[private] sunrise never waits

[lilliana]

She hasn’t always known the Cove this way. Lilliana had been here once as an aspiring, bright-eyed diplomat with every promise for an equally-bright future. She hasn’t always known the Cove - or Pangea - this way just as she hasn't always been this way. 

If the chestnut mare knew that he mourned a youth gone, perhaps they could have grieved together. They might have bonded over that - the last of Lilliana’s girlhood is buried beneath a pile of lake pebbles in Hyaline (the kingdom of his mothers) like his innocence seems to be left somewhere along it's lakeside. (A reminder constructed of a hideaway from her youth. A place where she and her cousin left flowers and shells and pretty stones if they couldn’t find the other to trade a secret.) The last time she had gone to Hyaline - on a cold, clear Winter night with only the silver stars for company - there had been nothing left to find.

As if they had never been there at all.

The copper mare - so often compared to that peaceful, pristine lake - had sent her anger and her fury rippling across its mirror surface. She had shouted and screamed until she had returned to Taiga in the morning, still seething and unable to voice anything at all for a few days after.

Her crimson face returns upright immediately. Lilliana reacts almost the instant that he does; the Taigan mare means to give him no time if he intends to hurt her. Her heart echoes in a rapid succession, the sound her hooves should be making as she turns to run. Instead, she angles her stomach away from him to protect her unborn child and pins her ears.

There are thoughts in her mind that aren’t her own and her dark lips curl to reveal a flash of white, that no matter how sick she feels at the thought, she will bite him. This is a bond like she had once shared with Craft - though that bond had felt like a gentle tether. This feels like being harnessed to a tornado.

No, mind-talker?

The fire in his eyes catches and blazes hers to brilliant blue as Lilliana stands her ground - her ire speaking plainly, no thoughts needed.

The chestnut mare decides to repay the favor and lets the image of how he had been just moments prior slip between them, how she had found him, how he had looked through her eyes.

(His pale face, hanging low. His buckskin pelt shivering. The way he had held his wings. The freshly burned skin on his chest.)

She stays firmly put - but the slender mare flinches visibly when he tells her to run.

Lilliana’s delicate ears remained hidden in the waves of her red mane and though her jaw is clenched, she finally relents with her thoughts. What does it say of me if I left you like that? While the red mare doesn’t move towards him, her expression could pen odes for the ages about her distrust of anyone in Pangea. Are you the kind of monster to prey on empathy? I didn’t think you were, she brightens, growing angrier with each biting thought she projects back at him. But forgive me, if I’m wrong.

@[Rhaegor]