07-25-2021, 03:42 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-25-2021, 03:44 PM by Neverwhere.)
No.
What makes everything seem so different?She wakes in Nerine, but she doesn't stay there, this strange child with wicked scars raking across her skin; with the half ears. She wakes in Nerine with the taste of dust in her dry mouth, choking on the memory of her death and the Nuckelavee's poisonous breath that sealed shut her furious throat. Those pale blue eyes are wide still with panic, the heart beating overtime between her ribs. Her lungs are on fire and when she coughs, there are leaves and - worse - beetle shells on her lips. Her legs are slow to respond when she wants to stand, too used to lying dormant, too used to death and being scattered, shattered bones. It's the cold, too, the snowy nest she finds herself in, numbing her legs, and if she had bothered to come back with her ears they might already have burned off again but luckily she didn't find the tips even in death. When she finally stumbles to her clumsy feet, it's with a disgusted sound to see their frailness. Her coat is thick against the worst of Nerine's bite, but the snow is already deep enough that she has trouble breaking through and she's wheezing by the time she finds cover.
Like all winter storms rolling across the Northern Sea, this one drives itself back out again, though the sun that peeks between the heavy layer of clouds is weak, anemic, and offers her very little. Neverwhere, small, alone-- and where is Lilli? Is she also back in the place where she died? Better question, was any of it real? The Afterlife already feels like a static-y dream. Not a real thing except...
Well, except that she's still shaped like a child.
Not just shaped like one. A tremor runs up her spine, a fear the silver filly doesn't remember as she picks her way through the lightest snowpack. She doesn't remember being afraid to be alone, does it come of dying or is it the girl she's become again, full of fanciful illusions? But who needs this imagination when monsters are real? Small, soft lips twist into a deep scowl, and the cynic that she was tamps down on the childish terror as best it can. Somewhere between rage and dread, she loses herself to the mindless and mind-numbing task of leaving the northern territories behind. Not even the thought of finding Lilliana in Taiga can stop her weary feet, not until she's in the nameless forest once again.
The long journey south awakens the world around her, spring creeping in slowly, though the dense woodland fends off so much of its warmth. It's only when she steps free of the oak and the brambles, among the smooth, worn stones of the river, that Neverwhere can find spring, feel the sun and its breath on the still-cool air that ruffles the soft curls of her coat. Here, too, she finds others and maybe she should be less surprised that they are attracted to the sight of an orphaned foal (she remembers finding Amarine in much the same way,) but she spits curses at them until they withdraw. When they don't, she bites and throws her tiny hooves up into their faces until they do, leaving the belligerent girl to disappear again into the forest where she curls up beneath needled hawthorn branches and wonders what to do.
