- it's in the eyes, i can tell you will always be danger -
we had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?
LILLIANA
Her eyes remain steady on the horizon. Lilliana watches the waves as they come crashing in and she becomes aware of how long they have standing here. The salt tangles her mane and she knows will continue to smell the brine on her skin for hours after. The chestnut mare has done a fair amount of her thinking beneath Taiga’s tall canopy but most of it has been done here. Even from the very beginning, Lilli has always found it easy to dream beneath the open sky by the coast. It’s easier to send thoughts out (and up) with the turn of a tide.
"You’ll have to tell me more about what the North was like then,” she murmurs. From Aten, she had pieced together the history of the Redwoods to a reign of a stallion called Ruan (and sometimes she thinks she’s caught a glimmer of a patrolling wolf echoing from the primordial ferns). Still, Lilliana isn’t Beqanna born-and-bred. The fine red pelt that shivers against the brisk winter cold tells a story of another place - a much warmer one with a waterfall that rivaled Tephra’s, with a valley so deep that it would have made the Redwoods behind them small - despite the tragedies that have shadowed it.
There hadn’t been an ocean in Murmuring Rivers. There hadn’t been one in Paraiso, either or Culloden. Of the many things that had lured the copper woman to Taiga, the ocean is one of the few reasons she stayed (the other two are tucked safely away in the forest at her back).
Lilliana, though chilled, is relaxed and at ease next to a stallion she considers a friend. She has known @[Leilan] for years and perhaps that’s why these words slip so easily between them. He had been one she thought of (in terms of Crowns while she considered Curses in Pangea). So that’s why she thinks nothing of it when glances sidelong at him and peers up at from beneath her dark lashes when he laughs. Even though the winter day is fair, there is something brighter than the daylight in his rolling laughter.
It makes her smile.
Leilan tells her that he’s appointed a council - like they have done in Taiga, like the half-formed idea she still has in the back of her mind - on the Isle before. It baffles her, that like Neverwhere and Eurwen and Lethy, the silver roan acts like sovereignty is something she can give. (She is the daughter of a King, though Valerio had been too modest that call himself that, if bloodlines and histories mattered at all here.) That quick smile falters because there is a memory of someone who seemed to agree with her.
But this day is pleasant and there is warmth twinkling back at her from the green-eyed gaze of her present companion. It makes it easy to smile again. "You tell me,” Lilliana says. He’s been a leader before. He’s been in the North longer than she or Lethy or Neverwhere have. If there is anyone who might know it or what it needs, it should be Leilan. And when he tells that he expects her to act as his confidence, well, "I doubt you need me for that.” She banters with him and beams that impish grin. A lack of confidence is not something she would attribute to the Freyr.
The winter wind blows past again, reminding her of the hours passed and the ones left. Lilliana tilts her head towards the towering sentinels behind them, "If your feeling indulging, perhaps you’d be willing to keep me company while I make my rounds.”
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind