There is a lonely soul who blows in on a Taigan breeze.
She drifts in again from the forests of the north and the more she makes this trek, the more familiar it becomes. It becomes easier to float from territory to kingdom and any apprehension she had about doing so fades with each season that passes. That invisible border that Lilli had created between herself and Neverwhere falls away, another wall she had constructed because it was so much easier to put space between herself and the world. Because it was so much easier to pretend that nothing was wrong at all when everything was.
She's still a pretender. The crimson woman who walks with a fluid stride in Nerine is absolutely a pretender. Lilliana has learned how to craft a porcelain face that smiles like her, that beams and warms and laughs as she has always had. It was almost terrifying how easy it was for her to lie about those emotions - how easy it was for her to hide beneath the mask of someone else, of someone who had once existed. (If there is one thing she is grateful for in her upbringing, she grateful for the lessons her mother unknowingly taught her. She is thankful for the example that Aletta provided - in the absence of identity, take on a role.) So Lilli tries on a few roles these days and always asks the dawn the same question, 'Who will I be today?' Diplomat. Friend. Stranger. Beqanna, as it has always been, is entitled to take its pick.
That quiet that she and Elaina had once wished has settled in her life and Lilliana finds it devoid of anything she has ever wanted.
('I think we could both use some quiet,” her golden cousin had said. 'We have had far too many complications. I think it would be nice, to live a life, without any more of them.' )
She comes to Nerine intending to find Brine. The last look exchanged between the two mares has settled uneasily on the tempest soul of the chestnut and Lilli adds the roan to an ever-growing list of things done wrong, something else she repents in silence for. (Was she right to suggest Nerine? She hopes - Gods, she always hopes - that whatever had taught Brine to find such fear in the world does not find her here.)
Her eyes are cast upon the sea. Under the spell of winter, everything is grey.
Everything is resting. The world lays in wait again.
Lilliana doesn't notice the thin layer of new snow that quiets her hoofsteps. For once, she doesn't look upon a wintry landscape with aversion. She hardly notices it all. The sea - the song of a waning tide on a barren beach - calls to her and like all forgotten things she encounters, her heart reaches for it. Without thinking, her trail changes and the copper mare goes where it seems other souls frequently do not. Those sovereign cliffs remain in the distance and Lilli keeps it waiting, choosing the gentle-sloping hill instead. It's a quiet cove she finds, another abandoned beach that aches for somebody to remember that it exists.
So she stands there and she listens. The wind is sharper here, angrier, than it had been on the clifftops above. There is nothing to abate it. It tugs and tangles her mane. The iciness of it bites at the tips of her ears and burns her flaring nostrils. The bluffs and precipices of Nerine have learned to alleviate it over the decades. But here? Here, the wind tells Lilliana of all its bitterness.
And she simmers within its embrace.
She shouldn't, she knows. She has no right to feel this way. She has no justification for the anger that has been building. Her feelings should have never existed and whatever Lilliana had felt should never have been in the first place. So she tells herself over and over again when the hurt and the ache fill a void in her chest (something she knows that wasn't there before), she furiously reminds herself that she is not allowed any of it.
(And so goes the vicious circle - the emotions that push against her like the waves of an incoming tide and Lilliana pushes them back out like an ebbing one.)
Maybe it is the churning of the ocean, the stirring of the artic current around her but the woman who stands there and stares out to the wild sea closes her eyes and turns away. She goes to hide against a wall of stone where she thinks that there is nobody to see her cry. Where nobody can tell her she has no right to grieve something that should have never existed to begin with.
She turns and blinks, stunned.
This beach is not empty.
"@[Brazen]?"
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind