blue eyes and blue skies fade into the dark; aten

[lilliana]

Summer comes to the Taiga as only that season can - all that green vibrancy and the lush promise of things to come. Even the fog that has hidden Lilliana on the western shore starts to burn away by the insistence of the summer sun. And truly, when has the chestnut mare ever been one that is meant to be hidden away?

No, that isn't Lilliana. That isn't the wildflower child.

Her pelt sports the dapples of the season and the copper mare moves through the impressive redwoods, those imperial trees that have stood for so much (and stood through so much) with the fluid ease of someone who knows the trails and the seasons of this northern land. It has been her home for three years and Lilliana has come to know Taiga as she has come to know herself: some parts that reveal themselves with startling clarity and other parts that still remain shrouded in fog, places and pieces of her that have yet to emerge.

But the young woman who emerges today is not an uncertain one. The one who emerges through these trees today is one who searches in earnest for a champagne stallion that she knows lingers in this part of the forest. Lilliana emerges from the trunk of one massive trunk to another, brushing underneath the primitive ferns while frequently looking above to keep an eye out for Turul. The falcon was as much a protector of these woods as the Champion was; locate one and the other was never far away. Her determined stride pauses as she stills behind one trunk and looks around another, as she continues forward trying to find Aten.

His scent is here as well as Lethy's and their expanding brood of children. That thought tugs a smile at the darkened edges her mouth and Lilli rounds another corner of her trail while glancing upward once more, staring above at the tangle of leaves and branches that wave so impossibly high against the breeze that passes above.

"Aten?" she calls, her voice inquiring as it echoes against this part of the redwoods as she comes to a standstill - a crimson flame that stands devout in the cathedral of Taiga's woods. "Anybody home?"

@[Aten] and anyone else who might want to crash