You are a coward.
The thought has echoed within her head, resonated in the deepest caverns of her mind and has only grown louder and louder in the few months since she has come to Beqanna. She is not brave. She is the foolish, silly girl that so many dismiss her of being. Lilli, with those laughing blue eyes and her head in the clouds, is so easily dismissed as being too childish in her mannerisms and her thoughts. There has been a part of Lilli that has liked that facade because if she is do easily dismissed, it is so much harder to be disappointed in the characters that come and go in her life so easily. They can leave and Lilli can forgive them with a child's grace because she has none of the emotional baggage that comes along with getting older.
Coward.
Coward.
The voice has only chanted louder, demanding her to acknowledge the fact that she has known all along. She can smile and laugh, be the girl she has always been, but there is something there that wasn’t broken before. There is something dark and angry that she keeps buried, that she keeps pushing away because to acknowledge it is not something she knows how to do. The guilt is always there. There are days that she can keep it so far from her that Lilli can pretend it doesn’t exist. She pushes it so far away, adds layer upon layer until she thinks that she has finally conquered it. She can finally lay it to rest and find some peace, find some way to absolve herself of the sins that she has been coated in.
Lilli has never know regret. She has known disappointment but that has been kept at bay. Disappointment can be acknowledged and the crimson girl knows how to move on from that. The disappoints she has known have been slight in comparison to others and she uses that to not dwell on them. If anything, Lilli can take those disappointments and use them to paint an even brighter picture. She has known a few homes in a few years but her family has always been together. They clung to each other and persevered, kept moving forward when it might have been easier to let the loss of an ancestral home consume them. She has seen her mother, regal and fierce in her determination to provide for her family, fight and protect to secure a place for them. And she had seen that same mare become gentle and coaxing, easing the darkest parts of her sire when the ghosts of war had plagued him. She watched how together they balanced the other, became stronger and how that love not only sustained them but a family and a kingdom as well.
Here in the outskirts of Pangea, alone among the maples and the commanding mountains, Lilli chases the last remnants she has of those memories.
Beqanna had been home to her mother once. Aletta had seen the land divided and decided that the home of her ancestors wasn’t the place that she was looking for. In a twist of fate, the daughter is here instead. She knows that Pangea is one of the ancient places and Lilli can’t but wonder that perhaps, perhaps that might be some magic still here. There might be a remnant of the places her distant kin once knew, a part of the Dale or the other places they might have called home. In the memory of her parents, Lilli has set out to discover the last fragments of her family that she has left.
Coward, the thought echoes to her again, letting her know that she is not alone in the silence of the night. She is never alone. Aletta, Valerio, her siblings, Elena, Orani, they are kept as close to her heart as they have ever been and in a place that she is so unfamiliar with, she has turned them over and over again in her mind, going from memory to memory where she can repeat the words of her mother, father, cousin line for line and knows every outcome. She clutches them to her heart and Lilli sends a fervent prayer out into the night, hoping that wherever they are, they are happy. Coward, comes the voice again, taunting and cruel.
It breaks the memories and strips her bare of the protection they offer. It leaves her exposed and raw, resurrecting the guilt and loss, the very things she has fought so hard to hide.
There was a time when Lilli had fire. She has stared down the Winter King and even in the dark of the night, undead Underworld hadn’t scared her. She had been bold once, a lifetime ago. But the regret and the guilt have broken Lilliana in some way, taking something from her. It has changed her, the very thing she had been so afraid of. In the shadows, the maples all look the same. They loom in the shadows and she can feel her heart race, the pulse comes alive and quickens. Perhaps it is the stories of old magic, of Carnage but the crimson girl starts to see shapes in the darkness. The silence suddenly becomes unbearable, the atmosphere shifting into something eerie and expectant.
There was something out there waiting for her.
Hyaline might not seem so daunting under sunlight but drowning in the darkness of a new moon, Lilli walks faster. And upon deciding this was a bad idea, perhaps one of the worst she has ever considered, she turns. She is ready to run, to flee and never come to this forsaken place. Her mind reels with ghosts and evils, the terror coming in the form of night and pushes against her chestnut frame. It threatens to swallow her, to dissolve her into nothing and oblivion. She runs, runs and runs with all the speed she can muster. She is almost blind with the fear until a scent comes drifting down the wind. A sweet, familiar scent that is engraved on her heart. A smell that Lilli could discern among a million others even in a land as wild and as vast as this one.
Coward, the voice comes again, encouraging her to keep running.
But something inside the chestnut girl shifts and Lilli stops, letting the smell of sweat and fear surround her. For the first time in months, something outweighs the dismay, something is stronger than the dread. She knows that scent and Lilli goes against everything in her that tells her to run, goes the opposite way. The mare goes back through the trees, pausing where she needs to and then continuing follows it, follows it through the dark and the emptiness and against everything that tells her this is impossible. Lilli knows that this is most likely a trick of the mind, one of Beqanna’s fickle gods playing a trick on her or perhaps it is her desperate hope, blinding her to the rational. But she has to know.
The steps become determined and the scent, though changed and different, is still the same at heart. It is wild and bold, a shining light in the dark. And there in the dark, resting is the golden form of a mare that Lilli knows. It is her best friend, her cousin, her sister. Now the dark does push against Lilli and it terrifies her. There is a split second where she thinks it is a trick of the senses, of her aching heart wanting nothing more than to be reunited with Elena, her flame in the darkness. Somehow she closes the distance between them, the feeling in her feet gone replaced solely with the feeling of air and grace, of want and urgency and longing.
Coward, the voice comes fainter now, quieted the presence of perhaps the only one who could convince Lilliana otherwise. Her vision blurs then and Elena becomes a tangle of gold and shadow, of the trees of Hyaline and the night around them. ”Elena,” she chokes, the words somehow finding their way out. How she is here, Lilli doesn’t know. But as they have always been, Lilli is just grateful that she is somehow here.
@[Elaina] i caved
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind