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

How does anybody learn to be whole when so much is gone? (And she'd wonder, where does it go?)

Lilliana has never claimed to be whole. She has never claimed that the heart beating in her chest wasn't fractured, wasn't chipped in some way (and in reality, she has been offering out small pieces of it since her very first breath). She has never been whole but she has tried to fill so many empty places, tried to fill the emptiness that others carry around with them because she has always believed that if everybody is fractured and broken, then maybe all the shards and splintered pieces of souls come together to make something new.

There are so many fractures in hers now, though. Even in her dreams (of a waterfall that she no longer hears, pressed against a golden woman who she has loved too much), Lilliana doesn't know what to make of them. She doesn't know what to do yet with the lines that have carved away parts of her and created new valleys, has yielded mountains, and opened rivers to run. (Sometimes it feels like the wilderness isn't around her but in her. Something wild, untamed. Something, she thinks, she might be afraid of. )

When the self-doubt comes creeping in with fog, when she has thoughts about what might have happened if she never returned from Pangea, she remembers that she did. She did and she is here, building towards a future that she has never allowed herself to have. It's one that she creates for her children because Lilliana thinks (hopes) they will be in the North long after she is gone. That it might become something that Paraiso should have been, that if they ever need shelter or protection, the reaching branches of Taiga will always be there to welcome and shield them.

She isn't in Taiga today, though. Lilliana roams the barren moorlands, looking for Brazen. The roan mare is always easy to find this time of year, like Lilli. The two of them stand out like a pair of flames, a vibrant fire-red against the vast frozen fields. Eurwen, on the other hand, is as pale as Lilliana is bright. The ice on her chest glistens in the daylight where her flame marking sparks to life. She approaches the spotted Nerinian, moving away from the path that she had been traveling to spy her friend with eyes closed and shielded. Like she was -

Remembering.

And then a voice whispers that I wish you hadn't run off. The memory isn't strong and Lilliana is careful with it. It feels almost fragile, that if her Magic tried to reveal more, the memory itself would fall apart. She takes a step forward and asks with concern clouding the present in a silver-plume of freezing vapors. "@[Eurwen]?"

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

Lilliana remembers, too. She remembers far too much and recalls too often. (It is why she is so grateful for Neverwhere, who pulls her forward time and time again. Who reminds her again and again that the past is a thing done; there is no changing it.)

It worries Yanhua, makes Nashua uncomfortable, and had been one the last pieces of advice she had been given by her mother, Aletta, before the pale mare had left for the realm of Beyond. ('Enough, Lilli.' She had said one foggy Taigan morning. Lilliana had caught sight of Aela and had stood there with her heart breaking in those shattering blue eyes. 'You tell her or you don't. You tell her to stay or you let her go. But there is no more of this.' The copper mare had said nothing. She had stood there in the quiet, thinking of all the things she wanted to say, the air becoming electrified with her anger. But nothing had come. What was there to say? Aela was almost grown. She had always been gone. Trying again, gentler (or as gentle Aletta knew how to be), she said: 'There is no point of throwing yourself on a spear already thrown, Lilliana. Let it hurt. Let yourself bleed. And then let it go.'

She's been trying.
She has been trying so hard to follow her mother's advice.

But like Eurwen, Lilliana remembers.

She remembers the day that the mist around her home fell. She remembers the fog descending and she remembers that Elena had burst through the barrier of it. She had gone charging through it like the knights and warriors of their legends and Lilliana has always leaped when it has come to those she loves. She had leaped after Elena and then the two of them had gotten separated in the Common Lands of Beyond. And then started the pattern of their story in this life: they only come together in dreams, now.

Lilliana remembers Elena (and also Aletta) when she looks at Eurwen. She recalls the sense of family as the whisper fades into the back of her mind with a myriad of other memories. "Hi, Wen." She says and takes a step closer. Lilli takes one more step and then greets the other mare as she would have done with her golden cousin. (A heart-shaped marking on the palomino mare on her forehead and that was always how they greeted each other; with foreheads pressing against that lovely heart.) Something about her companion seems so vulnerable, so fragile like the wisps of the memory that lingered, that Lilliana almost didn't ask.

But she does because as Aletta had said, there was no sense in holding to things already gone.
Because as Lilliana was learning, nobody should be hostage to their memories.

"What's wrong?"