"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
03-05-2020, 05:19 PM (This post was last modified: 03-06-2020, 08:51 AM by Ruthless.)
if you do not have shadows, you are not in the light
She doesn’t come here for Brine, not initially. Though it would be a lie to say she isn’t casually looking for her mother; a sworn devotee to the shadows.
With each tree the golden child swerves, whispering into caves and calling into the forest.
Nothing, not even a twig snap.
Ruth cannot help but acknowledge the lack of scent her mother is leaving, as if she isn’t here at all.
The filly finds herself walking along the coastal cliffs, leaving the shadows and the usual habitat her mother sought to find the sun and crowd again. Smells intertwine with others and create a plethora of horses all of which are foreign and new.
No Wolfbane, thankfully.
Her stomach churns the closer she gets to Nerine’s centre, steps so slow she could be confused for walking through mud. If someone were to ask, she would likely blame it on a lack of sleep and a lot of running. I am tired, she would excuse.
No, she will not openly admit to the heart-breaking flashback when Lilliana surrendered herself to Wolfbane. Our aspiring soldier felt no comfort in sharing the flaw she found in her otherwise impeccable savior. That is the last thing the copper mare deserved.
But Ruthless felt it fair to hold anger within herself. At least there it is safe, and furtive.
At the sight of Lilliana, Ruthless loses air. It hits her with a wall of emotion, almost to paralyze her to the spot. Is she ready for this? Can she handle this right now? After everything?
“Lilliana,” she placates even with the sizzling boil in her heart, but more words do not follow. She cannot find them; they are buried beneath the numbing ache of her coronet band.
('Lilli, tell me a secret,’ her yearling cousin whispers. Lilli grins and happily obliges her: 'You are my very best friend in the entire world.’ Not really a secret but Lilliana hadn’t known what else to share then.)
('Lilli,’ Elena whispers one night in Culloden when they had both still teetered on the edge of youth and adulthood. ’Tell me a secret,’ she pleaded. Lilli had hesitated but answered, 'I think I’m supposed to love him.’ The chestnut admits and then the worst part, the part she dreads and she knows that had disappointed him. 'But I don’t know.’)
(’Lilli,’ her golden cousin had asked on one of their last nights in Hyaline, 'Do you think we’ll ever find it?’ and Lilliana had known what she meant. The peace. The quiet. ’I don’t know,’ she had answered. And then there had been no more secrets - her cousin had gone, vanishing into the quiet they had been longing for.)
It is harder for her to make the daily trek between Taiga and Nerine and so some nights Lilliana stays North. She rests not far from Brazen and tries to find sleep where she can though her mind often goes to the Redwoods where she worries for Ruth. And she still hasn’t forgotten about Brine - about the promise she had made - and the Ambassador was still trying to figure a way to find the roan mare.
She had hoped Ghaul might offer more insight but one of the few benefits of having him in Nerine was knowing that he couldn’t harm Brine or Brinly. (Though the horned stallion is one that is difficult to place - she has seen him ‘look’ down upon a nest of rabbits and leave them be and then be just as apt to ignite a tree with his fire.)
The world is full of shades of gray - not the clear cut black and white she had once thought it was.
When she finally sees Ruth - there is a warmth, a love that swells in her chest at the sight of her - and she manages to come forward as quickly as a mare carrying twins can. But she isn’t blind. The closer she comes, the more she sees the lines of pain (and something else, lack of sleep perhaps?) on her youthful face.
That feeling comes back - the one from the Field - that fervent desire that Lilliana has. The want to protect her. To keep her safe. And while she can’t understand (who could? What explanation is there for what Wolfbane had once been? There is betrayal and infidelity woven in that tale.) why she had chosen as she had - of the way, that for a moment, a curse and a past and a ghost collided and Lilliana had only wanted Ruth away from all of it. They could have fought, perhaps, but where it concerns Ruth, it seems that is a risk she wasn't willing to take.
”Ruth,” she says with a voice full of relief as she comes closer.
And then her magic - out of habit perhaps from Brazen, from the way her healing had sought out the cuts and tears in her armored skin - unknowingly reaches out to @[Ruthless], coming forward before Lilliana can. It’s a strand of light, a luminous embrace around her coronet band and then instead of taking, the magic gives.
(It’s an image - of another golden girl who Ruth has reminded her so much of from the start - a young blonde mare of age with the pegasus who whispers through the memory: ‘When the mists came, Alvaro wanted me to stay as did Marcelo. But I couldn’t Lilli. I couldn’t stay. Not when this is such a cruel world and I have a chance to bring light to it.’)
LILLIANA and its harder than you think telling dreams from one another
if you do not have shadows, you are not in the light
Their relationship has grown unfathomably strong, and despite the inner turmoil tearing the inside of her stomach to shreds Ruthless cannot ignore the comfort that spools across her cheeks.
A flush of safety.
She breathes her name, and it sounds sweet from her tongue. Ruthless could melt into a pool of satisfaction here and now, just hearing the sincerity in the tone of what she secretly considered her adopted mother whisper with such reassurance. It sat in her ears and hummed awhile before falling mute amongst the soft chirp of distant birds.
The world pauses as hazel eyes land on the copper mare’s belly, the notable expansion and weight. At first, she worries. But then.
Then it settles across her in a way she imagines would feel similar to Wolfbane’s slimy tentacles gradually lowering across her back, gripping every edge and groove on her body.
“Don’t tell me it was him,” the devil, the nerve. A steam of rage radiates from her body, the suffocating air feeling tighter with every inhale.
Her mother never shared much—somethings, Ruth knows, were too dark for her glowing golden mini—but what she did share made Ruth wonder if perhaps this could be the same monster.
“Did you tell anyone?” She pleads, knowing Lilliana to likely conceal the truth to protect everyone around her. The kind-hearted, motherly-figure Ruthless never knew she missed until now.
03-19-2020, 08:50 PM (This post was last modified: 03-19-2020, 08:51 PM by lilliana.)
She can see the weight of the world as it settles upon the youthful shoulders of Ruth and Lilliana takes a stride of purpose forward, not willing to let it linger there. It isn’t her weight to carry. This is all Lilli’s fault - if she had just listened to Neverwhere, if she had just left Taiga behind, maybe the events that came after would have played out differently.
But that thought wraps around her heart much like his tentacles had.
It rips through her and tears away every certainty she once had (friend her determined mind had once called him, what she had tried to describe him as to the Queen of the North.)
There is a flash of pain behind her blue eyes as @[Ruthless] looks to her stomach, something that has made Lilliana more conscious of late. If it were anyone else, the copper mare might have found a smile and managed a laugh from somewhere but her sunshine nature is hidden behind a cloud of judgment that she imagines must be building behind the hazel gaze of the younger mare. Perhaps her own shoulders should sag, perhaps the weight of everything that has happened should make Lilli falter under the pressure of Ruth’s rage.
Perhaps things would be so much easier for Lilliana if she knew how to fall apart.
Her heart twists and her chest tightens to see the anger there - the way that it fires against the chill of a brisk winter day in Nerine. Lilliana can feel it and it fuels her final steps as she comes to stop in front of the pegasus mare. Her face traces the lines that have formed on the tired face of Ruthless and the crimson mare gently exhales, releasing a breath she hadn’t known she had been cradling in her chest. "It’s alright,” she says gently, though it isn't. There is a part of her that has been lost in all this madness and she doesn’t know if there is any salvaging the last remnants of the dreamer she had been.
She had to grow up at some point, didn’t she? At some point, the dreams, the stars, the wind and its secrets… all of that had to come to an end.
Lilliana reaches over the neck of the golden girl and pulls her close. It is perhaps Lilli’s greatest flaw - the one she has always been so acutely aware of - and yet when she holds the girl close to her like this, Lilli knows she would do it all again if it meant keeping her safe. She would sell her soul a thousand times over and do so gladly if it meant keeping the darkness away from the shining pegasus. The mare from Murmuring Rivers harbors many regrets but doing what she had (what she thought was keeping Ruth safe) will never be one of them.
A frown forms when the girl asks if she has told anyone - if anyone knows anything out of the horses who had been there that day - and her heart twists again. "Some in Nerine do,” she admits, thinking back to the day that she had realized her boys had family here - that Brazen and Eurwen were an aunt and cousin of sorts to them.
"Ruth,” she tries again but what can she say? Her mind is blurred with a fog of words, of unspoken accusations and words that try to bind Lilliana into a single one. She has always refused that and does so now - "what happened that day…,” she continues, ”don’t carry it with you. The moment we let darkness stain us is when the light dims.”
The copper mare has to be careful with this - the light is just as likely to blind as the dark is prone to make one stumble. They are both needed to some degree to balance the other.
"I didn’t think he’d hurt you,” Lilli finally offers, choking out the darkness from her thoughts. She had never thought he’d hurt anyone. But then that has always been her problem regarding the former Commandant - she had never thought it through. Not until the day with Brennen and Jesper, when it had been too late and Neverwhere admitted that the striped stallion wasn’t well. It had come into the focus then - the realization that the insanity she had felt was just that.
Madness.
And it had carried over that day in the Field, spilled chaos in abundance that not only affected Lilliana but Fiorina and Ruth as well. "I’m sorry.”
LILLIANA
i met your demons but they do not scare me (they will be angels once they learn to fly)
