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Neverwhere · (This post was last modified: 07-21-2020, 08:31 PM by Neverwhere.)

Beryl leans close to @[lilliana] in that shadow realm, although the red mare seems not to notice her, lost somewhere in her own thoughts. Perhaps that's better, nobody knows better than Beryl what can happen when you leave your path too soon, although the thought reawakens the concern for the filly swallowed by shadow and gone... Gods, she hopes gone to Nerine.

Have faith, she reminds herself with a fierceness fueled by guilt. Have faith that the shadows took the girl to safety, no matter where that may be.

And then light pours over them, cool sea air rushing into her lungs like clear water on a parched throat. After Pangea, after the humidity of the forest, the closeness and stillness broken only by the cries of the confrontation they have left, it is a relief to be home. The shadows recede, except one that winds itself into her mane like a fond snake seeking warmth, and blinks its three yellow eyes in a particularly un-snake-like manner. She cannot see it but feels the cool air of its darkness crawl against her skin and flicks an ear back as though listening to words no-one else can hear. Brown eyes blink against the bright light, and as they clear the rocks separate themselves from a stony-faced mare, dark and dappled, pale blue eyes in a white face like the fog that often hides the sun.

Neverwhere.

Beryl draws herself up defensively under that gaze, turns when Lilliana asks her if she knows where her daughter is, and then crumples, shoulders drooping and her proud head falling.

safe

"....No." The word falls from her lips like a stone. The three-eyed shadow hisses in her ear.

friends

There are limits to the knowledge she can glean from them, and she doesn't know if that is her limitation, or theirs, but the shadows hold their secrets.

"I..." What is she going to do, apologize? For losing a child? Her heart cracks. "I'm so sorry. I don't know where she is. They say she's somewhere safe but they won't - or can't - tell me where. It's their nature to hide things." Her head turns away as Neverwhere comes nearer, unwilling to see the expression on either mare's face.

It only takes a moment for Neverwhere to forget her distaste for magic when the sudden swirl of shadows lightens and in the center is Lilliana. Her eyes fall briefly on the young palomino that accompanies her, that returns her stare with fading defiance and then turns away, speaking softly. This must be Eurwen's sister, though there is nothing in their shape to advertise it. She spares little time to wonder, already turning back to Lilliana with a scowl that hides her concern.

"Lilli. You look like shit."

Her words are a disapproving growl quickly belied by the way she presses into her friend, lets her chin rest briefly across the other's back. It has been a long year.

"It's Brennen," now her voice turns uneasy. Necessity does not breed love for the magic net constricting Nerine, "he's been keeping Wolfbane out of Nerine." For as long as he can. Her scarred skin twitches. It's not a perfect plan, but it gives them time. To heal, to regroup, to protect their family and friends, "But he's vulnerable, I think, so we won't be able to do this forever. Something more needs to happen, I just don't know what, and I'm quite sure Lepis will have no interest in discussing that with either of us."

She snorts a rough laugh and pulls away from Lilli, casting a glowering eye on the faint glimmer above them. She is not very interested in having that discussion with Lepis, either. The bald-faced mare has no qualms at all with letting others take the lead and take the risks of that venture, but she knows that not every Nerinian feels quite the same on that count. No... Not every Nerinian. She wonders what they will call the kingdom's people with its seat growing hoarfrost on the Isle. Islanders will certainly not give the right idea of who they are or where the majority live. Lilliana had been wrong to think queendom had suited Neverwhere, but she had certainly been true to herself to hope. For her part, Neverwhere had always known it would come to nothing and there is a relief to be freed of their expectations. Their disappointments she does not care to bother with.

Neverwhere · 07-26-2020, 08:21 PM

Neverwhere is like the rocks of Nerine, dark and slow to change. She yields to the gentle pressure of her friend the way the forbidding walls of granite do to wind and wave, wearing away to something smoother, if not much softer, than before. For this reason, she spoke so sharply to Eurwen, demanding the red mare be brought home, for this reason she lets her dislike of magic burn low as Nerine sits beneath Brennen's flynet, as Lilli arrives in a swirl of darkness, and for this reason, she forgets her usual stand-offishness to hug tight to the broken mare, in spite of the strange memory of thunder that rings softly in her ears just before she pulls away. She does not go far, but follows Lilliana's gaze back to the young palomino that lingers nearby.

Beryl. The girl is quiet, but she flinches when Lilli reaches out to her, as though she expects something other than graciousness. The Nerinian Queen is silent during the exchange, only watching the way sadness cracks at the edges of the girl's face, disbelief warring with guilt, the way she returns the gesture nervously. The briefest touch and then Beryl's head jerks back as though she has been shocked, her skin jumping. Neverwhere frowns and turns her gaze away from them, looking back at Brennen's web. She has no doubt who 'He' is, and he would only be interested in one sort of creature that Lilliana might have with her. The etched lines of her burnt lips deepen. Safe, but lost, perhaps irredeemably so. Magic. She sneers. Neverwhere would be less forgiving if Amarine were plucked away from her and turns back to comment sharply on a job only half done, but @[lilliana] is already changing the subject and the words die on her tongue.

"He's been standing in the ocean for days," she says, instead, watching the strange horror that makes Beryl's eyes widen and her breath quicken, "The magic draws it's power from water, but it's a large spell, it requires everything." This is what makes it unsustainable - the stallion is a prisoner to her request.

"A friendly eye on the water, for one."

Neverwhere · 08-11-2020, 09:53 AM

Beryl does not need anybody to tell her that she has failed. Her only instruction, of course, had been to return @[lilliana] to Nerine and to that point, she has done exactly as requested, but things are never as simple as that. The world is not black and white. She remembers being in the painted mare's dream world and the blank white nothing that she had been deposited within to do with what she could. She could do nothing until the shadows came, pouring out of her mouth, turning her inside out. They had mixed with the purity of that blankness, with the starlight that sparked off her shoulder, had stained the void with darkness and color, and built an entire world.

What else she had done in that world was not relevant. What is relevant is what she is doing in this one, and in this one, she has left a child lost. The tawny mare knows exactly how that destroys a family, how it can tarnish a childhood. It's impossible not to remember her own loss in a similar manner (she had been young and unaware of her powers, the shadows had been eager to accept her among them,) and it adds an extra barb of ice to the usual fear and guilt that pierce her breast.

Of course she has failed, she does not need Neverwhere's scowl to tell her that, and Lilliana's acceptance is too easy, too simple. It makes her brow crease, her eyes narrow in concern, flicking from the red mare to the dappled one, but Beryl's forte is in hiding among shadows, not handling the emotions of others, she can barely control her own. Instead, she returns Neverwhere's stern frown and touches her muzzle softly to Lilliana's red poll, an apology, a farewell.

"I'll go. We," she means the shadows, there are so many in the deep sea, "can watch the water," and then she is gone in a sudden rush of cool shadows.

Neverwhere is silent as Beryl fades away in a cloud of darkness and there is something in that power that feels familiar, something long ago - in experiences if not in actual years - and she cannot quite place it. A memory of shadows and lions and golden horses. She snorts softly - it cannot be important. Certainly not more important than the topic at hand.

"Ischia? I hadn't thought to ask. I don't think his protection stretches as far as that, but he spends quite a lot of time there, so he may have friends willing to help. It might be best to find out what he needs from him."

Saying it is admitting that she has not done exactly that already, and she knows that she is doing a poor job of leading Nerine but it does not weigh as heavily on her as perhaps it should. Pale eyes run over Lilliana's thin frame, her mane unkempt, her coat dull and scarred, and she sighs.

"That is not a trip for you to make right now." There is a warning in her voice - she knows full well that her crimson friend would try. "We can find someone else if it is needed."

If it is needed. Brazen and Fiorina could watch the borders, but it will not be enough to be defensive. Defensive will leave Brennen in the ocean forever.

"I think we need to figure out how to end this, Lilli," Neverwhere shakes her head emphatically, "Wolfbane needs to be stopped, and it's more complicated than just killing him or Lepis would have let Castile burn him years ago."

lilliana · (This post was last modified: 08-13-2020, 01:31 PM by lilliana.)

- it's in the eyes, i can tell you will always be danger -
we had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?

LILLIANA

Something happens to Lilliana when Beryl goes. She owes the girl a great debt of gratitude. If she were not Immortal, at the very least, she would owe the shadowchaser her life. It’s something that she might owe for Aela. The palomino dissolves in a haze of them and leaves the chestnut mare staring at the open space she had been.

All the open light suddenly seemed too bright. Almost overwhelming.

Lilliana simply stares at it, losing herself somewhere along the lines of the anguish of her missing daughter and the disbelief that she was finally home. Neverwhere calls her back with a snort and Lilli blinks, trying to chase the shadows from her blue eyes. "I know their Dame,” the red mare says. "Aquaria. She has abilities tied to the water.” She forces herself to blink again because otherwise, she will think of her time on those white, sandy beaches. She will remember Aquaria commanding the sea, harnessing something unpredictable, and turning it into entertainment for her boys.

Her mind is turning to fast and Neverwhere reminds her to slow down.

"You’re right,” she says softly and her fleeting sense of purpose makes her seem smaller, frailer than she had been moments before. If Brennen needed something, it would best to ask him directly. If there was something they needed from Ischia, Lilliana wouldn’t be the one to make the journey. Not now, anyway.

Not when, "I don’t even know if I can make it home.” The red mare admits to her friend, filling up the open space between them where Beryl had been. There would be a debt owed to the girl but Neverwhere is one of Lilliana’s oldest friends and at this moment, she doesn’t feel the pretense to keep up appearances. Not here. She feels no shame in admitting to Nev that she feels much like she looks. Tired. Wan. Almost empty.

She reaches out to the dappled Queen and rests her slender head across the back of the Nerinian. The world has started to skew again, tilt a little this way and that. Neverwhere helps steady it.

"Do you think there could be two of you to help me back to Taiga?” she tries to tease because Lilliana still wants to grasp onto something of her old self.

And then there is silence.
And then there is more.

And then finally, Lilliana says something.

"How?” she chokes the word out from behind @[Neverwhere]. "If it can’t be killed, how can it be stopped?” The world starts to spin again and she presses her eyes shut. "I don’t know if we can stop him,” she whispers. "I tried, Nev.” Lilliana says because it feels important to say. That somebody knows this. She hadn’t thought that he would come back after the Field. She had thought that after everything that had happened - that once he had gotten what he wanted - that would have been the end of it.

Instead, it seemed like Nashua and Yanhua had been the start of everything.

You tried, she doesn’t say. She tried, the deep pink (angry) gouges on Neverwhere’s flank remind her when Lilliana finally opens her eyes.

image credit to rigardatta

Neverwhere · 08-25-2020, 10:02 AM

She can feel the change in the air when Beryl leaves. Lilliana deflates and falls against her as if the star-marked palomino was the only thing holding her strings tight, and Neverwhere keeps her silence, keeps her worries close and unspoken while Lilli grieves. What good is it to say anything? She can predict the future no better than her friend, and it's only a difference in nature that has made it seem as if she can. It's only Neverwhere's habit of introversion and distrust, of following her instincts, and the minute she stopped? Everything fell apart for her, too.

But perhaps it's easier to accept the destruction of everything when you've done no work to get where you are. Nerine means so much to Eurwen, and no wonder. She's worked so hard to protect it, spent years in silent service of it. Taiga means so much to Lilliana, and that is a small mystery to Neverwhere, except that she thinks Lilli's heart is big enough to swallow the world. Or, at least, it's big enough to try, splitting itself at the seams in the process. Perhaps that is why Neverwhere's scars don't bother her (she has never been beautiful, why start now?) but the scars and fatigue that dull the chestnut hugged tight to her side make her furious.

She returns the embrace, burying her muzzle in the thick red mane still full of witch-knots and red sand, and bares her livid teeth where Lilli cannot see. What can they do? I'll kill him, she thinks angrily, knowing full well that there is nothing she can do alone. She is less able to hide the edge in her voice.

"You're already home, Lilli. Taiga can wait." The Taiga still has Izora Lethia there to lead it, and Lilli's boys will be safer in Nerine, anyway. Lilli is safer in Nerine, "Stay here where Brennen can protect you, at least until you're stronger."

Can there be two of you? Lilli asks, and that elicits a laugh that breaks through the sharp anger in her chest. Why stop at two? The air wavers for a moment around them, shimmering strangely like the horizon on a hot day, and then there are two more dappled frowning mares. They stand strangely at first, as though embracing something invisible, but quickly pull themselves back to a normal stance and turn to look at Lilli.

And then, the air shivers again and Lilli, battered and torn, is standing between the dappled duplicates, peering back at Neverwhere and Lilliana. She is identical down to the torn flame flickering like gold foil on the Guardian's shoulder, but she does not know how to behave like Lilliana because Neverwhere does not know how to behave like Lilliana, and so this strange duplicate watches them frowning, her ears half-cocked and skeptical. Neverwhere returns the expression.

"I don't think that will fool anybody, do you?" And as she speaks, she pulls away from the Truth to study the Lie, reaching out with her muzzle to touch it to the soft grey nose.

It's a mistake to touch her.

Memory floods her. Her own memories - because the duplicate cannot have Lilliana's though it somehow has her magic. Neverwhere freezes and the other duplicates disappear, but the scarlet one remains, locked nose-to-nose like an electric pulse is coursing between them. Disjointed, uncontrolled, they come one after the other without pause.

A colt screams, his wing dislocates - Wolves howl in the woods - A porcelain-white mare wearing purple blooms remembers being a tree - the warmth of her dam's chocolate side - that same side melting into the rough bark of a tree in the forest and the scent of Neverwhere's own blood, crimson and bright as berries in the snow--

Neverwhere squeals and jerks away, striking out at the false Lilli with rolling eyes and falls back to the real one, banishing the duplicate back to nothingness. Sweat darkens her neck.

"What the hell was that? Lilli? Did you do something to it?"

@[lilliana]

lilliana · (This post was last modified: 08-29-2020, 12:20 AM by lilliana.)

It's been so long since someone has held her this close. At first, she mistakes the ferocity of Neverwhere's embrace. She thinks of the weeks and months alone in Pangea, hiding away in caverns and crevices. She thinks of the Wind that she learned had a whole different way of howling in the Wasteland. There was a mourning in it that she has never heard before.

Despite the brilliant Nerinian sunshine and the iron-brine filling her noise, she returns to Pangea in her thoughts. She returns to despair and desperation. She returns to hollowing herself out because that is the only way she knows to prevent from overfilling the emotions associated with her captivity. She'd turn into a chalice, fill to the brim with the wine of agony and Lilliana doesn't doubt that Neverwhere would choke on it. It is easier to be empty; it easier to feel nothing.

Lilliana, who has wished for so many things, wishes for only that at this moment.

Until Neverwhere tells her something she has always needed to hear. Something in the years and the wandering that she has needed to know. Something she lost somewhere between Murmuring Rivers and Paraiso and Culloden.

(Home isn't a place, Lilli. Malachi had once told her. Home is a feeling. It is a knowing from the hearts around you. An echo from the heartbeats reaching out.) Where moments ago Lilliana had wanted to feel nothing but the absence of her missing child, of the year she lost for Nashua and Yanhua, something stirs between the beats of her heart. @[Neverwhere] has always seemed like the fiercest parts of a storm to Lilli. She is the dark barrelling clouds. She is that tenacious burst of cold wind that dares the world to be anything but wind-worn. She is the erosion that stone should be wary of. Neverwhere is not stone at all. She is the Wind.

Neverwhere lends her spirit - a gust of resilience - into Lilliana and there is flickering within. A not-yet dead ember that almost sparks to life.

(Almost but not quite. Not yet.)

Her attempt at humor kindles something else between the two mares. Where there were two was now four (though Lilliana will always think the world could use more Neverwhere's) embracing the invisible. They are the mirror-image of the Khaleesi and yet the Lie lacks something. Lilli turns to look the Truth in her piercing blue eyes. "How-," she wants to know though the answer taints the air with the smell of copper. Magic. She glances sharply to the two when a third appears, when she appears. Lilliana had studied her reflection many times. She has peered in still lakesides and bubbling creeks. She has tried the frothing waves and the frigid winter rapids searching for it. What stands in front of her is not the shattered reflection she so often sees. This is what she looks like? If desolation could take a shape, it would be fire-gold? It would be here?

She's looking at herself - a Lie - but it's so easy for her to hear the truth in Wolfbane's words then. Haunted Lilliana can't share her ghost, not when Neverwhere is facing one of her. The dappled woman can't hear the way that his words echo within her. That she was weak and injured. That she was a game to be played.

(A Cursed needed a Catalyst and what better one than Lilli? What better than the child born between the lines of her parent's heartbreak? A girl who had come into this world bright and shining, wanting nothing more than to ease the sorrow that she had been created from.)

An ear flicks towards her friend. Neverwhere is speaking though she is far more aware of the way that she has pulled away from her. It's like an ache where she had been, another acute loss suffered this day. The Nerinian reaches towards her Reflection and something changes at that moment. The duplicates disappear and in their absorption, Never gains something. The winged-marked mare recoils from the false Taigan and strikes out as the copy finally dissipates. Their world returns to what it is should be; just the two of them. While the one darkens with sweat, the other only stares at her with disbelief.

She can't think of anything she could do.

Until she can.
Lilliana thinks of the way she feels the world around them. Like Yanhua does. Like Aela will.

"What happened? W-what did I- it do?"

Remember when our songs were just like prayers
Like gospel hymns that you caught in the air?

Neverwhere · 09-06-2020, 11:19 AM

Hey all you cool cats and kittens

Her ears don't turn forward, but they do lift slightly from her poll as Neverwhere looks from Lilliana to the empty space where her duplicate had stood, and she snorts at that emptiness, shakes her head, irritated, unnerved.

That shouldn't have happened.

It's never happened before, but she's never copied anyone but herself before, and she has nothing else to copy but her duplication, at least, nothing as far as she knows. Her skin is leaping and the expression on her face best described as vexed when she turns slowly back to a bemused Lilliana.

"Memories." But how?

"How could it have shown me memories? My own memories?" All the duplicates that she has brought up in the past have simply been extensions of her, of her body, her thoughts, they were simply projections of the earth-colored mare, and she had expected the copy of Lilliana to be the same - Neverwhere, but in a new shape.

It hadn't. Something new was in the magic, or, if not something new, something unexpected.

"No, wait. Let's try that again." The air shimmers again, it's like waves of heat rising from bare rock, and then she is back like a false twin, her expression scowling, perplexed. Neverwhere stands back, eyeing the thing suspiciously, wary of touching it again.

"How?" But of course, the duplicate cannot answer that question, it's an empty shell, it only knows what she knows, but it holds something strange in its depths, something that makes her suddenly mistrustful. Reluctantly, her pink muzzle grazes the torn gold flame on the duplicate's shoulder and the half-second contact makes her vision swim, but she's ready this time and doesn't stagger.

(Saphire eyes watch her coldly, but this memory is foggy and hard to see. It is before she came to Nerine, and before Heartfire gave her back her sight. "Are you, in fact, made entirely of flies?")

Time recalls itself, her eyes, still cloudy, see again. They see @[lilliana] watching with concern and confusion shining through her exhaustion. It's too much all at once, an emotional homecoming and now this. It's too much, but she has to know.

"I think it's taken something from you, something more than your shape, Lilli. It took your echoes."

That bitch, Neverwhere

Image by Cievesare

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