[private] it was dead long ago; wishbone

[lilliana]

Her smile tugs again at one side of her dark mouth as Lilliana falls into stride alongside longer-limbed Wishbone. The chestnut's refined face tilts towards the Tephran, already growing more and more comfortable in the presence of Warden's elder sister; it leads to another curiosity about the onyx-and-gold woman. There is very little of the Watcher that she can see in the elegant creature that walks beside her. There are no wings, no glimmering gemstones, no mighty antlers.

Even the regal navy blue that she so often associates with Warden isn't there. It's a honey-eyed sweetness gleaming brightly back at her, with no shadows of the future haunting them. But what about the past?

One curved ear flicks towards Wishbone as they walk, listening as the former Khaleesi tells the history of this ferned-and-fabled place as only a native could. A familiarity spoken with an ease that Lilliana thinks could only one come from someone who had been born here. Something in her aches at that because it seems like she is always longing for home, for a place lost among the mists of time. For each year that passes in Beqanna, her memories of Beyond and the life she lived there become hazier and hazier.

Not so for her time in the Land of the Sunrise.

She can recall each year spent here with painful clarity.

But her present company keeps the darker memories at bay and Lilliana finds it easy to bask in the warm presence of Wishbone. For each step that she takes and the further they wander down this trail, the fire-branded woman leaves some of her heavier worries behind them. What to do about Brazen's memorial will be waiting for her when they return from the Summit. What to do about Popinjay and Warden's vision (but it does linger in the back of her mind, the light going out across Beqanna and her mind keeps reeling about all the things it could mean) will still be at the end of this quest. Where Neverwhere has gone will still be a question without an answer when she returns to Taiga.

The history that Wishbone elaborates is listened to with rapt attention - a pricked ear, blue eyes that brighten at the mention of Magnus (a name she has heard before), an occasional slant of her sculpted head when the other explains the politics of the past. These are parts of the histories of Beqanna that she hadn't known; Lilliana so often only gets fragmented pieces and the stories told from others who had lived through certain current events (sometimes she might get lucky and stumble across a memory but the kinds of memories that are left behind - that have marked the realm of the Living - are often the ones the empath doesn't want to find).

When Wishbone askes about the North, Lilliana slows and can feel her throat momentarily tighten (it feels like a tentacle twining around her neck).

There is a moment that Lilliana looks away from her traveling partner, out towards the ferns and foothills rolling at the base of the volcano. She starts at the beginning, where it is easiest (she speaks the North in its entirety; she has never seen the use of identifying it as Leilan's Isle or Neverwhere's Nerine or her beloved Taiga; borders were the creations of mortals - not Gods - and all they seemed to do was create division).

She starts at the beginning as she knows it: Nerine passed from Breckin to Heartfire to Neverwhere to Popinjay (this is said with an ache, with worry because Lilliana reveals that this is her dearest friend and the current Queen - Rook as she calls herself - claimed the crown after the disappearance of the other). The Isle remained largely quiet until it was razed at the tail-end of Castille's - then-king of Loess - reign. Jesper, former Leader of the affronted island, was stolen by the same offending country. More thefts occurred across the realms. And then the stirrings in the East finally turned into flames that blazed across Loess, Nerine, and Taiga.

Part of Taiga burnt, she says. Nerine has a blasted beach from a small skirmish fought by Magicians and dragonlings and shifters. (Lilliana even elaborates with bits of flickering memories: the charred eastern part of the Redwoods, the scorched stone in Nerine, the smoldering taint of Magic staining the air afterward.) They are fortunate in that they are rebuilding, she reminds herself. "We were fortunate," she reminds herself and to @[Wishbone]. "We didn't suffer casualties as Loess did."