Glancing at her golden daughter tugs at her heart like the ocean current must tug at the coastline. Just when she thinks that her heart couldn’t take another wave of love crashing through her, it swells again and again with each searching glance that the blue-eyed girl sends. So like your Aunt, Lilliana thinks each time that she looks at Aela.
It’s the part that had surprised her most about motherhood. That looking at her children is finding those lost pieces of history coming together, dreaming a soul into existence that is both unique and realized by those who had come before. There are the graceful lines of her mother, Aletta, in her youngest. It’s Valerio’s blue eyes (or a reminiscent shade) that observes the world around her, like Yanhua. Her daughter is wrapped in gold - like Elaina, Arwel, Ruth and Marcelo. There is a small snip on her nose that she adores - a gift from Brazen. (The hard part of her - that broken part of her she refuses to acknowledge - won’t address the rest.)
Her daughter is, at best, a few days old and still finding her strides. She doesn’t race or romp far through the sand dunes but the little girl is becoming brave enough to venture around them and through the salt grasses. The pair has forged a quiet existence out on the edges of Beqanna, where the River lets out to the sea. Lilliana tries to do her best to heal but the process is slow after a troubling pregnancy and her captivity in Pangea. (The River had carried her from that cursed kingdom; it demanded a payment in the form of a deep gash on her right hip and the bruising of a few ribs.)
The filly becomes captivated by a seabird perched on a piece of large driftwood (an Osprey?) and when it takes to the sky, Aela follows behind at a curious trot. She disappears behind a large dune.
No, Lilli thinks. The pair kept to this quiet end of the beach because any proof that they had been there washes away with each tide. Lilliana has been careful to keep them positioned between dunes until … until what? She needs to get back to Taiga but to do so means traveling across Beqanna and doing that injured and with an infant? How far would they really get?
They needed to get back to Taiga but they needed the thing that Lilliana always seemed to run out of - time. (Time to heal, time to make a plan.)
"Aela!” she calls, trying to be louder than the crescendo of waves nearby. A few Sandpipers flutter in sudden disarray and Aela emerges from behind another pale dune, racing wildly towards her with a flagged tail. Her legs sprawl in different directions as she comes skidding to a halt. There is no time to worry about her balance, not when she was worried more about what (or who) she was running from.
The girl presses her pale face into her mother’s side, as if beside Lilliana, she might disappear.
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions
@[Wolfbane] here is a ramble-y starter for you
and anybody from Pangea