10-23-2021, 08:44 PM
WE ARE ALL JUST FRAGILE THINGS /
SOFT AND SMALL /
BUT ALL THE BROKEN CAN FIND /
HOPE IN THE MOST UNEXPECTED PLACES /
"Is he alright?" Lilliana asks quickly. Her second son was well past the age of needing his dam, but Leilan's mention of a promise to him makes her maternal concern sharply rise. She peers up at the taller horse, suddenly desperate for news. She had been out in the Common Lands searching for Neverwhere, and hearing no news of Taiga, she had assumed that everything in her former home was fine.
If something was wrong - if something had gone wrong during the Eternal Night - surely she would have heard a whisper about it in the Meadow or the River. Beqanna loved gossip, and if there was a murmur of anything about Taiga or any of her children, Lilliana had been certain that she would hear of it.
"Taiga?" she continues, wanting to know about Oren and Roselin, and Reave.
She continues to look up at him, but Leilan won't look at her and it makes Lilliana uneasy. The slender chestnut shifts her weight from one hip to the other, waiting for him to meet her waiting gaze.
He found his sister in the Afterlife, he explains, and then wonders aloud if she had stayed there or returned to Beqanna. They had been alike in that way. They had both come from large families; both came from unions that had been love matches. Lilliana has her head tilted towards his, listening to listening to Leilan continue to speak. Would he return for this sibling, or try to figure out what had happened to her?
But it isn't family that he continues to talk of. Instead, it is Wolfbane. He speaks the name so easily, and yet in the almost decade that the striped pegasus had been dead, Lilliana has never been able to say it. She stills, and her muscles grow taut for a moment. Wolfbane said hello? Her confusion registers plain enough on her face, and the chestnut pulls slightly away from him. Why would Wolfbane have anything to say to her? (And more importantly, was there anything left to say?)
"I don't care what he has to say," she finally decides. Leilan even smiles that handsome grin of his, slightly mischievous, and Lilliana continues to glance up at him, trying to make some sense of what he was trying to do. She knew that he didn't intend for the message to be cruel or unkind (she might assume as much about Wolfbane, but Leilan had helped rear her children - even the ones that hadn't been his - and despite their differences, unkind would never be a word she could associate with Oren and Roselin's father).
What home did she want to go to, he asks? That had been the reason for the fog, hadn't it? The filly who had been born in Murmuring Rivers, who had spent such a short time in Paraiso, who had spent a year or more on the run before coming to Beqanna, who had lived in Taiga and Nerine, where was home?
"I don't know," she answers him. Her mind returns to the Afterlife and slowly, the tension between her shoulders and creasing at the corners of her blue eyes begins to recede with the memory of her brother. Malachi had once told her that home wasn't a place, but a feeling; a sense of belonging, of family. Lilliana had been careful over the years to not bring up Leilan's former spouse, not willing to cross anymore boundaries, but perhaps his mention of the man that she had once strongly cared for had already broken them.
"Did you ever want that again?" and she doesn't let the memory stay overlong, but an image of Breckin presses gently against his conscious. Her voice becomes soft, because she doesn't want to upset Leilan, but here they were, talking about past loves; it seemed that Death made something abundantly clear to Lilliana. Maybe this was why she hadn't truly died.
fragile things (reprise) - megan hilty
image credit to footybandit
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind