When the fog recedes, the sunlight is dazzling.
It smiles into her eyes and blinds her, causing the chestnut mare to blink as Lilliana tries to adjust her sight. Her blue eyes see the familiar ghosts of the massive redwoods emerging through the haze but there are other images that flash through her mind too, specters that remind her she has been in a waking dream.
(A palomino child, defiant and daring with wildfire amber eyes, glances at her as Lilli presses herself shyly into her mothers side.)
(A gilded face in sunglow that registers shock as his blue eyes find their mirror in the chestnut yearling that looks up at him.)
(A golden shoulder, striped in blue and shadow-)
That thought brings an iron wall in her mind and she shuts it out almost as immediately as it came. She blinks again, realizing, remembering, telling herself that she is home. That the grassy knoll she stands on, the trees that tower above her, that the cadence of waves that crash in the distance all tell her she is home. She is home and she lets the scent of pine and evergreen wash over her. There is nothing that brings her as much peace as knowing that she is back in Taiga.
Air can fill her lungs again. She is away from that desert, from that place that was and yet wasn't.
Lilliana turns her head, thinking that it must have been a dream. Her mind is again grasping for reason and it goes first to Neverwhere, remembering a touch on the shoulder that felt real. She thinks it must have been a trick of her subconscious, another reminder of all the wrongs she has done to perhaps her only true friend in Beqanna and that knots around her heart. She needs to go to Nerine.
('Nobody is looking for me,' comes her heavy admission. A familiar touch comes in reply, 'I am sorry if thats true.')
She feels oddly weak, like a newborn foal grasping their legs for the first time and so Lilliana doesn't move. She takes the moment to steady herself before she takes that first step. An ear twitches to the sound of the ebbing tide in the distance and a brief glance above shows the mist lingering at the treetops, a whole world existing above their heads that they would know nothing of. It's easy to imagine those clouds that Smidgen had spoke of, how it felt to spread imaginary wings and cut through them.
A moment, a moment is all she wants and then there it is.
It is the smell of the deserts in these woods and her bruised heart panics, rattles against her ribcage and her blue eyes widen. What weakness, fatigue had been there, tells her to flee because she can't go back. She doesn't want to return to that place of impossible choices. She can't. Even if it had been a fever dream, she doesn't want to revisit it even in her memories.
But it comes.
(A black mare too close to a cliff's edge, an angry stallion with orange eyes who extinguishes the life of a flame.)
And then she sees them. It stops her heart. How was any of this possible? How was this real? It had been a dream.. like Kagerus's dreamscape. It had been a dream... hadn't it? None of it could have been possible and yet when she sees the gold and black forms standing together beneath the Taigan trees, she remembers all of it. She remembers and even though she is confused (and they must be as well, to not exist and then to suddenly be), the Diplomat takes one step forward. Her gaze first goes to the flame and Lilliana feels the start of a wistful smile, "You're real." She murmurs. And then she looks to the black mare. She has never been so grateful, so relieved to see a stranger. "And you're together."
LILLIANA
light me up, i will blaze
like a soul you have saved
@[craft] @[anatomy]