must have been the wind; leilan

[lilliana]

She is curious.

Many questions cross Lilliana's mind as she looks up to the draconic stallion. There are questions she could ask and yet she doesn't - her past shows itself clearly in the way that it prevents her from doing so. The part of her that is so eager for knowledge, that so badly wants to know about this land and its magic and all those things she has yet to learn, stands armed with her questions like a sword ready to dispatched from its scabbard.

And yet Lilliana doesn't ask.

The questions die like embers on a fire that is slowly losing kindling.
So the two stand at a crossroad; Leilan who would speak his secrets plainly and Lilliana who won't bring herself to ask because she has never known things to be so simple. Instead, they allow themselves to fall into the banter of those who live with empty spaces. There are holes, it seems, in both their lives and the things they do not say speak far louder than any joke they might share. (All it takes is the right pair of ears to listen and it seems that Leilan knows this.) A life full of laughter, some might think, but what is the laughter hiding? How big are the spaces that the laughter is trying to fill?

Lilliana doesn't know about the voids in Leilan's life - what his holes are and how they hurt him. She doesn't know if he runs or hides or buries like her but there is an unspoken conversation here. Words that are being said beneath the teasing, a knowing that surfaces from below their repartee. Perhaps she should ask, perhaps there is something that she should do to acknowledge but Lilliana lacks the social graces to know how to do such a thing.

In that way, she still much the same green girl she has always been.

His low chuckle does give her pause though, an indication that she wonders at what to say or how to say it. Diplomacy, for her, seems to be a work in progress. There is a slight arch to her neck and that curiosity sparks again behind her blue eyes, a pause at the edges of the smile she wears. Another cryptic message about Heartfire (and Lilli has heard plenty lately) and the crimson mare is about to ask aloud, to finally give life to all those things she has heard about the Nerinian queen.

Nothing eludes Heartfire.
Heartfire threatened Lepis.
In Nerine, Neverwhere can see.
Heartfire would have shown her all the best places that Taiga has to offer.

It is all such a tangled, twisted web and yet Leilan dangles Elaina in the midst of it. That's all it takes - those blue eyes sharpen with rapt attention and all those empty places in Lilli's soul suddenly hold the stallion with her keen stare. Whatever doubts she had, whatever fears she harbored, Leilan utters the word that has caused Lilliana to contemplate far worse when it comes to her golden cousin. There are worse things she has considered than what she thinks of asking Heartfire and a price never crosses her mind. If there is one, well, Lilliana had almost betrayed her brother when it came to Elaina. 

She might have done so if the Fates hadn't twisted themselves in the ways that they had.

"She could do that?" she asks as if the trees themselves could hear her thoughts. Could see the plan that starts to form in the quiet of her mind. Hope softens the expression on her face because it is all that Lilli can do on this edge of ruin that she has been dancing on lately, "Do you think she would?"

Elaina is part of the essence of the words she never says. 
About a life that should have been and never would be. A part of the life that she mourns in darkness even if she never sheds daylight on. 

And like Leilan, she realizes how close they venture on a ledge of personal feelings, of things absent and things they both would rather not remember. Things she could ask him but a gut instinct prevents her from doing so. Lilliana answers his next question with a roll of her slender shoulders, a pretender in her own right. "Well, there are the squirrels," she says with a slow drawl and a wry grin. "And I attempt this," she motions towards him with an incline of her head, "Diplomacy and the like."

A gesture that she is still very much an amateur at this game.

"What about you? Is surprising lost souls a hobby of yours?"

@[Leilan] ramble away