These endless fields are supposed to be full of peace, so how is it that she is here, still full of tears?
Oh, but they come.
They finally hit her the moment her brother leaves and the fog surrounds her. They fall fast and hard and hot against her chestnut cheeks. The years between the last time they saw each other and this meeting here in the Afterlife nearly overwhelm her, but the years that separated them are ones that she can see clearer than ever.
What Beqanna doesn't know - what the land of the Sunrise never saw - was that there were once three horses on a mountain pass. Two were light-colored (and one as pale as the autumn snow that threatened to fall soon), one had a blazing red pelt like wildfire. Two sets of eyes glittered like onyx in the sunlight, tempers ready to blaze like Lilliana's gold-red skin. And she had done her best, as she had always had, to dispel the rising tension between her family members.
But Aletta was a force to be reckoned with; she always had been. And the words that Malachi had cast at her had been the stones to crumble a mountain.
"You would have me break father's promise?" the dappled gray had asked. (He didn't raise his voice but somehow the deepening of it had sounded worse. Like thunder in the distance, like the rumblings of discontent yet to come.) Aletta, who had taught her children to have their own voice from an early age, heard her eldest and raised her refined head. But just as she had raised them to speak their concerns and to make themselves known, the gray mare had never wavered once her mind had been made.
Not even for her children.
"I would have you look to your own family," she tells him. Kalina - his mate - had been expecting again and with four young mouths to feed, scavenging for dead grass and roots was no longer a feasible choice for the band. "Your father knows that I will be here and when the Winds decide, he will come back for me." But the young stallion had argued. Would the Winds be there to aid her when a predator came calling? Worse yet, what about a rogue male? And that had earned a glittering stare from their mother.
Sharp, pointed words as dark as the onyx that shone through her near-midnight eyes.
Hadn't she managed to sneak Brynn away from Skullface?
Had she not defeated Sirocco at the Summit?
Had she not kept Underworld away from young Elena?
And Lilliana had tried. Malachi had argued with their mother and their mother had said fewer and fewer words. "Malachi, please." The smaller chestnut pleaded. Then the worst had happened. The gray Andalusian had looked to his sister, another horse that he had promised their father that he would protect, and said: "You are coming with us to Liridon. To the Donietas." Much as he had told her when he announced that they were all going to Culloden.
That had been the moment her grief had broken free.
She had done as she was bid; Lilliana had played the respectable sister, the dutiful daughter. She had gone to Culloden and how had that played out? A man was supposedly dead because he had sheltered them. Something had broke in her and Lilli had snaked her head back. "No." She finally said, no longer trying to smooth the ragged edges of the argument between her mother and brother. Danger would follow them wherever they went and some part of her said it was better to go off alone.
It always seemed to find them wherever they went - the Legacy clan, the Summer line - and some part of Lilli thought that maybe she would be harder to find on her own.
On her own, she found trouble. It didn't seem to matter where she went, how far she tried to leave it behind her. It took the shape of a stallion with blue stripes and the gold coloring she had trusted through her entire life. She found trouble and Lilli who had played the peacekeeper for her family, called out for help the only way she knew how. Because in their hour of need, they always came. Because when the worst was about to happen, somebody was always there: her mother, her father, her brother, Elena. Somebody always came and perhaps some part of her thought that somebody would come.
That the worst would be about to happen and the family she had lost would know, that something was wrong, that they would -
They never came.
They never came and she weeps now because she knows why he never came back for her; it wasn't because he was angry. It had nothing to do with their mother's stubborn pride. It wasn't because his fury had lasted years. Malachi had never been given them. Her brother never came back because he couldn't. He had been here and the repressed fury that has been building all this time just pours out from her blue eyes.
It makes her angrier that she can't stop them. She clenches her jaw and arches her neck, tucking her refined head down until a familiar voice lifts it back up. Lilliana looks to see @[Neverwhere] standing there with the fog swirling around her and wearing a frown that is familiar to Lilli as the mare herself. Her eyes widen and then her nostrils flare though there is no scent; there is nothing of the brine of Nerine or the moorland grasses that once clung to the dappled woman. "I was going home," Lilliana says. The haze around them continues to swirl until there are faint outlines of a forest, the soft trickle of a current nearby. "With my brother," she starts to explain (because once Lilliana had told her that nobody was looking for her and now she knows that wasn't true). "But it would seem his home and mine are no longer the same."
She takes a deep breath, railing against the tightness in her chest. What she says next should surprise neither of them. She blinks once and then twice as the world around them continues to resemble a forest they once passed through. Her voice wavers. "I'm lost, Nev."
but it's all in the past, love
it's all gone with the wind