Glancing at her golden daughter tugs at her heart like the ocean current must tug at the coastline. Just when she thinks that her heart couldn’t take another wave of love crashing through her, it swells again and again with each searching glance that the blue-eyed girl sends. So like your Aunt, Lilliana thinks each time that she looks at Aela. 

It’s the part that had surprised her most about motherhood. That looking at her children is finding those lost pieces of history coming together, dreaming a soul into existence that is both unique and realized by those who had come before. There are the graceful lines of her mother, Aletta, in her youngest. It’s Valerio’s blue eyes (or a reminiscent shade) that observes the world around her, like Yanhua. Her daughter is wrapped in gold - like Elaina, Arwel, Ruth and Marcelo. There is a small snip on her nose that she adores - a gift from Brazen. (The hard part of her - that broken part of her she refuses to acknowledge - won’t address the rest.)

Her daughter is, at best, a few days old and still finding her strides. She doesn’t race or romp far through the sand dunes but the little girl is becoming brave enough to venture around them and through the salt grasses. The pair has forged a quiet existence out on the edges of Beqanna, where the River lets out to the sea. Lilliana tries to do her best to heal but the process is slow after a troubling pregnancy and her captivity in Pangea. (The River had carried her from that cursed kingdom; it demanded a payment in the form of a deep gash on her right hip and the bruising of a few ribs.)

The filly becomes captivated by a seabird perched on a piece of large driftwood (an Osprey?) and when it takes to the sky, Aela follows behind at a curious trot. She disappears behind a large dune. 

No, Lilli thinks. The pair kept to this quiet end of the beach because any proof that they had been there washes away with each tide. Lilliana has been careful to keep them positioned between dunes until … until what? She needs to get back to Taiga but to do so means traveling across Beqanna and doing that injured and with an infant? How far would they really get?

They needed to get back to Taiga but they needed the thing that Lilliana always seemed to run out of - time. (Time to heal, time to make a plan.)

"Aela!” she calls, trying to be louder than the crescendo of waves nearby. A few Sandpipers flutter in sudden disarray and Aela emerges from behind another pale dune, racing wildly towards her with a flagged tail. Her legs sprawl in different directions as she comes skidding to a halt. There is no time to worry about her balance, not when she was worried more about what (or who) she was running from. 

The girl presses her pale face into her mother’s side, as if beside Lilliana, she might disappear.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions

For one blissful moment, she doesn’t fear or panic. Aela comes swimming into her view and when the girl is beside her, relief floods her veins. The filly trembles but Lilliana is coming to learn that her youngest isn’t as brave as Nashua had been or as calm as Yanhua could be. Her daughter has all the flightiness of her ancestors and Lilli tries to comfort her as best she can.

(How does one soothe a gale?)

Lilliana lowers her head and traces the flaxen mane that curls with the moisture in the air, starting between her perfectly-tipped ears down to her slim shoulders. The wind that stirs past them exposes another healing wound from beneath the Taigan mare’s flowing locks and reveals a scent. (She should have noticed; Aela’s memories came in frantic heartbeats. The Osprey flying away. A dark .. something that flits in and out her daughter’s vision.)

It comes. The dark stallion and that familiar stiffening that makes the chestnut mare look up sharply.

She shouldn’t be surprised to see him, but she is. Worry creeps in behind her eyes before she guards it. Wolfbane smiles - manic, arrogant - and when he stops, the copper mare lowers her head to murmur something to Aela. (Let him wait, she thinks.)  A golden ear flicks back and while the child doesn’t pull away from her side, the filly stops trembling. Another loving whisper of encouragement and Lilliana carefully raises it.

The chestnut mare knows it's him. The gold-and-blue might be gone and even though the swagger is more prowl than strut, she knows. This isn’t an innocent bystander or a passing stranger - it’s @[Wolfbane].

Why the black coat, she wonders as the Taigan mare studies this borrowed (created?) shape. Why such a ragged, beaten form? Perhaps she should have paid more attention to her mother’s stories. There hadn’t been many tales of the skinwalkers. What limited lore the grey mare had known about shapeshifters had always come back to the basic law of Magic: that if something was taken, something had to be given. If they took so many shapes, what was left?

(If Lilliana hadn’t been so intrigued by Wolfbane instead of his Magic, she might have stopped to ask the same thing.)

Aela edges closer to her mother and the chestnut mare makes no motion to correct her daughter. Lilli only levels her blue eyes to his vacant (false) ones. "This was the best you could do?” she asks, a retort that might have been taken for her trademark teasing if this had been anyone but him.

Maybe, she thinks, what he's borrowed is running out. Maybe the Monster of the North is finally running out of shapes.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions

"Aela,” she tells him, hating the way that the word comes out so much softer than she intended. Lilliana had wanted it to be harder, firmer. A more definitive shape, one that @[Wolfbane] couldn’t take. The chestnut mare keeps a guarded gaze on him, unsure of what to expect. But he ignores her earlier taunt and instead focuses on the child pressed tightly against her side.

Aela’s head remained turned away up until the moment that the girl heard her name spoken and with both ears flicking back, she lifted her petite head to glance up at her mother and then behind her, feeling a presence there. Lilliana is looking down and Wolfbane is looking on with their daughter caught in the middle.

It’s a mockery of the moment but to any other horse that might have spied them on this lonely end of Beqanna, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. A mare and her foal with a curious stranger glancing in their direction. Like a calm before a summer squall, there is a lull as both parents study their daughter (and foolish of Lilliana for doing so). There has never been a moment that he comes that doesn’t upend her world in some way.

When Lilliana finally looks up to carefully regard the shapeshifter, he seems to lose himself in studying Aela. The filly has taken her time to crane her neck around and peer up at him, even if the expression she wears is an apprehensive one - perhaps an echo of the one her mother wears. The red mare is reminded of a tale about a horse who fell in love with a river for the reflection it gave and she wonders if his madness is like that, if he is searching for reflections of himself in the children he sires.

He uneases her and Lilliana shifts her weight to the opposite shoulder, trying to better protect her daughter. The action seems to break the spell as Aela looks back up to her dam and Wolfbane looks at Lilli, wearing that same look of hatred burning in those eerie eyes. It catches her off-guard; it shouldn’t but it does and the red mare feels the anger that blazes in response lighting her veins.

"You’ve lost your mind,” she seethes back at him, finally saying what she has assumed out loud. Her delicately tipped ears pin as she feels her daughter slip beneath her. What use did he have for a child? And more importantly, what made him think that she would just hand over her own? "After what you did to Nashua and Yanhua?” Lilliana baits, bewildered and exasperated. Nashua had looked and asked for Wolfbane; Yanhua became more solitary and quiet.

She’s fighting to keep it in control - that anger and that rage has been smoldering the last few months. Emotions that could threaten to craft a hurricane or summon a gale, had she been born with the traditional gift of her ancestors. However, it’s just the little red mare on the beach with her child tucked protectively beneath her girth and the summer winds that whistle around them, deaf to any call she might have given.

"You didn’t kill Neverwhere,” she tells the splayed stallion though she remains unaware of the punchline to Ghaul’s joke. Lilliana just knows that (thankfully) the Queen of Nerine lives.

The wind whips angrily around them and the Taigan mare turns her neck, allowing the zephyrs to tangle and part her mane to reveal the still healing wounds there. Bite marks from another predatory equine. "Might as well finish what the others started.” What the River should have done, she thinks. What her pregnancy with Aela should have succeeded with.

A trait that she suspects she shares with her golden daughter.

Aela - wide-eyed and overwhelmed by everything she feels electrifying (echoing) through the air - slips to the opposite side of Lilliana, slowly moving towards an angry ocean and away from the blazing mare.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions

Whatever she had been planning, he cuts it in half as he paces back and forth. She looks, briefly, above and past him to the treeline that lingers in the distance. To the rest of Beqanna that now seems unreachable. The sound of the raging surf behind her reminds her of what waits there - the open ocean. Currents that could easily drag her infant out to sea. Wolfbane wouldn't have to do anything at all. The angry tide could do it easily enough for him.

Wolfbane accuses her of being a liar and Lilliana bares her teeth at him - a brilliant, gleaming edge of white that flashes against her dark mouth - but she doesn't defend herself. How could she? Not when the shapeshifter could personally attest to it. How wonderful.

So she bites her tongue and watches him carefully as he goes back and forth. As he wanders his crazed mind while he walkss the corner of beach that separates Lilliana and her daughter from the rest of the mainland. The wind whips bitterly past Wolfbane towards the pair, making the chestnut mare wish (not for the first time) that she had the gift of her ancestors. She wished she could summon a hurricane. A monsoon. A typhoon. Anything. Anything at all that could blow Wolfbane far away. But the copper mare doesn't have that kind of ability. Her 'gifts' have never been a match for his; that has always been made abundantly clear.

The best she can manage is trying to stay ahead of him, ahead of the puzzling (manic) thoughts that he sometimes mutters and mumbles.

His accusation that this is all her fault is the very thing that cripples her. How often has she thought that? Lilliana has known for some time that she and Wolfbane should have never crossed stars. They should have stayed firmly put in the heavens. It's been the thing that has paralyzed her in the past. Lepis. A guilt that has kept her stationary, a sin that has kept her still. Because she remembers at one point, that she had wanted him. That she had once wanted his approval, craved his affection.

That she had once been a star-struck Diplomat.

The warmth of Aela beneath keeps her quiet. He condemns her for the fire-gold of her once lustrous coat and Lilliana pins her ears again, burying them into the curls of her matted mane. Her fault. The red mare might have stood quietly before but the slight warmth that had settled underneath her small frame vanished and when Lilli looked sharply towards the waterline, her daughter was already racing towards the surf. To the edges of the inching waves, like she had taught her. Because the pair of them could vanish on the fringes of the tide.

There was no vanishing, not now.

And as the golden form of Aela grew smaller on the horizon, Wolfbane galloped after her with all the rage of a thunderhead. The crimson mare was already gone as soon as she registered the cadence of his foreboding hoof-beats. Charging after them, spurred on by a dual dose of adrenaline and instinct, she follows. His white tail whips out like a banner behind him and Lilliana decides then that if she can get close enough, that if she can find a gust of wind to spirit her ahead, she'll snake her head out and grab on to whatever part of him that she can.

Anything for Aela.

"NO!" she yells.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions