Leilan gets it.
Though to be fair, Lilliana is standing beside an ocean. It’s an easy thing to look small when put beside such a vast and endless thing like the sea. Always changing, ever-churning. When one is not a dragon or gifted with superior magic, a simple thing like a red mare is easily made small.
She is just one more dot on the other side of the horizon.
Lilliana doesn’t consider this when Leilan lowers his large his head, however. She isn’t thinking about that when his dragon eyes consider her and the Taigan mare doesn’t - as he so eloquently put it - shrink from meeting his gaze. She doesn’t rescind what she asks him. Lilli just looks up at him and waits.
It’s only when he goes behind a massive crag to change that she considers something. Something that she hadn’t thought of before and her steadfast expression cracks under the consideration. Leilan was shifting and suddenly, as his body goes from dragon to horse, her mind is reeling with a million questions. She almost recoils from him when he approaches her in the body of a bay roan and her blue eyes are already bruising with worry.
"Does it change you?” she asks, almost demanding. "Does the Magic take something from you every time you change?” This question comes with less force but there is a hard set to her brow and suddenly, the icy air around her becomes charged with her challenge. With her fear. "God dammit, @[Leilan].” She exhales because this isn’t something she had considered.
Of course, she hadn’t.
"This won’t work if it changes you,” she starts, with her voice cracking on the last word. "This won’t work and the North can’t-,” Lilliana stops. The North can’t keep going on as it has. It’s something that she has come to understand and the blue-eyed mare has said as much to her constituents. The North can’t afford anymore upheaval. Brennen’s magic keeps them protected, for now. But for how long?
She means to propose to unify the North.
That for a Northern leader who gets usurped by outsiders, there are two other leaders to represent the stronghold they could create. That if a leader goes missing, there are two other counterparts who are swift in recovering them. The North moves together - as one - to protect history from repeating itself. That for every Northern resident who seeks aid or sanctuary, they receive it not from one territory but two. Possibly three if Nerine wanted to make herself equal to the Isle and Taiga.
The proposal is overdue, perhaps, and a long-time in coming. Even longer still, if Lilliana can’t overcome her aversion to Leilan’s Magic. It’s the one thing, she reminds herself, that she thought might make him the most eligible for what she was proposing.
She just didn’t think it would be the thing that would make her so reluctant to it as well.
The Guardian exhales and blows a gust of warm air from her dark, flaring nostrils. "I’m not hiding,” she tells him. Those cracks that he first saw break apart a little more, "I just.. I just can’t; It’s just easier to be out here.” Alone.
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions