More than once, Ryatah says and Lilliana isn't quick enough to hide her shock. More than once? How many times has she died, then? How many ways? What were the different reasons? In the easy companionship of the winged mare, the Taigan is as transparent in her concern. In all the jagged ways that she turns her expression to glass and then tenderly fractures it, revealing all the worry she has for the white mare underneath.
For a moment, she even imagines that her lungs are burning. Like there isn't enough air in them. For a moment, she imagines the brine of Nerine on the tip of her tongue. Odd.
"We're fools to think immortality means never dying," she replies, echoing a memory from her time before Beqanna. Immortality could be borrowed (or found) in the blood of children and descendants. In the memories that others carried of those departed to the Afterlife. In the stars that carried fables and legends and stories, just waiting to be remembered. Immortals had always dreamed up creatures for Lilliana, a mythos that belonged to the realm of dragons and Magicians. It took the shape of a black unicorn, a healer who had warned about those golden veins. That there was a price for living from one end of time to another. Death was cheap, empty payment; immortality required something more permanent.
It required @[Ryatah] still living, walking beside the fiery-red mare of Taiga.
Lilliana grimaces against the shadows as soon the angel mare says it. Love. The other mare speaks, telling her that it is a beautiful and terrible thing. There is beauty in it, she knows. There is adoration in her love for her sons. For them, Lilliana would (and will) sell her soul. There is an endless depth for her capacity to love that has always terrified her but when it comes to her boys, that has never emerged. There had been no terror in the bond her parents had shared; there had been nothing dark there.
(How, then, has she come to this? That she knows the shadows of Taiga aren't empty and the potential for terror lingers behind each mighty Redwood.)
The red mare slows when Ryatah's dark eyes meet hers and the forest around them falls quiet. A lull that creeps in with the fog. This time, it isn't that Lilliana isn't quick enough to catch her reaction. It isn't that she even tries to hide the way her face wants to fall. A leap of faith that she shares with the haloed woman beside her. "Is that why Death refused to keep you?" says the younger one, her voice descending into this quiet they've found and regarding Ryatah behind deep blue eyes. "Because there was nothing left to moor you?"
And all Lilliana thinks of is fire; of all the ways that she has always loved to burn so impossibly bright.
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions