remember when our songs were just like prayers?
like gospel hymns you caught in the air
She tries to prepare - Lilliana tries to get better at anticipating - but when the Watcher comes crashing to the ground, this is not the Future she expected. The last time the two of them had met had been another clash. He had flared those lovely white wings and Lilliana had hurled every terror that she could think of at Warden, had projected every fear that she had ever known (and there have been plenty).
Their confrontation had left Lilliana renouncing her old gods but the horned stallion had given her the knowledge, the realization that she did have something to believe in: herself.
"Warden," she says coming closer to the fallen stallion. Her breathing had become labored with the sudden exertion of the fast pace she had taken and so comes out in shadowed plumes between them. The moonlight catches on the frozen ground and an almost deceiving quiet surrounds them. "Don't get up," the Healer speaks. He might not be able to, she realizes as she comes closer. After he tries to gather his legs and is unable to find them. When she finally comes to where he lays prostrated on the ground, with his chin resting on a forelimb, she lowers her slender head below his horns and reaches to brush against the curve of his cheek.
Lilliana knows better than to try and heal another horse in her condition. It had taken all of her ability with her last pregnancy to keep Aela healthy. (She is not a mare meant for this; lovely Lilliana was never meant to be a mother. Too slight, too slim, her herd healer had warned.)
And yet, "I can heal it." The chestnut starts to glow - a soft light-emitting from her pale socks, shining from her golden flame on her shoulder - as she reaches for the limited ability she has to share with @[Warden]. "It won't be quick," she apologizes and she starts to the tell the painted Tephran the same that she had told Warlight, "It might take-" But the moment that their magics interlace, she gasps.
Like the air he had lost from his lungs when he fell, Lilliana loses it now for the way that her heart thunders in her chest. It starts to hammer so profoundly that there is no room for anything else. The air she tries to breathe is chased out and everything in her feels... tight.
The Tephran says her name like it will bring her back from where she has gone. Like it will bring her back from the memory he projected. There had been the proud cliffs of Nerine (she has strolled alongside them many times with Eurwen, Brazen, and Neverwhere; with no company at all but the turbulent wind and wild sea), blazing with fire and the furies of Magic that she doesn't yet know. Lilliana has stayed in the North because they were protected under Brennen's barrier. They were told they were safe in the North.
Her children are supposed to be safe in the North.
"Can you see more?" she begs, suddenly conjuring images of stripped Nashua, glowing Yanhua and golden Aela. "Can you see them?" she pleads, her worry already making the memories run away from her. (Nashua and Yanhua barely a month old, racing over the moorlands. Aela who lives near the border with her adopted mother, the spotted Kota.) The night around them lies. It is so still, so silent. Even the softly falling snow makes no sound at all.
It is only Lilliana and her pleading.
"Please."