you were a shot in the dark
and aimed right at my throat
Lilliana remembers, too. She remembers far too much and recalls too often. (It is why she is so grateful for Neverwhere, who pulls her forward time and time again. Who reminds her again and again that the past is a thing done; there is no changing it.)
It worries Yanhua, makes Nashua uncomfortable, and had been one the last pieces of advice she had been given by her mother, Aletta, before the pale mare had left for the realm of Beyond. ('Enough, Lilli.' She had said one foggy Taigan morning. Lilliana had caught sight of Aela and had stood there with her heart breaking in those shattering blue eyes. 'You tell her or you don't. You tell her to stay or you let her go. But there is no more of this.' The copper mare had said nothing. She had stood there in the quiet, thinking of all the things she wanted to say, the air becoming electrified with her anger. But nothing had come. What was there to say? Aela was almost grown. She had always been gone. Trying again, gentler (or as gentle Aletta knew how to be), she said: 'There is no point of throwing yourself on a spear already thrown, Lilliana. Let it hurt. Let yourself bleed. And then let it go.'
She's been trying.
She has been trying so hard to follow her mother's advice.
But like Eurwen, Lilliana remembers.
She remembers the day that the mist around her home fell. She remembers the fog descending and she remembers that Elena had burst through the barrier of it. She had gone charging through it like the knights and warriors of their legends and Lilliana has always leaped when it has come to those she loves. She had leaped after Elena and then the two of them had gotten separated in the Common Lands of Beyond. And then started the pattern of their story in this life: they only come together in dreams, now.
Lilliana remembers Elena (and also Aletta) when she looks at Eurwen. She recalls the sense of family as the whisper fades into the back of her mind with a myriad of other memories. "Hi, Wen." She says and takes a step closer. Lilli takes one more step and then greets the other mare as she would have done with her golden cousin. (A heart-shaped marking on the palomino mare on her forehead and that was always how they greeted each other; with foreheads pressing against that lovely heart.) Something about her companion seems so vulnerable, so fragile like the wisps of the memory that lingered, that Lilliana almost didn't ask.
But she does because as Aletta had said, there was no sense in holding to things already gone.
Because as Lilliana was learning, nobody should be hostage to their memories.
"What's wrong?"