oh redwood tree, don't you recognize me?

[lilliana]

Glancing at her golden daughter tugs at her heart like the ocean current must tug at the coastline. Just when she thinks that her heart couldn’t take another wave of love crashing through her, it swells again and again with each searching glance that the blue-eyed girl sends. So like your Aunt, Lilliana thinks each time that she looks at Aela. 

It’s the part that had surprised her most about motherhood. That looking at her children is finding those lost pieces of history coming together, dreaming a soul into existence that is both unique and realized by those who had come before. There are the graceful lines of her mother, Aletta, in her youngest. It’s Valerio’s blue eyes (or a reminiscent shade) that observes the world around her, like Yanhua. Her daughter is wrapped in gold - like Elaina, Arwel, Ruth and Marcelo. There is a small snip on her nose that she adores - a gift from Brazen. (The hard part of her - that broken part of her she refuses to acknowledge - won’t address the rest.)

Her daughter is, at best, a few days old and still finding her strides. She doesn’t race or romp far through the sand dunes but the little girl is becoming brave enough to venture around them and through the salt grasses. The pair has forged a quiet existence out on the edges of Beqanna, where the River lets out to the sea. Lilliana tries to do her best to heal but the process is slow after a troubling pregnancy and her captivity in Pangea. (The River had carried her from that cursed kingdom; it demanded a payment in the form of a deep gash on her right hip and the bruising of a few ribs.)

The filly becomes captivated by a seabird perched on a piece of large driftwood (an Osprey?) and when it takes to the sky, Aela follows behind at a curious trot. She disappears behind a large dune. 

No, Lilli thinks. The pair kept to this quiet end of the beach because any proof that they had been there washes away with each tide. Lilliana has been careful to keep them positioned between dunes until … until what? She needs to get back to Taiga but to do so means traveling across Beqanna and doing that injured and with an infant? How far would they really get?

They needed to get back to Taiga but they needed the thing that Lilliana always seemed to run out of - time. (Time to heal, time to make a plan.)

"Aela!” she calls, trying to be louder than the crescendo of waves nearby. A few Sandpipers flutter in sudden disarray and Aela emerges from behind another pale dune, racing wildly towards her with a flagged tail. Her legs sprawl in different directions as she comes skidding to a halt. There is no time to worry about her balance, not when she was worried more about what (or who) she was running from. 

The girl presses her pale face into her mother’s side, as if beside Lilliana, she might disappear.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions

@[Wolfbane] here is a ramble-y starter for you
and anybody from Pangea

[Wolfbane]

I believe I'd die if I only could

I sure feel strange, but it sure feels good

Fooled once by a false Lilliana, Wolfbane was now twice as cautious to be sure he wouldn’t be outwitted by a second false replica. He’d been internally disgusted by Neverwhere’s ability to make more of herself, but lately he’d been seething about another impostor who’d made it clear that she could play his own game against him. Heartfire and Eyas. You won’t escape them, The many voices in Bane’s head taunted him; meanwhile he laid low until his moving pawn, Celina, had found him at one of their designated hideaways and told him the truth of it: Lilliana had gone rogue. As proof, there was a missing wing to be accounted for.

He’d struck the ground in a rash moment of fury and turned on Celina, but stopped himself just in time.

He still needed her. So he told her to split, and then went out on his own for a little hunting party.

A distraction or a ruse, Heartfire must be in league with Lilliana’s escape, He thought to himself, pushing an intensely sensitive mole’s nose to the ground in Pangea where Lilli had last been seen. His body was thick and curved, striped in a heavy brown-and-white pelt. A modified badger, clawing his way through the heavy undergrowth and down into the tough sand in hot pursuit where he could find her trail. When he came upon the basin of the river and broke through, tumbling into the river's current, Wolfbane wasted no time swirling his body into the shape of a squat bull shark.

Where her tracks left off, the blood splattered over rocks told him she’d gone downriver. He swam, and when at last he curved his predator’s body near the shoreline somewhere close to the basin of the River’s end, he smelled where her trail had left off and grew legs that carried him up onto the shore.

Step after step, he manipulated skin and hair, the shape of his bone structure and the length of his stride. The way he breathed and the set of his eyes molted too, both narrowing and shifting forward into the permanent scowl of a deadly beast. He trod up the little path, soaking wet and eager as Lilli’s semi-fresh trail ribboned out like a colorful, waving flag for him to follow. Further and further he followed her, and the longer the trail wound on the angrier he felt himself becoming. His skin turned black, and even though he finally settled on the simple form of an old, markingless stallion, he looked eerily blind and disturbingly ragged. At last, her stench was almost overpowering and Bane knew he was close. To his delight, Lilli’s scent wasn’t the only one around anymore.

A second, more familiar but still new-to-Bane scent wove in and out of Lilli’s. Feminine. Young. The battered black horse smiled and grunted as he dug his hooves into the sand dunes, trying to get atop one of them.

Then, Lilliana’s voice cried among the quiet and the gulls. In a second Wolfbane flitted away, too fast for a horse as old as he looked, too certain and direct in his approach to be mistaken for just a passerby when he appeared, trotting out onto the beach. Her saw the real Lilli out and away from him, standing (somehow) by the shore - her hair whipping in a frenzy around her, scarlet and silk. Pressed lovingly beside her was a filly.

Wolfbane smiled harder and stopped.

For this thread:  Sex: M  ◉  Appearance: Old Black Stallion  ◉  Mood: Dangerous

@[lilliana]

[lilliana]

For one blissful moment, she doesn’t fear or panic. Aela comes swimming into her view and when the girl is beside her, relief floods her veins. The filly trembles but Lilliana is coming to learn that her youngest isn’t as brave as Nashua had been or as calm as Yanhua could be. Her daughter has all the flightiness of her ancestors and Lilli tries to comfort her as best she can.

(How does one soothe a gale?)

Lilliana lowers her head and traces the flaxen mane that curls with the moisture in the air, starting between her perfectly-tipped ears down to her slim shoulders. The wind that stirs past them exposes another healing wound from beneath the Taigan mare’s flowing locks and reveals a scent. (She should have noticed; Aela’s memories came in frantic heartbeats. The Osprey flying away. A dark .. something that flits in and out her daughter’s vision.)

It comes. The dark stallion and that familiar stiffening that makes the chestnut mare look up sharply.

She shouldn’t be surprised to see him, but she is. Worry creeps in behind her eyes before she guards it. Wolfbane smiles - manic, arrogant - and when he stops, the copper mare lowers her head to murmur something to Aela. (Let him wait, she thinks.)  A golden ear flicks back and while the child doesn’t pull away from her side, the filly stops trembling. Another loving whisper of encouragement and Lilliana carefully raises it.

The chestnut mare knows it's him. The gold-and-blue might be gone and even though the swagger is more prowl than strut, she knows. This isn’t an innocent bystander or a passing stranger - it’s @[Wolfbane].

Why the black coat, she wonders as the Taigan mare studies this borrowed (created?) shape. Why such a ragged, beaten form? Perhaps she should have paid more attention to her mother’s stories. There hadn’t been many tales of the skinwalkers. What limited lore the grey mare had known about shapeshifters had always come back to the basic law of Magic: that if something was taken, something had to be given. If they took so many shapes, what was left?

(If Lilliana hadn’t been so intrigued by Wolfbane instead of his Magic, she might have stopped to ask the same thing.)

Aela edges closer to her mother and the chestnut mare makes no motion to correct her daughter. Lilli only levels her blue eyes to his vacant (false) ones. "This was the best you could do?” she asks, a retort that might have been taken for her trademark teasing if this had been anyone but him.

Maybe, she thinks, what he's borrowed is running out. Maybe the Monster of the North is finally running out of shapes.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions

[Wolfbane]

I believe I'd die if I only could

I sure feel strange, but it sure feels good

Awareness between Wolfbane and Lilliana had always been a funny trait of theirs. From the moment he’d first met her, it was like an electric current vibrated between them. Bane would read the look in her eyes, shift his stance or head whenever she moved, and wonder if Lilli had that effect on everyone she met. For the longest time, he blamed that damned blueness of her eyes; now, coming across the mother-daughter pair on the far end of Beqanna’s beaches, he knew it was something more. The look she gave him was telling enough, but her welcoming tone stopped the shapeshifter (and his smile) in its tracks.

A bit bent and a little crooked, the black stallion creaked and swayed in the ocean breeze. Like the dune grass, like the back-and-forth of the sea, he leaned one way then the other. Wolfbane said nothing, at first. Only stared at Lilli with his own set of blank, colorless eyes before turning his chin toward the filly.

“A girl.” He crooned, forgetting the existence of the red mare supporting his daughter’s weight. Lilliana was all but forgotten; her words rudely ignored. He had nothing but eyes and expression for their new addition. You see, Lilliana wasn’t far from the truth herself - and maybe she knew it through that old connection, maybe it was just a good guess - but Wolfbane is running out. Out of time and out of sense, he was beginning to slip into those final stages of the curse. He’d traded his sanity for a higher power, and now it was time that he paid what he owed. Just like Lupei. Just like Longclaw.

Except… one thing was missing. One important thing. “Look at her, just like her brothers.” Longclaw thought. Bane couldn’t be sure if he was silently thinking or speaking softly, though. “Nash and Yan were strong… she might be, too.” Wyrm hummed thoughtfully.

So many choices. All of them secure and tucked away. He needed a vessel, needed one soon, and longed to groom up one of his children the way his father had groomed him. Longclaw had been a selfish father though - died without passing on the hate; and yet when Wyrm came around he revealed the key to it all. The method. The intention. Their lineage. All of it connected, somehow. All of it contained inside Bane, now. He hissed deep in his throat and broke contact with the filly, turning a vile look of disgust and hatred down on Lilli.

“You’re weak.” He accused her. “Alone and injured. I’m done playing with you, Lilliana. Give me the girl and live -” He pulled his black lip up over his gums, showing her a set of curved fangs, “- or resist and die, like your silly friend Neverwhere.” Bane smiled again, unaware still that his assault had been for naught. Under his impression no one could’ve survived the bloody maiming he’d given the old blind bat of Nerine.

The withered horse spread his limbs apart and turned his ears back, looking comically weak aside from the sharp teeth, waiting.

For this thread:  Sex: M  ◉  Appearance: Old Black Stallion  ◉  Mood: Dangerous

@[lilliana]

[lilliana]

"Aela,” she tells him, hating the way that the word comes out so much softer than she intended. Lilliana had wanted it to be harder, firmer. A more definitive shape, one that @[Wolfbane] couldn’t take. The chestnut mare keeps a guarded gaze on him, unsure of what to expect. But he ignores her earlier taunt and instead focuses on the child pressed tightly against her side.

Aela’s head remained turned away up until the moment that the girl heard her name spoken and with both ears flicking back, she lifted her petite head to glance up at her mother and then behind her, feeling a presence there. Lilliana is looking down and Wolfbane is looking on with their daughter caught in the middle.

It’s a mockery of the moment but to any other horse that might have spied them on this lonely end of Beqanna, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. A mare and her foal with a curious stranger glancing in their direction. Like a calm before a summer squall, there is a lull as both parents study their daughter (and foolish of Lilliana for doing so). There has never been a moment that he comes that doesn’t upend her world in some way.

When Lilliana finally looks up to carefully regard the shapeshifter, he seems to lose himself in studying Aela. The filly has taken her time to crane her neck around and peer up at him, even if the expression she wears is an apprehensive one - perhaps an echo of the one her mother wears. The red mare is reminded of a tale about a horse who fell in love with a river for the reflection it gave and she wonders if his madness is like that, if he is searching for reflections of himself in the children he sires.

He uneases her and Lilliana shifts her weight to the opposite shoulder, trying to better protect her daughter. The action seems to break the spell as Aela looks back up to her dam and Wolfbane looks at Lilli, wearing that same look of hatred burning in those eerie eyes. It catches her off-guard; it shouldn’t but it does and the red mare feels the anger that blazes in response lighting her veins.

"You’ve lost your mind,” she seethes back at him, finally saying what she has assumed out loud. Her delicately tipped ears pin as she feels her daughter slip beneath her. What use did he have for a child? And more importantly, what made him think that she would just hand over her own? "After what you did to Nashua and Yanhua?” Lilliana baits, bewildered and exasperated. Nashua had looked and asked for Wolfbane; Yanhua became more solitary and quiet.

She’s fighting to keep it in control - that anger and that rage has been smoldering the last few months. Emotions that could threaten to craft a hurricane or summon a gale, had she been born with the traditional gift of her ancestors. However, it’s just the little red mare on the beach with her child tucked protectively beneath her girth and the summer winds that whistle around them, deaf to any call she might have given.

"You didn’t kill Neverwhere,” she tells the splayed stallion though she remains unaware of the punchline to Ghaul’s joke. Lilliana just knows that (thankfully) the Queen of Nerine lives.

The wind whips angrily around them and the Taigan mare turns her neck, allowing the zephyrs to tangle and part her mane to reveal the still healing wounds there. Bite marks from another predatory equine. "Might as well finish what the others started.” What the River should have done, she thinks. What her pregnancy with Aela should have succeeded with.

A trait that she suspects she shares with her golden daughter.

Aela - wide-eyed and overwhelmed by everything she feels electrifying (echoing) through the air - slips to the opposite side of Lilliana, slowly moving towards an angry ocean and away from the blazing mare.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions

[Wolfbane]

I believe I'd die if I only could

I sure feel strange, but it sure feels good

He hadn’t lost his mind, the black stallion thought as he pinned his ears and snapped his teeth together. Lilli had lost hers if she thought she was going to get away with defying him. Wolfbane leaned to one side and then the other, swaying back and forth before he began to pace in a tight little line - cutting both mother and child off from the clear path back towards dry land. Their escape was the ocean, or they could attempt to flee around him. He doubts Aela and her Dam would both survive either of those choices. So what, then? Would Lilli test her strength against him? Or would she run like she always did? Far away, where he’d just hunt her down eventually.

“Hah, Liar!” He snarled at first, spitting the word back at her as if it could do any damage. He wouldn’t believe the captive; by now her desire to live outweighed rational thought. She’d say anything to throw him off, do anything to sway him from the task at hand. Not today, Wyrm whispers through his aching skull, we won’t be distracted today.

Today, this would come to an end. They would no longer exist. He wanted Lilliana gone for good and he wanted Aela.

Still walking, the elder black stallion watched as the beachy gusts of ocean wind tugged away his once-mate’s beautiful mane to reveal ragged, ugly lines across her neck. Puncture wounds; he knew their kind and how they came to be. “You’ve only yourself to blame for that. Red-devil temptress.” Bane laughed harshly, without any real joy to match the sound. How many others, he wondered? Not enough to teach her submission or silence, Longclaw supplied an answer. She was filthy, then. Used goods.

Even more reason for him to suddenly stop, pivot, and dart off after Aela’s retreating form like a bat sent straight from the fiery depths of hell.

For this thread:  Sex: M  ◉  Appearance: Old Black Stallion  ◉  Mood: Dangerous

@[lilliana]

[lilliana]

Whatever she had been planning, he cuts it in half as he paces back and forth. She looks, briefly, above and past him to the treeline that lingers in the distance. To the rest of Beqanna that now seems unreachable. The sound of the raging surf behind her reminds her of what waits there - the open ocean. Currents that could easily drag her infant out to sea. Wolfbane wouldn't have to do anything at all. The angry tide could do it easily enough for him.

Wolfbane accuses her of being a liar and Lilliana bares her teeth at him - a brilliant, gleaming edge of white that flashes against her dark mouth - but she doesn't defend herself. How could she? Not when the shapeshifter could personally attest to it. How wonderful.

So she bites her tongue and watches him carefully as he goes back and forth. As he wanders his crazed mind while he walkss the corner of beach that separates Lilliana and her daughter from the rest of the mainland. The wind whips bitterly past Wolfbane towards the pair, making the chestnut mare wish (not for the first time) that she had the gift of her ancestors. She wished she could summon a hurricane. A monsoon. A typhoon. Anything. Anything at all that could blow Wolfbane far away. But the copper mare doesn't have that kind of ability. Her 'gifts' have never been a match for his; that has always been made abundantly clear.

The best she can manage is trying to stay ahead of him, ahead of the puzzling (manic) thoughts that he sometimes mutters and mumbles.

His accusation that this is all her fault is the very thing that cripples her. How often has she thought that? Lilliana has known for some time that she and Wolfbane should have never crossed stars. They should have stayed firmly put in the heavens. It's been the thing that has paralyzed her in the past. Lepis. A guilt that has kept her stationary, a sin that has kept her still. Because she remembers at one point, that she had wanted him. That she had once wanted his approval, craved his affection.

That she had once been a star-struck Diplomat.

The warmth of Aela beneath keeps her quiet. He condemns her for the fire-gold of her once lustrous coat and Lilliana pins her ears again, burying them into the curls of her matted mane. Her fault. The red mare might have stood quietly before but the slight warmth that had settled underneath her small frame vanished and when Lilli looked sharply towards the waterline, her daughter was already racing towards the surf. To the edges of the inching waves, like she had taught her. Because the pair of them could vanish on the fringes of the tide.

There was no vanishing, not now.

And as the golden form of Aela grew smaller on the horizon, Wolfbane galloped after her with all the rage of a thunderhead. The crimson mare was already gone as soon as she registered the cadence of his foreboding hoof-beats. Charging after them, spurred on by a dual dose of adrenaline and instinct, she follows. His white tail whips out like a banner behind him and Lilliana decides then that if she can get close enough, that if she can find a gust of wind to spirit her ahead, she'll snake her head out and grab on to whatever part of him that she can.

Anything for Aela.

"NO!" she yells.

LILLIANA

if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions

[Beryl]

They don't see her, but she sees them.

She does not know what their quarrel is, too far away at first to make out the words, but she sees the child edging away, sees her break into a run and the terror of that monster in the shape of an old black gelding makes her breath catch. Memory makes her angry, makes her act rashly. Her shadows are swift, they fly past both horses with ease and wrap around the girl as she runs, the glowing markings dulling as darkness swarms around her.

safe

And she knows it was a mistake as soon as the shadow's leaf-smoke voice whispers in her ear. Loss and fear swallow her like ice water, guilt, panic, and salt choke her lungs. The child has been taken to safety, but what is safety to a patch of darkness? She could be anywhere. The yellow mare freezes, lost in the thorny maze of her thoughts and the memory of her own disappearance once years ago, of the remiscent way she has broken this family. Then the red mare screams No! Yanked suddenly from her guilt, Beryl, swathed in darkness, bursts out of her hiding place in the shadows. She is running before she knows it, running to catch the pair with their head start - though surely seeing the child disappear in shadow will slow their tumble towards the ocean. When the chestnut reaches out for the gelding's tail, she sees the golden flame bright on her shoulder, and trips in the soft sand, startled.

"Lilliana!"

Before she hits the ground, she is a lion, and the muscular feline body tumbles, somersaulting back onto its feet. Claws dig into the ground and she bounds to the mare's side, head low and guilt fanning the flame of her bravery until it burns away her fear. A growl like thunder rolls rhythmically in her chest and ebonywood eyes follow the monster, tracing the ragged, toothed, maw of his chest. Thin lips peel back from her cruel canines, and she feels more than knows that she is not a match for the beast physically, but she does not think he can stop her shadows.

"Lilliana is wanted elsewhere," Her voice is a snarl, rough and angry, her gaze never leaving the dark beast, "You are not." In a blink the amorphous darkness rises around them, yellow-eyed and impassive and swiftly shaping itself into mirror images of the torn gelding. Within the protective circle the lion becomes equine again, tentatively touching her grey muzzle to the scarlet mare's shoulder.

"Stay close," she whispers and the darkness collapses in on them, leaving Wolfbane alone on the distant shore with only his thwarted plans for company.

Image by Kharthian

@[lilliana] @[Wolfbane]
sorry this took soooo long, my brain is mush.