"Maybe," she concedes to Neverwhere.
Maybe the Amazons of old had broken apart on the ragged rocks of Nerine. Maybe their Jungle hearts were so twisted with vines and filled with thick, lush vegetation that when they had looked upon the Nerinian moorlands, they found themselves - like the land - stripped. Maybe they felt robbed of the home they had loved and fought for so many generations. Maybe, Lilliana thinks.
She stands quietly with a weight behind her eyes that hasn't been there before - a consequence that Lilliana has brought upon herself - but it does lend the chestnut a new look of maturity. Experience is lining her face in a way that the years will never do to her body (not that she has yet realized that) and so when @[Neverwhere] suggests that what remained of the Amazons lays as fractured anecdotes at the bottom of these cliffs, memories cast adrift with the many tides, there is a part of Lilliana that can agree with Neverwhere.
Lilliana doesn't know much of the time that the natives call 'the Reckoning'. She only knows the land was changed - ripped apart and reborn again. A Reckoning and perhaps a Revelation in one era. Another fairytale that her mother had used as a tale of caution from her youth, of what happens when magic grows corrupt and twisted. (Lilliana had missed the point of that tale entirely - her wide-eyed horror went immediately to the horses left to deal with the aftermath. 'Everything rises and falls,' her silver mother had shrugged. It was simply the way of things. It was the way of life that Aletta had known on her mountaintops. 'Perhaps the inhabitants took advantage of their new world. Perhaps it became stronger than what it was before.') Standing on that ledge with Neverwhere, Lilliana hopes that the magic the Fairies wove had also included threads of redemption.
"Nerine might have been intended as a gift," she speculates. "The land couldn't have healed if it had returned to what it had been before."
There is an audible sigh from the dappled mare beside her and Lilliana rewards her with an indulgent smile, one that reveals a dimple as her attention is pulled away from the endless sea. Busy, in Neverwhere's current situation, is an understatement. Word has rippled across the great pond that is Beqanna and the result comes flooding back by way of diplomats and leaders that venture into Nerine. To Neverwhere.
The Nerinian reaches out and brushes past the copper tendrils that cover a golden mark on her shoulder. The newness of it is still unsettling and the chestnut mare still tries to hide it most days. Lilliana turns her head to glance down at the golden flame and a shadow crosses her face. For any other soul, Lilliana might have deflected with a teasing retort. For Neverwhere, she ventures as close to honesty as she can get - as close as she will allow because her burdens are not to be Neverwhere's. The silver dapple already has enough to deal with. Ghosts, she wants to say. I dream of Taiga burning. Instead, Lilliana only offers: "Taiga is peaceful but I've been having trouble sleeping. Craft and Anatomy are there so perhaps that should make it easier."
Hesitantly she adds, "I thought I'd bring news of Ruthless for Brine and to visit with Brazen." And then Lilliana reaches out to trace the outline of a wing that covers her shoulder. "This is new too." What happened in the Desert sometimes felt like a dream. (Some days she wishes it had been a dream because her body wakes up in a cold sweat the following night.) Craft's breaking bones, the crimson shade of her blood as it ran down the dune, the stallion ripping his own eyes out - these are some of the things that keep her awake at night.
Lilliana pulls back. "I keep dreaming about the Desert. I keep seeing...," She can't bring herself to say the words. She can't bring herself to describe Craft's death in daylight. The haunted expression Lilli's face speaks for her before she goes to meet her friend's gaze,"But I remember you there."
And that, that counts for everything.
LILLIANA
light me up, i will blaze
like a soul you have saved