you were a shot in the dark
and aimed right at my throat
And just like that, she is young again.
She swims along a golden sea. Lilliana, who dances with swaying gilded stalks on an open moor, tosses a blue-eyed glance to the companion next to her. He is tall and handsome and she is young and foolish, with innocence still clinging to her cheeks and shining through her eyes. He had been bold and brash with her and she had been brazen with him. Time has made the memory hazy but the laughter still rings out as the girl continues to dance away from him, careful of the sparks igniting between them because she had no desire to burn under a man's gaze. She had laughed at it then, ignorant of all the ways that a look like that could raze (change) everything. He had grinned at her, wolfish and brimming with charm. 'Keep your honeyed words and roguish ways to yourself,' she had teased back and laughing again, 'and we'll get along just fine.'
And just like that, she is younger.
She is in the Dark - in the pitch of Night (not as she knows it now, not in the way that she has come to know it through Warden and his Endings) - and a girl with stars glittering on her roan coat tells Lilliana stories that she could never dream on her own. 'They have names,' Orani said in a voice filled with wonder and stardust. 'They dream just like we do.'
And just like that, she is younger still.
Lilliana looks up into the face of her silver mother as the silence surrounds them. Aletta wielded it, much as she did with her hooves or teeth in battle, letting the imagination of the children around her supplant their own versions of this story instead. Lilli could hardly stand it. She had almost stamped a hoof. Speaking up in the company of her cousins and half-siblings, she asks: 'What next, Mama? What came next?' The sterling mare had chuckled and then turned her to look at her blue-eyed daughter, 'Everything in its time, Lilliana. Things happen when it is time for them to happen. Our hero knows that." Aletta had smiled as if she knew a secret and the girl had held that dark gaze, rapt and waiting to know it. "The ending doesn't come in the middle of the story, my love."
And just like that, she blinks.
She is in the Field, chasing away the daylight from her eyes. Lilliana doesn't look to her old Gods anymore. She asks nothing of the Stars or the Winds or River (though she hears it now, taunting her with its trickling voice). Though the air is brittle and brisk, though it makes her throat tighten at a memory, the daylight saves her.
There is someone before her now, hardly older than Ruth had been that winter. The sight of the gray filly testing the shallows of the stream, carefree and so painfully ignorant to everything that might be lurking in the Common Lands, prompts Lilliana to ask: "Do you have somewhere to go?"
And just like that, they stand at a beginning.