[private] You will forget, and I won’t remember it

[Leilan]

Leilan

What are the odds of two bodies colliding, if and when they both take completely random paths? Near impossible? He wonders.

What are those same odds when both bodies have a path ingrained in their memory, whether conscious or not? Would that be near certainty, if one is patient enough? He thinks so.

They are, after all, immortal. It doesn’t really surprise that they should meet.

No - the surprise is in the ease and in the timing. Fate is surely playing tricks with him now.

It is fall when they meet: scents hang heavily in the thick, humid air above the river and beneath the trees. Hers, for one, as attractive as it is: sweet, airy and earthy, a summer child and a daydreamer. A contradiction in itself. Of course, she is no longer a child, hasn’t been for some time and even then, he thinks, she might not have had the mind of one. But that is just wild guessing, and he wouldn’t want to presume.

His, when we’re still talking scents, is that of autumn and winter both in one, and lacks what summer could be found in her. Tangy and icy, a smell of pine and snow and white musk on ice. The cold autumn breeze mixes them in the fog that rises from the river this morning, and he knows that Fate could not be turned away today.

Last they met was right before he turned his heart in for a version made of ice. A well weighted rational decision after so many emotional ones; or at least that’s what he reckons now. The world is void of something that always would take over his very being, and now his mind is clear like a wind-swept tundra. Hers, however, when he tries to gauge her level of anger with him, is filled with a thicker fog than Taiga had ever produced. Strange, but then, he has never skilled himself in magic of the mind, and she undoubtedly has much more power on her own grounds.

He retreats mentally as quickly as he touched the surface of her mind, recoiling like a snake - hiding or ready to strike, he isn’t sure himself. ”Here we are again,” he assesses the situation when she comes into view: the copper woman with the impossibly azure orbs amidst her face. He stops there, literally and vocally, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Fate brought them here, but for what reason?

And was there any use to it now?

sorry for the heart that i won’t show
for the lengths that i won’t go

@lilliana

[lilliana]

She doesn’t remember breaking apart.

She doesn’t remember Taiga.

She doesn’t remember what her heart so badly wishes she would.

What she does remember is waking up in the Meadow, staring up at the purple mountains of Hyaline, and not understanding the feeling that the unknown horizon awoke in her. Lilli remembers those conversations with Elena, feeling safe and finally at peace beneath those trees. She knows that in those memories, they had been somewhere they shouldn’t have been but that had been the story of their shared adolescence.

The memories have started to come back since then, especially since meeting with the angel in the Meadow, but they are still out of place and Lilliana still doesn’t know that they are broken because she has died not once, but twice. In the very last moments of her second life, before Gale had killed her, the Curse had worn the shape of its previous host. It might have been the shock, or the repressed trauma associated with her memories of Wolbane, that had broken her powers.

Her Echoes are gone (not that she knows this), but she does know that when she sees Leilan face, she knows him. Like with Ryatah, the memories of previous conversations begin to flood her mind but there is no understanding the order in which they came or the context of them. They are fragmented, brief moments of her history that have begun to torment her because they never reveal enough for her to fully understand them, like now.

”Again,” she repeats slowly, staring up at the tall roan. Her copper head tilted fully back trying to meet his gaze. Leilan, she realizes (remembers), though he hasn’t spoken his name and that makes the chestnut press her lips together in uncertainty. ”We do this often?” she asks, because while the murmurs of the past are there, it remains just beyond her reach.