Perhaps it is wrong to be so willing to trust a stranger.
She told herself she never would again.
And yet here she is, listening to the pangare woman as she tells a story that begins with her daughters. As a mother, she knows that beginning: how it starts as all twisted limbs and frantic breathes and how it ends with a heart so horribly knotted with love that there is no undoing it. Lilliana listens as this mare claiming to be Wishbone - who holds her gaze with those familiar amber eyes - speaks of the Plague and the children she carried. She speaks of her untimely death that came from their father. Her heart twists and the chestnut mare reaches tenderly for the other, a silent show of support.
There are flashes of a life that isn't her own and through those memories, Lilliana sees the Wishbone that she had known. The black-and-gold woman who had talked Lilliana into scaling a volcano. There glimpses of the Afterlife that Larva had spoken of: a gray and kind of monochromatic living. The rest isn't familiar to her. They have been fortunate in Taiga that none of their own had been felled by the monsters. It had attacked Cheri and scarred Nashua but that was where the damage had ended. She hasn't encountered a mare by the name of Mazikeen (but when does Lilliana ever leave the Taiga?)
Lilliana listens as Wishbone - because who else could this be? - explains that a new body was not the end of her story but the beginning. The chestnut feels the sliver of a smile emerge, glad that this story had its shining parts. This story that Wish weaves is one her mother, Aletta, would have loved. It sounds like one that the silver mare would have told while she and her siblings drifted to sleep beneath their willow tree. She has her own questions regarding Wishbone's gift but she refrains from asking for now.
The Tephran mare has given her story and Lilliana only thinks it fair that she offer one in return.
"If you'd permit me," Lilliana starts and then offers, "a story for a story." She waits a moment before telling the story of a girl born in a place called Murmuring Rivers. She speaks of growing up racing the summer breezes and the rapids because she had been the youngest of her family. She speaks of an orphaned cousin who turned into something between a sister and an integral part of her soul. She speaks of Orani with the night sky on her coat and Salem with his desire to see the world. She speaks of a father returned from war with ghosts and how they haunted her family. She speaks of that so much of his power had been given to save a place called Windskeep, there had only been so much left to protect them when he returned.
Lilliana then tells Wishbone of the years that followed. How her home and family disappeared in a flash of Magic. How she had spent the years after on the run from the enemies her father had made. How her large family had been cut in half and then quartered themselves to go seeking a better future.
"I followed my cousin, Elena." She says and got lost in the Commons of Beyond. The chestnut even brings herself to speak of the man that she had met on the Pass, with the stormy seas trapped in his gaze and the most beautiful singing voice she has ever heard. "A bard," she tells the pangare and even smiles at the memory. It had been the first time that Lilliana had heard of such a thing. He offered shelter to her quartered family and then as time passed, had offered more to Lilliana. A future, a life together and she had hesitated. "I asked for more time," she says to Wishbone. "And he- he didn't have that."
His time ran out.
Elena then left Beyond to find that fabled place her ancestors called Windskeep. Two brothers went seeking a place called Liridon. Her mother - as obstinate as ever - refused to leave their Mountains. It was the last place they had seen her father and the silver mare was adamant that was where he would return, as certain of that as she had been of anything else.
"And so I came to Beqanna, the place of my mother's ancestors, looking for the Dale."
The chestnut doesn't need to tell the rest of her story. Wishbone knows it.
"I'm glad you're here," she finally says to the mare who had gone to a thousand places and then emerged back to this one. Her voice wavers despite the steady way her dark muzzle brushes against the slender shoulder of Wishbone, "any shape or form, I'm just glad you came back."
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind