There had been a moment where this conversation had been made up of nothing but starlight.Their world was silent and Lilliana stood there, wondering if this admission somehow changed something. Within herself? Between this queer dynamic of the Memory Keeper and the Watcher? Between Lilliana and Beqanna? She keeps waiting for the rift, the tear to come from somewhere so she will finally fall apart. She is waiting, she realizes over the pitch of her thundering heartbeat, that she is waiting for a seam to come undone so that everything she keeps so tightly knotted would come pouring out.
But there is nothing.
Nothing but the silent, twinkling conversation of starlight that comes glowing from (as Leonidas has told her) either years ahead or behind the Earth-dwellers. They look like reflections of each other - Warden with the storms in his deep eyes and the accusation sparking behind them. Lilliana with hurricanes raging behind her lighter-colored gaze. They are looking up and Lilliana realizes she is just waiting for it all to fall apart; she is back to hurling her anger at the heavens and waiting for the sky to break apart, to come crashing down.
She is thinking of the horrible things that could happen; of the things that Warden might see, of the terrible events that teach the living that there is a far worse fate than merely dying.
Warden tucks his head down when Lilliana finally looks down and turns her slender head in his direction. There is something about the way that he stands - still proud, still the Watcher - that surprises the Taigan. It looks (to her) that Warden is holding something of himself back and yet here he is, proclaiming to know what she is afraid of and, then even more aggravating than his first statement, that she has never been. "Do not make presumptions of me, @[Warden] of Tephra." Lilliana warns the Watcher.
She takes a step towards him, as deliberate in her approach as unhurried as his remark had been. "Do you know what it's like?" Lilliana asked him rhetorically, taking another step. "To come into this life and to realize that you are the reason for your mother's heartbreak?" She holds on to the memory, the one that she could unleash towards Warden as easily as her breath comes out in silver plumes towards the winged stallion. ('It was your fault,' Brielle had said one day beneath their willow. She had fought with Malachi and was looking for someone to unleash her anger on. There had been Lilli with those wide blue eyes, trying to help her sister and all Brielle had wanted was the justifiable comfort of her rage. 'She couldn't make the journey with the others to Windskeep because she was carrying you.')
"Or perhaps you know what it's like to live a life always on the run," she adds, nearly blazing with the words. "Did your father make enemies who realized that targeting foals was far easier than enacting vengeance on a battlefield?"
She is so impossibly angry now.
There is nothing to cling to, nothing to grasp because the memories are swirling like a firestorm and they demand out of the little chestnut body that holds them all. Lilliana rails against them, forces them to remain in the lithe frame that houses them. Everything about her glows now. Her pale socks are nearly as bright as Leonidas who still drifts above in the bare branches and the flame marking is burning its gold presence on her right shoulder.
"What if the two hearts you loved the most asked you a choice? And you tore your own out because there was only the one path?"
She takes another step and can feel the heat radiating off his pale feathers from where she stands. Her ears are pinned in the wind-swept tangle of her mane and the smoke of her fury drifts from her dark nostrils towards the antlered pegasus.
"Have you ever thought that the monsters were behind you, only to realize that this land is riddled with them, like any other?"
This will always be the thing that gets Lilliana in trouble. This is her sun and she will forever be Icarus, drawing too close to its warmth because she can't bear the cold. Because there is nothing but loneliness in the dark. Because the possibilities could always be infinitely brighter than the dim reality; her hope will always be the thing that scorches her. Her physical body could be reduced to ash, her name forgotten, before she gives it up (and even then, maybe some part of her will still be out there - eternally hoping).
If hope is lost, what does it leave behind but ache?
Lilliana looks up at him, close enough now to firmly meet his dark navy gaze.
"We all have burdens," she says, finally relenting under the weight of their close proximity. "Nobody should have to carry them alone."
Remember when our songs were just like prayers
Like gospel hymns that you caught in the air?
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind