. The faint edges of a wry smile emerge because this is something Lilliana understands as well. Her hope is such a buoyant thing and it has yet to be swallowed completely by grief or loss or cataclysms. Lilliana's hope is still a thing that has yet to get lost, despite the lands she has wandered.

Wishbone's coaxing smile is the spark needed to ignite the warmth in Lilliana's.

It catches and flickers in the wild blue of her eyes. "Maybe there is peace in the Afterlife," she says thoughtfully. That was something her father - Valerio - had always told her. That in the living that came after, there was no pain. There was nothing to burden a soul that way that this life could drag one down. There was no suffering. But there is a view waiting for them and something in Lilliana - the part of her that always reminded her that she was very much alive - is glancing towards it.

"Though I can't imagine they have anything like this," she whispers as they come to another stop. The clouds break in the distance to reveal her beloved Taiga in the North and there are even glimpses of grey granite from imperial Nerine. The blue of the ocean breaks along a jagged coast and towards the other direction, it is a sea of green and paradise below.

"You did it," Lilliana tells the other, in a voice that traces the edge of awe of the volcano that Wishbone has conquered.

Lilliana

[Wishbone]

it's a mystery to me

we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.

“The Afterlife’s peace is a story for another time.” Wishbone had told herself she would save that adventure for a time when they have both recovered from their present heartache (and though it will never go away fully, it will fade and the edges will wash soft by the tides of time). Yet she cannot ignore Lilliana’s comment about the Afterlife; her dark lips move into a knowing smile as they reach their final lookout point.

No — her version of the Afterlife had never looked like their view. Northern Beqanna spreads under their noses, and each land lies distinctly from the next. Wishbone’s eyes trace the landscape, picking out the redwoods of Taiga from the wide emptiness of Nerine. Her heart twinges at the sight of the proud and lonely cliffs, with faces that brave the angry forces of the northern ocean. Nostalgia twists against her heart, pulling out the warm threads of muscle and blood that have always loved Nerine.

The ocean cuts a fine line into the shorelines of Taiga and Nerine. Though Wishbone knows the tides roll into the beaches and froth against the sand, the ocean looks like a smooth, soft sheet of deep blue that mirrors the sky above their heads. The forests are cut into patchworks from so far above, and animals that might normally be seen are nothing but the faintest pinpricks against green and brown swathes. The world looks so simple — and beautiful — from their view, and it brings gentle tears to Wishbone’s eyes.

She has never been brought to tears often, but the trials of life have brought her to this moment with Lilliana, and she is grateful. Wishbone finds she cannot put it into words; the entirety of her climb (a journey she has longed for all her life), and the adventures she has had, and the sudden knowledge of Wolfbane’s death, and the ways life has thrown her one way and then the other — they all press against her heart and body so she can barely breathe.

“It’s beautiful,” she says, and Wishbone feels her heart release a heavy sigh it had been holding in for too long. “Thank you for coming with me, Lilliana.”

credit to eliza of adoxography.

@[lilliana]

[lilliana]

They had a grove back in Paraiso, a place of willow trees where their leaders and warriors and healers were laid to rest. It was a place full of peace and if the legends were true, they were said to be haunted with knowledge from past lives. Lilliana never heard her ancestors whispering from the rustle of their weeping branches but she had liked to imagine that the almost sacred-like calm she felt came from the sleeping souls nestled in their burial mounds.

Those souls had lived great lives: Ichiro who lead them towards times of great peace; Zamier who readily gave his life for the love of family; Carwen who loved as poetically and fiercely as any epic.

Sometimes, Lilliana tells herself it would have made a difference if there was a resting place here (she won't consider the Beach with its bleaching bones and bloated bodies; the way that the dead were left for carrion). A place where she could go and rail, where she could shout and finally let herself be angry.

Angry for the loss of a cousin who never should have left. Angry for the loss of a beloved friend in childbirth. Angry for the absence of another who she had overcome so much for her to simply disappear. Angry for the piece of herself that she gave away to a man (to a Curse?) who had manipulated her as easily as he could manipulate his skin.

But nowhere she looks from the peak of Tephra's volcano provides any answers. She doesn't catch a glimpse of any place that could provide her the kind of peace she seeks. The wind moves past the pair, blowing softly as if to remind the chestnut mare that solace will never be a place. If she is to find it, it will be in moments like this one with @[Wishbone]. Steam rolls from the crater that lingers above them but the Taigan is quietly looking to her companion. The eyes of the gold-marked mare appear glassy as she studies the landscape sprawled before them. It is beautiful; more than that, like her guide, it is inspiring.

Lilliana glances below before shaking her head, "No." She says gently. "Thank you for sharing this with me," she murmurs. How long has it been? The wind-walker in her wonders. Another breeze passes them by and Lilli feels something in her spirit tug along with it. Too long.

Something in her lifts up and rises.
It dances on the wind.

Lilliana