you were a shot in the dark
and aimed right at my throat

And just like that, she is young again.

She swims along a golden sea. Lilliana, who dances with swaying gilded stalks on an open moor, tosses a blue-eyed glance to the companion next to her. He is tall and handsome and she is young and foolish, with innocence still clinging to her cheeks and shining through her eyes. He had been bold and brash with her and she had been brazen with him. Time has made the memory hazy but the laughter still rings out as the girl continues to dance away from him, careful of the sparks igniting between them because she had no desire to burn under a man's gaze. She had laughed at it then, ignorant of all the ways that a look like that could raze (change) everything. He had grinned at her, wolfish and brimming with charm. 'Keep your honeyed words and roguish ways to yourself,' she had teased back and laughing again, 'and we'll get along just fine.'

And just like that, she is younger.

She is in the Dark - in the pitch of Night (not as she knows it now, not in the way that she has come to know it through Warden and his Endings) - and a girl with stars glittering on her roan coat tells Lilliana stories that she could never dream on her own. 'They have names,' Orani said in a voice filled with wonder and stardust. 'They dream just like we do.'

And just like that, she is younger still.

Lilliana looks up into the face of her silver mother as the silence surrounds them. Aletta wielded it, much as she did with her hooves or teeth in battle, letting the imagination of the children around her supplant their own versions of this story instead. Lilli could hardly stand it. She had almost stamped a hoof. Speaking up in the company of her cousins and half-siblings, she asks: 'What next, Mama? What came next?' The sterling mare had chuckled and then turned her to look at her blue-eyed daughter, 'Everything in its time, Lilliana. Things happen when it is time for them to happen. Our hero knows that." Aletta had smiled as if she knew a secret and the girl had held that dark gaze, rapt and waiting to know it. "The ending doesn't come in the middle of the story, my love."

And just like that, she blinks.
She is in the Field, chasing away the daylight from her eyes. Lilliana doesn't look to her old Gods anymore. She asks nothing of the Stars or the Winds or River (though she hears it now, taunting her with its trickling voice). Though the air is brittle and brisk, though it makes her throat tighten at a memory, the daylight saves her.

There is someone before her now, hardly older than Ruth had been that winter. The sight of the gray filly testing the shallows of the stream, carefree and so painfully ignorant to everything that might be lurking in the Common Lands, prompts Lilliana to ask: "Do you have somewhere to go?"

And just like that, they stand at a beginning.

you were a shot in the dark
and aimed right at my throat

The girl is dancing and in the past, Lilliana might have laughed. Might have teased her and called her a nymph, teased her for resembling a nereid with all her aquatic finesse. Now the filly dances - gracefully and carefree - and the sound of the water that she splashes around brings the chestnut mare present. In the past, Lilliana might have even joined her and a bright, bubbling laughter might have come out to dance with them.

This is the present, though. And in Lilliana's present, she is away from the North. Brennen's Magic is nowhere to be found. The only chill in the air comes from an arctic wind that blows from kingdom, perhaps calling the chestnut mare home. It tugs on her mane and Lilliana shifts her weight, trying to adjust to the presence of the grey girl before her. She blinks and tilts her head, taking into account the lankiness (though still lovely) of her frame and how she is still long legs waiting to be grown into. The filly appears to be of an age somewhere between her twins and Aela.

An age that Lilli thinks is too young to be wandering the Common Lands on her own.

She wishes that the child had told her she had somewhere to go; somewhere to belong. She wishes that there was mention of a mother or a father but there is nothing. The girl has no one and the Taigan would never leave a young one to the elements, the unknown, to Beqanna. There could be nothing but trouble for her in the Northern forest. But, a voice tells her, but there could be trouble here, too.

A small part of her breaks to hear someone so young say they have nowhere to go. It's the way of the world, these tiny cruelties that knick her in different ways and yet Lilliana still aches at them, will always ache at them. It finally happens - a moment in the present - where a small smile quirks on the Guardian's dark mouth (for she remembers who she is; there is a girl in need of a home and this is something she could provide). "Would you like somewhere to go?"

And just like that, a beginning if the waterdancer wants it.

you were a shot in the dark
and aimed right at my throat

Lilliana has made far too many leaps in her life to suggest anyone else do the same. The last time she had been with her cousin, Elena, she had finally urged caution. No more cliff-dancing, as she had called it. The chestnut mare seldom takes them these days. Her leaps of faith are now limited to ones that can be contained. If she falls (fails) now, she runs the risk of a scraped knee from patrolling in Taiga instead of falling from heights that she can't catch herself from.

The girl dances forward and it summons the small smile on Lilli's face to grow as she approaches. She is all unpracticed delight and it is a beautiful, shining thing to Lilliana. Innocence like this rarely lasts long in Beqanna, she thinks.

"I come from Taiga," she explains and then turns her head towards the direction that she had come from. "From the North," she corrects herself, remembering that Taiga is the same now as the Isle or Nerine. "It's a large forest," she adds, "but there are cliffs if you venture towards the ocean and if you enjoy water, there is an Isle that you could visit." It's a journey, her silence says. (Lilliana has made it once and that once has, so far, been enough for her. The sleek-coated mare has never enjoyed the feeling of icy ocean wrapping around her.)

Her ears prick as she waits for a reply and Lilliana shifts her weight from one hip to another, trying to alleviate the pain that always seems settle in her joints with each pregnancy. The filly, in all her youthful enthusiam, splashes forward with her excitement and it even drenches Lilliana. While it doesn't make her laugh, something sparks behind her blues eyes and she takes a step forward where the girl had stepped back. She apologizes  (and some part of her despairs at that), "You have nothing to be sorry for." Lilliana says gently.

Lifting her head, she asks with a returning smile, "How about offering your name instead? I am Lilliana."

you were a shot in the dark
and aimed right at my throat

It's hard to imagine Taiga at first. Lilliana had once described it as intriguing and all these years later, she still thinks it's an appropriate descriptor for the Northern forest. The fog certainly lends it an air of mystery, the way that the haze of it haunts the trails and wide tree trunks like a ghost. The are spaces of it - wild, vast, closed off from the world - where it seems like time has forgotten to exist.

Trapped spaces from another era, perhaps.

Lilliana tries her hardest to explain it. The chestnut mare smiles a little more at the girl and tries to describe the cliffs of Nerine and the rolling moorlands that flow away from those edges. She tries to describe the crags and moors of the beaches, the way that Taiga and the former home of the Amazons, come together. It's the Isle that proves more complicated but the chestnut mare finds the smile on her face deepening when she asks about, a girlish dimple emerging against a curved cheek. "Unless you have another way to travel there," Lilliana teases and watches the girl for a moment, waiting to see if she'd say anything.

There is nothing on the outside of @[Borderline] that says otherwise. There are no wings to make the journey swifter, like her eldest child Nashua. She can't see any scales or gills to make the swim easy, like her fellow Councilmember, Lethia. But the story is so rarely told at the surface. It only begins to emerge when diving deeper.

Borderline is young but so aren't most of the inhabitants of the Isle. Leilan's court might be a place that Borderline could feel at ease. "If you'd like, you can accompany me back to Taiga. Should you desire a swim," she teases gently but her late pregnancy shows that its nothing something Lilliana can (or will) do. "I can point you in the direction of the Isle."