There is a quiet intensity behind her blue eyes as she studies the champagne Champion.
Lilliana is listening and listening closely. She is looking up at Aten as he answers her question. Like before, he astonishes her in his ability to recall the events that happen not just in Taiga but Beqanna. He's an untapped resource, something tucked beneath the Redwoods, and the copper mare considers herself fortunate that Aten is kind enough to share this knowledge with her.
"Ruan," she murmurs into a passing autumn wind. It's a name she has heard before, spoken of on tongues of Beqanna natives in association with the Taiga. "Was he a leader you knew?" Her timeline of this place is relatively unknown and while she knows that Aten has been here for some time, exactly when the events he speaks of take place blur together. The smaller mare blinks and tilts her head in that curious way that she always does, one delicately-tipped ear a little closer to catch the rolling baritones of his voice.
While one ear does remain trained on Aten, Lilliana looks away while she waits for him to speak. She stares out into those Redwoods again and in the empty spaces between the trees, she sees ghosts threatening to emerge like the fog that this forest was renowned for. As she stands there, she is reminded that she has asked and asked Aten. She has asked him for parts of Taiga's past in the hopes of its future and he has never asked anything in return. He has never once extracted or demanded a price - never told her that all these questions and the time he has spent with her could come at a cost. In a world hellbent on taking (and she is as guilty as the rest of them), Aten has been a source of unending patience and kindness.
He has never asked her for anything.
The revelation leaves her raw with emotion and she struggles to swallow it down.
As Lilliana stands there with dancing eyes (going from one apparition to the next, remembering), she fights the black panic that fills her chest as she makes her choice. It's a hard thing, for her, that she decides. It is agony in her mind and the silence that lingers between the Champion and the Diplomat roars in her ears; if anyone deserves to know what she is thinking, what she hopes for Taiga and the things that motivate her for it, it is Aten.
The chestnut mare lifts her sculpted head and tears her blue-eyed gaze away from the forest and back to the Champagne stallion. Her eyes are a little rounder, a little wider but Lilliana is the daughter of an accomplished storyteller (so that is what she treats this as). The Regents' daughter detaches herself and crafts her voice in a way she had heard her mother do so many times before, "My family was torn apart by war."
The admission isn't a shocking one. War occurs in many different places, in many different lands, and for all their differences, one thing always remains the same: there is always loss. Casualties can litter the battlegrounds, open eyes staring unblinking into the unknown chasm of death as flies swarm. But it doesn't stop there. It trickles down, like the blood that can stain the ground and seep into the land. It can - and does - echo for generations to come.
Those who leave can carry those ghosts with them. A war can remain in the past and for the soldiers who fought it, for the warriors who were there, the memory of it can be carried into the present.
Her father was one of those men.
"My father made a promise to his sire," she explains. Lilliana blinks, fighting unshed tears. "My home," says the girl from Murmuring Rivers, "We didn't have kings or queens or Comte's or.. anything like that." She means no offense to the leaders of Beqanna, to Taiga's leader or the Nerinian queen who is her dearest friend. All she is trying to do is make someone understand the depth of her love for this place, trying to explain to Aten the source and how such a bond can form between equid and land (but maybe he already knows, unwavering Aten who is as steady as the trees that stand sentry around them). "My father was a Guardian. As was my grandsire before him and his sire before that. The land bonded with its leaders, with the horses who had birthed and breathed and died on it. My brother used to say that if you stood still enough, you could feel the land pulse beneath you."
She forces the air from her lungs. In her storytelling, for a moment, she has conjured her past and Lilliana can see silver Malachi with his dark, laughing eyes. She can see him smiling at her, shaking his head indulgently at his youngest sister who (at the the time) hadn't understood his meaning. Embraced by the shadows of dancing branches above and the golden rays of sunlight, she understands it completely now. Despite the war she rages inside herself, she knows that she loves this forest. (She loves the Taiga in a way that spans the width of the trees to the fingertips of their branches, from the breeze that whispers from the craggy beaches.)
There is a boldness in her glance matches the gaze of the golden stallion, a rather uncharacteristic defiant tilt to her chin that paints a picture of generations of Guardians that came before her and ones that could come after. "My father came home," she says quietly. "But his heart did not. Whatever happened to him haunted him for the rest of his life until he left. My mother moved us from place to place, fearful for the enemies that my sire and grandsire made. Magic shielded us for a time but magic can be," she swallows again and makes a weak attempt at a smile, "tempermental at best."
Other things happened during those sentences, in those fragments of her past life that she offers Aten.
"Taiga is the first home I've known in a long time," she explains. There is no lover to warm her nights and there is no child to claim her heart and so all that emotion goes into the ground, straight to the roots and lifeblood of this place. Lilliana plants that love here in the hopes that a generation of saplings will take root and remain as impenetrable as the ones that came before.
The chestnut mare feels the heat of her words creep up her neck and then she can no longer look at him. She can't look anywhere but the forest ahead of her. The smell of clean, silver fog calms her and ebbs away the panic. The way her pulse has risen and that her heart crescendos takes a painful moment to find peace and for them to work in tandem with each other. Aten has been wronged, she knows, and the more she comes to know him, the more she feels the injustice of it. But the thought of turmoil, of any more strife in this forest, fills her soul with iron dread and it sinks with the weight of it.
And yet, despite everything that has changed these last few months, despite the changes in herself, one thing remains the same: Lilliana is still the dreamer she has always been, always the optimist that is searching for the cracks and breaks in a broken thing where the light might shine through. "Do you think he'd take your counsel?" she asks hesitantly. She doesn't know much about Pteron but from what she has seen, he seems different from both of his parents. Aten speaks of chances and so Lilliana gently prompts, "He might have his own shadows he wishes to step out of."
LILLIANA
light me up, i will blaze
like a soul you have saved
@[Aten]