to the top of the world; nev

[lilliana]

There is a gust of air that comes from within the chest of the russet mare as she pushes her thoughts out with a passing breeze. Her refined head lowers as Lilli's thick mane is gently tousled by a passing breath of air that makes it way from the bluffs above down to the crashing waves below. Freedom had been her first impression of Nerine and now she wonders if that was just the wind echoing in her ears, telling her that there was nothing to hinder its travel here. That above the rest of Beqanna, it could be as wild and untamed as it liked. That it could taunt the waves and sing against the cliffs.

Whatever its intent, with each journey into in Nerine it takes a piece of Lilliana's soul and lets it soar.

Since the disappearance of Heartfire, there have been many visitors to Nerine. Some have come by way of Taiga and some are just figures that pass by the chestnut mare. Her ordinary colors and her easy-going demeanor make her just another face in the crowd. Someone they might not take notice of but she certainly notices them.

Lilliana has ideas of why they come. They come in search of the missing Nerinian Queen. They might be curious about the new one - the silver dapple left in command - and come to see for themselves about the one that Heartfire has left as her heir. (When has Heartfire done anything that was not intentional?) They come seeking answers to a question that the former queen has left behind.

Lilli comes only seeking her friend.

She comes seeking the one who knew how afraid she had once been of dark, of the one who had seen her grief and her anger when Lilliana would have much rather given the illusion that she had neither. The one who knows more about her than most do and still calls her friend, despite all her failings. The others might come seeking answers but Lilliana comes because the visits are overdue and she already knows.

Her blue eyes spy her against one of those cliffs that the rocky landscape was known for. (The wind rips past her and towards her friend, a blustering push towards Neverwhere. Lilliana walks forward because she has never been one to ask questions of the Fates or the Gods of her ancestors.) She comes alongside Never, where she stands looking out to a grey and endless sea. Where the tides carry things to other realms and existences that only one of them might even fathom.

Her shoulder is light brush against the other mare and Lilliana stares out with her, two windswept creatures blurring in a biting breeze. The chestnut mare listens to the way that the waves crash against the rocks beneath them, appreciating the consistency of the tide below them. There is a moment of silence between the pair but Lilli doesn't keep her waiting long, "My mother and sister never agreed on much." The edges of her mouth lift fondly and something on her face almost gives way to laughter against the sharp and frigid cold around them. Softly she adds, "But Brielle begged for stories about the Amazons. There was nothing that could captivate her like the stories of the old Queens and their Jungle." As time goes on, she finds it gets easier to speak of them - the family that she aches for.

Brielle, the fire of their family, the golden girl who had been born fighting and was always out to prove some point or another. She had clashed against that cool exterior of their mother, unbendable Aletta who had the mountains in her blood and refused to bow to anything. Together they had been nothing but constant discord throughout her youth. As Lilliana stands here with Neverwhere, it seems fitting though that they had bonded over this - over the sisterhood that had claimed the names of Antarda, Prague, Asylum and Twinge for their history.

Her mother and sister had always seemed so impossibly fierce to Lilli.

Standing here, it seems fitting that it is Neverwhere who now wears that crown and inherits all those legends.

"Do you think when the magic remade the land that it gave Nerine these views because it knew what heights the Amazons might aspire too?" Her mind wonders, as it always does, and those thoughts go with another winter gust that passes by them. She remembers the impossible heights that they climbed to in the stories of her youth.

The warmth of Neverwhere calls her back from the wind and the unknown places it travels. A familiar press of her shoulder into the Nerinian mare  beside her and then the chestnut turns to study her with a careful gaze: "How have you been?"

@[Neverwhere]  rosé Lilli wanted to say hey

[Neverwhere]

Freedom for one mare, chains for another. Neverwhere takes up the responsibility she had never desired and Lilliana, always searching for her purpose, comes to shed the weight her family - and Life, and Lilli, herself - has draped across her shoulders. That one land can mean such different things is a surprising realization for her when no land has meant anything to her before at all. All the country she has passed through, those mountains and deserts and riverlands, none whispered to her the way Nerine does, hooking small tendrils into her soul like climbing ivy. She could tear it away, tear herself away, but there would be scars, now.

Of course, scars hold no fear for her, not real ones, but the emotional ones she has not prepared for. She was so well guarded from those little hurts, there had been no time for them in her earliest years, but now? Now she must rebuild a kingdom that barrels towards conflict and there is more than a small part of her that screams to leave it. Leave it and run. There is nothing natural about these kingdoms and their politics, and nobody to stop her. Let them have their magic and their war and their ridiculous adherence to invisible boundaries, she could drop it all and leave as others have done before her. There is a battle deep within her, to stay or go, and neither side pulling ahead.

When a shoulder brushes feather light against her, she does not need to look to know who it is, but any thought of running falls away like leaves from autumn trees. No one else in this place would touch her, not so easily. Nobody else who knew her would tell her a story like that, or ask her such a question. And from no one else would she tolerate it, even humor it, if only for a moment.

"I think the Amazons should have kept to jungles, it seems to me that they broke apart on the cliffs."

Perhaps the real truth is that they broke apart when their Jungle was destroyed, because what came to Nerine to rebuild was a patchwork - lost souls that drifted together, that stitched themselves together with those aspirations that Lilli mentions. They built on ashes, on memory, and for their effort they were rendered nothing more than memories themselves. Nothing left but the stories, now. She shakes her head against the legends that Lilliana tries to build in her head. They might be glorious and golden, but they aren't real. They aren't true, not really, told and retold and built into something magical and infallible.

Still, she can feel the draw to such perfect, clean, stories, the satisfaction when everything resolves exactly the way you want it. But Life is messy, and kingdoms are worse. Nev exhales audibly, one pale eye focusing hard on Lilli, but she says nothing more of her thoughts on the subject. They both know that the crimson mare has experienced her share of that mire, and perhaps her escapism into such fairy tales is not so far from Neverwhere's own reliance on her ability to simply leave it all behind.

"Busy. And angry," she pauses a moment before adding, "Only one of those is new."

Self reflection is not beyond her, after all. She has always been aware of her moods and tendencies, she simply has no desire to change. She sidesteps, putting enough space between them so that she can touch her muzzle to the golden flame on Lilli's shoulder.

"This is new. What else?"

Neverwhere

...

@[lilliana]

[lilliana]

"Maybe," she concedes to Neverwhere.

Maybe the Amazons of old had broken apart on the ragged rocks of Nerine. Maybe their Jungle hearts were so twisted with vines and filled with thick, lush vegetation that when they had looked upon the Nerinian moorlands, they found themselves - like the land - stripped. Maybe they felt robbed of the home they had loved and fought for so many generations. Maybe, Lilliana thinks.

She stands quietly with a weight behind her eyes that hasn't been there before - a consequence that Lilliana has brought upon herself - but it does lend the chestnut a new look of maturity. Experience is lining her face in a way that the years will never do to her body (not that she has yet realized that) and so when @[Neverwhere] suggests that what remained of the Amazons lays as fractured anecdotes at the bottom of these cliffs, memories cast adrift with the many tides, there is a part of Lilliana that can agree with Neverwhere. 

Lilliana doesn't know much of the time that the natives call 'the Reckoning'. She only knows the land was changed - ripped apart and reborn again. A Reckoning and perhaps a Revelation in one era. Another fairytale that her mother had used as a tale of caution from her youth, of what happens when magic grows corrupt and twisted. (Lilliana had missed the point of that tale entirely - her wide-eyed horror went immediately to the horses left to deal with the aftermath. 'Everything rises and falls,' her silver mother had shrugged. It was simply the way of things. It was the way of life that Aletta had known on her mountaintops. 'Perhaps the inhabitants took advantage of their new world. Perhaps it became stronger than what it was before.') Standing on that ledge with Neverwhere, Lilliana hopes that the magic the Fairies wove had also included threads of redemption.

"Nerine might have been intended as a gift," she speculates. "The land couldn't have healed if it had returned to what it had been before."

There is an audible sigh from the dappled mare beside her and Lilliana rewards her with an indulgent smile, one that reveals a dimple as her attention is pulled away from the endless sea. Busy, in Neverwhere's current situation, is an understatement. Word has rippled across the great pond that is Beqanna and the result comes flooding back by way of diplomats and leaders that venture into Nerine. To Neverwhere.

The Nerinian reaches out and brushes past the copper tendrils that cover a golden mark on her shoulder. The newness of it is still unsettling and the chestnut mare still tries to hide it most days. Lilliana turns her head to glance down at the golden flame and a shadow crosses her face. For any other soul, Lilliana might have deflected with a teasing retort. For Neverwhere, she ventures as close to honesty as she can get - as close as she will allow because her burdens are not to be Neverwhere's. The silver dapple already has enough to deal with. Ghosts, she wants to say. I dream of Taiga burning. Instead, Lilliana only offers: "Taiga is peaceful but I've been having trouble sleeping. Craft and Anatomy are there so perhaps that should make it easier."

Hesitantly she adds, "I thought I'd bring news of Ruthless for Brine and to visit with Brazen." And then Lilliana reaches out to trace the outline of a wing that covers her shoulder. "This is new too." What happened in the Desert sometimes felt like a dream. (Some days she wishes it had been a dream because her body wakes up in a cold sweat the following night.) Craft's breaking bones, the crimson shade of her blood as it ran down the dune, the stallion ripping his own eyes out - these are some of the things that keep her awake at night.

Lilliana pulls back. "I keep dreaming about the Desert. I keep seeing...," She can't bring herself to say the words. She can't bring herself to describe Craft's death in daylight. The haunted expression Lilli's face speaks for her before she goes to meet her friend's gaze,"But I remember you there."

And that, that counts for everything.

LILLIANA

light me up, i will blaze
like a soul you have saved