"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
07-04-2020, 04:30 PM (This post was last modified: 07-04-2020, 04:30 PM by Leilan.)
Autumn has well arrived by the time the roan dragon shifter takes flight to find a certain chestnut mare. Two messages by her have since arrived, one directly sent and one through his spotted daughter who takes after her mother so much. Eurwen’s however had been more pressing - fall had arrived, but not Lilliana.
Her theories about the chestnut mare’s delay were hesitant, and he agreed that it was odd - even if she had a child with her, or even two or fae forbid, three, the mare would have made it home by now or find another way to send her inventive messages. Should have, anyway.
The dragon swoops over Taiga, his hawk-eye vision scanning the woods. He doesn’t honestly believe she has come home yet, but while Eurwen roams the meadow and other common lands between here and Pangea, he has decided to start searching the other way around. That way he would also be searching Hyaline before his pink-dotted daughter reaches it, which seems relatively safer. Not that she wants or needs his protection, so he doesn’t make it obvious.
He’s about done searching whatever he can see of Taiga, rounding off his flight with a 180, now searching not for a hotspot that seems to be red between the redwoods, but a resting place instead. However his dragon shape is large and he is not so lucky immediately, finding no clearings he deems large enough to land. It is by the sea then, that ironically borders Nerine and looks out to his own home, that he propels himself down to earth - to sea - and makes a landing by freezing the sea below, landing on ice instead of in the waves. The newly made ice creaks under his weight, but he doesn’t care - it’ll hold because the water, now ice, isn’t so deep here - and instead looks towards the redwood trees.
”I almost gave up on finding you today.” he tilts his head, a surprised but relatively easy smile on his draconic face when he addresses the red and flame-marked mare on the shore.
nothing burns like the cold
Leilan
@[lilliana]
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
07-11-2020, 05:23 PM (This post was last modified: 07-11-2020, 05:24 PM by lilliana.)
It's hard to miss a dragon flying over Taiga.
Leilan's draconic form casts a shadow above the snowcapped Redwoods and below them - to a lone red mare. It cancels out the sheen of her red-gold coat. The Taigan mare had been staring out at a vast horizon - at the meeting place of sea and sky - and trying to remember what she once saw there. Wondering if she even wanted to return to seeing the world as she once had.
Lilliana can't be looking at infinite spaces and dreaming. Not anymore. Not if she and Lethia are going to keep Taiga safe. She needs the ideas in her mind to take shape; she needs them to harden and form into words, into actions because her consequences have already done that.
The air is cold but Lilliana shrugs away its frigid bite. Her head follows the dragon as he circles above her. Is it luck on her side as she takes in the roan scales? There are many dragons in Beqanna but the coloration of this one is similar to a horse she knows and so by the time that the Freyr of Icicle Island has landed, Lilliana has emerged from the treeline and stands expectantly awaiting him. The harbor ice below the dragon groans as he lands but does not break and the copper mare cranes her head to look up at the shifter, some part of her still surprised that anyone pays her any mind at all.
That the message she gave to Rebelle all those months ago in Pangea reached @[Leilan] on his barren island and here he stands, regarding her with a familiar tilt to his reptilian-type head.
"Leilan," she exhales in a glittering cloud of silver smoke. He is smiling at her - an easy, relaxed smile - and the red mare reminds herself to ease the tightness between her shoulders and the stiffening of her spine. Lilliana offers a tentative smile in reply. Not her brightest, not her best and certainly not the daring smile that the once-Diplomat had been known for. It's the best she can offer (for now) and it seems despite everything that has happened in her year away from Taiga, Lilli is still determined to give her best to those around her - even if that 'best' is a baseline she is still determining.
The red mare motions with her head to the tree line behind her, "do you mind not being a dragon? We have much to talk about and I'd prefer to do it at eye-level."
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven i've got a long list of questions
If he had to say anything about her at all, he would say that she had changed - she looked a little empty. She lost... something of herself. The look of longing, combined with defeat, the surprise in her eyes that someone is actually kind, or even just normal, in their approach - he knows that look. He knows it from his sisters, he knows it from mares he ones offered a new start, a new home, a place of shelter in Nerine.
It's his specialty, so to say.
His head lowers to her eye level as she speaks, though he doesn't smile - he's self-conscious enough that to laugh at one's own jokes can be quite annoying, and might not fit the situation. Instead, he studies her, then nods. "Just a little - but you know how to make any guy shrink." He lifts his reptilian head and blinks at her. "But no looking." Fairies know he finds it hard enough to willfully change - usually he goes with whatever emotion, and today he had felt rather... well, he wasn't quite sure, vengeful maybe. Thankfully though, there is a little isle further out that he starts to walk around and behind, and also, there is Lilli's loss to focus on. He'll have to actively think of the first time they met, when he was still that in-between horse; Beryl comes to mind, too, and the women he once met. He'd offered them protection, not revenge - a safe place was what they'd needed. Willa had and Eilidh had both needed something like that. If only they could have seen him as a horse initially, it would have saved them so much trouble.
At that, he finally shrinks, not only to the scaled and pointy-toothed semi-dragon horse he was once, but purely himself. Still the ice clings to him, of course, but otherwise nothing draconic is left - even his eyes return to his normal color, the one he had inherited from his father - though Breckin had always said he had his mother's eyes; must be the shape then.
Well, shit. No room for that today - in fact, perhaps with Lilliana around it was easier to focus on her and her troubles, and to forget his own. There were bigger fish to fry, today. "Right, then." he states almost matter-of-factly when he makes it back to the chestnut mare. "Are you going to tell me why you're hiding?"
nothing burns like the cold
Leilan
@[lilliana]
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
07-17-2020, 08:47 PM (This post was last modified: 07-17-2020, 08:52 PM by lilliana.)
Leilan gets it.
Though to be fair, Lilliana is standing beside an ocean. It’s an easy thing to look small when put beside such a vast and endless thing like the sea. Always changing, ever-churning. When one is not a dragon or gifted with superior magic, a simple thing like a red mare is easily made small.
She is just one more dot on the other side of the horizon.
Lilliana doesn’t consider this when Leilan lowers his large his head, however. She isn’t thinking about that when his dragon eyes consider her and the Taigan mare doesn’t - as he so eloquently put it - shrink from meeting his gaze. She doesn’t rescind what she asks him. Lilli just looks up at him and waits.
It’s only when he goes behind a massive crag to change that she considers something. Something that she hadn’t thought of before and her steadfast expression cracks under the consideration. Leilan was shifting and suddenly, as his body goes from dragon to horse, her mind is reeling with a million questions. She almost recoils from him when he approaches her in the body of a bay roan and her blue eyes are already bruising with worry.
"Does it change you?” she asks, almost demanding. "Does the Magic take something from you every time you change?” This question comes with less force but there is a hard set to her brow and suddenly, the icy air around her becomes charged with her challenge. With her fear. "God dammit, @[Leilan].” She exhales because this isn’t something she had considered.
Of course, she hadn’t.
"This won’t work if it changes you,” she starts, with her voice cracking on the last word. "This won’t work and the North can’t-,” Lilliana stops. The North can’t keep going on as it has. It’s something that she has come to understand and the blue-eyed mare has said as much to her constituents. The North can’t afford anymore upheaval. Brennen’s magic keeps them protected, for now. But for how long?
She means to propose to unify the North.
That for a Northern leader who gets usurped by outsiders, there are two other leaders to represent the stronghold they could create. That if a leader goes missing, there are two other counterparts who are swift in recovering them. The North moves together - as one - to protect history from repeating itself. That for every Northern resident who seeks aid or sanctuary, they receive it not from one territory but two. Possibly three if Nerine wanted to make herself equal to the Isle and Taiga.
The proposal is overdue, perhaps, and a long-time in coming. Even longer still, if Lilliana can’t overcome her aversion to Leilan’s Magic. It’s the one thing, she reminds herself, that she thought might make him the most eligible for what she was proposing.
She just didn’t think it would be the thing that would make her so reluctant to it as well.
The Guardian exhales and blows a gust of warm air from her dark, flaring nostrils. "I’m not hiding,” she tells him. Those cracks that he first saw break apart a little more, "I just.. I just can’t; It’s just easier to be out here.”Alone.
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven i've got a long list of questions
Lilliana has always been... strangely one of the closest friends he's had. He wouldn't say his best friend - he's had a few best friends, and even though some are currently missing in action, that doesn't mean he doesn't care for them in a way. As such, he cannot disregard them, or compare them to someone who is so completely different. Neither is better or worse, just as it is with his children, or their mothers.
One does not exclude the other, though, and his retreat behind the rock is just one of those ways to keep them sort of separated. Just like the red mare knows he has two faces, that doesn't mean that changing in front of someone you know is easy. Although he'd trust her with his weakness that came with the moment of vulnerability, he still might find her watching - her studying of him - difficult to deal with.
When he returns though, his chocolate brown orbs searching her blues, she still asks a most prying question: he knows then that even when she didn't see the shift itself, it was still being rubbed in her face by the change
Does the magic take from him? He tilts his head at her, thinking for a heartbeat, then shakes his head. "It changes as much as I do - taking isn't the word, not even changing, it's more like... adapting." He narrows his eyes at her, scrutinizing her as much as she him. Connecting the dots of where her question came from, and her subsequent curse - she'd never cursed before, not in front of him. "The North can't what?" But he knows the answer. "Trust a dragon?" His eye color already starts changing back, light blue not so much unlike hers - not exactly icy, no; not exactly deep blue either. A middle ground between hurt and offense, perhaps, ears following suit, twitching back and forth insecurely; not settling between his dislike and his inquisitiveness. He should have seen it coming, he supposes. He'd asked for the shifting trait exactly because of this: that distrust that a horse naturally has to a predator. That he could be among them as fully a horse, but change when necessary - and it had been necessary, now or then. To show the world he was not to be messed with.
And yet, apparently the ones closer to him also realized he might not always be what he said he was. Did she not trust him? He'd told Lethy not to - and thus she'd jumped. To test exactly how far she could trust him, see the results on a tiny scale before trusting him with anything larger.
Never mind that he had a heart, and that he could hurt, too.
A deep breath intake follows, his chest heaving slightly with the larger inhale. He steels himself for the rebuttal, waiting for the admittance that is sure to follow - she doesn't know him well enough, she doesn't fully trust him with his changed abilities. He closes his heart - lets the ice creep up his pre-made walls so that whatever she throws as him won't hurt as much.
Because he's seen it before, hasn't he? He is not to be trusted - not with Breckin's love, not with Izora Lethia's trust, not with Castile's friendship, not with Neverwhere's emotions. He can take this - one more to a pre-existing list. Just let it be over with.
Denial. She's not hiding, she says, and he just stares at her, emotionless ice blue going over her features now. "Sure." He cannot sound any more cynical or dry, and she'll most likely hear it. Of course she's hiding - she thinks she'll break under her responsibilities, so she comes to a place where she is alone, where others cannot see. The fact that "she can't" tells him enough; all she needs is to be confronted with that fact. He knows the feeling too well not to have noticed.
Lucky for her, he is an ice-made mirror today - reflecting her distancing with his own. Reflecting her fear of his shifting magic with his fear of being rejected. She doesn't want him around, or worse, they don't, and she's the messenger. He is alone in the world.
A snort follows, cold air from his nostrils though she is not close enough to notice - and it's not cold enough to create snowflakes or the likes as of yet. What good is it having the power to protect, if all it does is create fear and distrust? One might wonder - Leilan knows the answer though.
The fact is, he's not willing to sacrifice his well-being while gaining nothing in return. If he's not wanted, then... well, he's not going to force them to live with him. And so he's mentally preparing himself for the verdict; if she truly can't trust him, he won't force her to live with him on her doorstep.
nothing burns like the cold
Leilan
@[lilliana] this went... slightly in a different direction than I thought
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
07-19-2020, 09:27 PM (This post was last modified: 07-19-2020, 09:29 PM by lilliana.)
Adapting. Leilan says and for a moment, Lilliana is studying him intensely. The dragon-horse has been one of her dearest friends, too. And she is reminding herself of that as she regards him from where she stands.
Watching Leilan, she finds nothing of the basilisk or hydra or wyvern. For her love of legends, for her once-dreams of fantasies, the Freyr doesn’t change the expression on his face despite the skin he has just shed. Taking isn’t the right word, he tells her.
Lilliana looks away at that. She exhales - long and slow - before looking at him again.
"I trust you,” the Taigan mare finally says. It sounds more like a reaffirmation to herself than to him, she thinks. Why should he trust you? a voice taunts. Why should any of them trust you when you have been so full of secrets? Lilliana closes her eyes briefly, taking in the scent of salt and snow, of dormant pine overhead. "I do,” she says again, softer.
She looks out at the ocean, staring over the breaking waves and her eyes burn, not from the cold, but from remembering. "We were always taught that things had to be in balance,” Lilliana explains. "The oldest law of Nature and Magic,” the red mare chimes, repeating the phrase she had heard Aletta speak so often. Something that she has strived to pass along to her sons.
"For everything the Magic gives, it has to take from somewhere.” Lilli turns to look at Leilan again, hoping he might understand what she is trying to say.
Maybe there is some truth to it, because what she is proposing has to start from somewhere. It could start with trust. Maybe, Lilliana could start.
"The Monster came North because it’s children - it’s sons,” she states and Lilliana nearly chokes on the admission. "Were here.” Taiga, she means. "Nashua and Yanhua, my sons.” The Monster went further North and it seems most of Beqanna knows that.
@[Leilan] can change his face. Well, her straightforward gaze says when she looks at him, here is the other side of hers. Lilliana has known monsters. The Dragon of the North is not one of them, her face plainly says.
Her history has been like gravity. Something that has kept her weighed down. "So, perhaps, the question should be can you trust me?”
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven i've got a long list of questions
The suspense hangs between them for what feels like forever, electricity-loaden air that could crack, strike, and burn as quickly as it had arrived. Lightning - like the bird who had attacked him and Castile once, like Sabra whenever she whipped her eyes towards him with a hatred he could only appreciate. A type of flame that seemed altered, in a way.
Perhaps their bond needed such a spark, an event to shock them out of their comfort zones. It came close enough to feel it, to see the outcome of what would happen if both of them lost it - clash and burn, roar and thunder - but she deflates and defuses, and he sees then that his steely behavior has a mirroring effect on her, as well.
Mirrors meeting mirrors, the two of them listen to her words hanging in the air between them. Pairs of blue eyes staring, at her, at him, until she has convinced herself and therefore him. She does trust him, and he doesn’t have to move away from her - not for that reason, anyway. There is something he finds odd about their relationship, familiar and strange at the same time; she is reminder and wholly different, of something he doesn’t want to give a name to.
”I was given this magic only for that balance to exist.” he admits softly, nodding to her, ”It’s not the magic itself that takes, but there are those who use it with different intentions. Magic itself is a neutral, balanced thing, though.” he shakes his crest, some of the blue retreating from his eyes, leaving them a strangely warm kind of greyish brown.
She continues with a Monster, though - no longer does it have a name, then. As Leilan hears her out, he presses his mouth into a line, not because of disappointment in her, but in Bane if he's honest. Technically the two of them are related, what with him being Heartfire’s grandson, and he’d always liked to think that the stubbornness that is his family’s main trait would have helped him fight of a curse like that. But perhaps he hadn’t wanted to, given in to the raw power of it. Leilan wouldn’t really be able to tell what caused it, but to threaten one’s own family... Wolfbane was now a black sheep.
Her question draws him out of his train of thoughts, and he tilts his head at her, adding something nearly akin to a smile. She is the opposite of how Izora had approached him, in a way, and he somehow appreciates it more. Nevertheless he is no fan of self-loathing where it is misplaced. ”I don’t know, Lilli. You tell me. Do you trust yourself?”
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the least trustworthy of them all? He’s pretty sure it’s not either of them, if he’s honest about it - in a world of monsters and dragons and ladies giving in to either of them... there are always worse things to find, around the next corner.
nothing burns like the cold
Leilan
@[lilliana]
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
07-25-2020, 09:14 PM (This post was last modified: 07-25-2020, 09:25 PM by lilliana.)
She is peering up at him from beneath her curling forelock and for a moment, Lilliana keeps her edge. The red mare of Taiga doesn’t push against him but neither does she retreat. It had been one thing to think of plans while she had been in Pangea. It had been one thing to think of ideas and of all the things she would do once she got her freedom again.
There had been so many ideas and then Lilliana had lost her daughter. She had returned to the North to find Elaina gone (again), her sons nearly grown and the land she so dearly loved in turmoil. The chestnut mare had her own part to play for it and when she bluntly admits it to @[Leilan], she is already bracing for herself the judgment she knows will be waiting there.
The Freyr purses his lips in a line - perhaps a sign of it - but he doesn’t hurl words at her like stones. He doesn’t look disgusted. There is no seething hatred. For the heartbeat that Lilliana had been preparing herself for it, when it doesn’t… she just blinks and lifts her head, almost startled by its absence. Leilan, to his credit, doesn't leave.
(And if Lilliana knew what Leilan thought about black sheep, Lilli would have said that it was her. That she is the black sheep, she is the one always looking to belong. She is the one that never quite fits.)
Lilliana turns her attention away from him. The ocean is gray and angry, unlike his eyes that have somehow turned warm. His eyes had been changing colors, reminding Lilli that there is Magic in everything. It twists her stomach and feels like a knife in her gut. "No,” she bluntly says as the winter wind whips around her, "I don’t.” The chestnut mare pauses before adding, "But I’d like to, one day. I’d like-,” and then stops.
Don’t get too far ahead of yourself, she warns inwardly.
Before this conversation goes too far, Lilliana asks several things she has wondered. That she has spoken with Lethy about and they had considered for Taiga. "What do you want, Leilan? For yourself? For the Isle? The North?"
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven i've got a long list of questions
There is a moment in which he recognizes their mirroring for what it is, their odd friendship and somehow-tight bond for what it looks like: therapy. Whatever her horrors from her past, his dry retributtals are working like little wake-up calls, distractions even from the pain when she tells it. In a similar way, the emotions in her eyes when he reacts this or that way because the questions she asks are too sharp and too close to center, soften the pain of the cuts, the fear of the breaking of the walls...
Yet all of it seems temporary, and perhaps that’s why they return to clash once again, when time has taken them apart for too long.
Hurt can be a great comfort, too, after all. The pain and soothing she provides is addictive.
The moment is fleeting and passes when she answers his question negatively, and he finds himself scoffing. ”So you’re trying to tell me that the choices you made at the time - with the information you had back then - were all wrong? That you didn’t really stand for them at the time?” he tilts his head - if there’s anything he knows about her, is that her moral compass is right. That certainly hasn’t broken. Is she trying to convince herself that it has?
A moment passes, a silence from his side that speaks loudly enough for his taste. If she chooses to answer, she’d better hesitate about her lack of trust in herself, about her choices - or better, realize that she’s wrong, but that might be too big a step for now.
Therapy isn’t supposed to work in a day.
A change of topic follows like a leaf in an autumn storm, twisted and turned and suddenly moving in a different direction. He follows, tired of opening up a part of himself, of feeling exposed and thus sucking in all of her own exposed feelings as well. He is an emotional creature, but he can overflow so easily - knowing this, he finds it best to make sure to close when the waves start to make swimming more difficult. He’s drowned a few times before, and he knows the kind of damage that he can cause when doing so.
”I got asked that question once before. Ambition was all I had at the moment, and I stuck with it.” he grimaces, eyes on the horizon for a moment. ”I’ve stopped believing in wanting things for myself, any more. When I chased those things, I’ve found they couldn’t last, and the mess I’ve left behind on my path towards it involves too many people’s lives.” Some of those lives he had made in that chaos - nevertheless, that route didn’t seem preferable in retrospect. ”Now what I want is for the north to thrive. For my people to get the respect and resources that they need.” It would seem to him that a legacy like that would be enough - should be enough - even though he might already have an inkling that if it’s too easy, then over time, he may need a new goal. A new ambition. A new dream - a new life.
But it’s not that day, yet.
nothing burns like the cold
Leilan
@[lilliana]
Two things I know I can make: pretty kids, and people mad.
08-06-2020, 06:11 PM (This post was last modified: 08-06-2020, 06:53 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
She closes her eyes. It's the easiest way to keep them there - the horrors of her past. She shuts them and keeps them away from herself and Leilan. Her ears flick back and the red mare sighs, using all of her self-control (and her gift) to keep them contained. Frostbane and Underworld have no place in Beqanna. This isn't the time to reminisce about a war that this land knew nothing of (and why would they, when they have had so many of their own?). Lilliana has shed herself of some secrets but these older ones - the ones that lurk in the murk and mire of her soul - stay buried.
Lilliana is determined to keep it that way.
It should be easy to do when there are so many other things to think about. Her children. The proposal to move the kingdom seat to Icicle Isle. Growth and prosperity for Taiga, something that it has long deserved and now needs. It should be easy to think about the many things that they (along with Lethy and Neverwhere) need to speak of. Lilli had intended to keep this conversation only on politics. But instead, Leilan is a mirror. He (ironic, given their first meeting) reflects what Elena had once told her and that's what Lilliana hears when he speaks: Defend your kindness, Lilli.
The chestnut had thought she had understood what Elena had meant, then. That defending her kindness would come from dealing with Ghaul and Draco. That it would come from the moments like one she has just shared with Leilan. Where Lilliana would cast herself on the judgment of others again and again, so they knew her. So that they knew her faults and knew that she was capable of great mistakes. That she couldn't be trusted.
What Leilan says is something that Elena has known all along - from their shared days of laughing rivers and lean, lanky legs. "I never meant for anyone to get hurt," she says, quiet and aching. Lilliana falters with it - an emotion too heavy even for her - and the red woman leans briefly into @[Leilan], her slender shoulder pressing into his for support.
It doesn't last more than a second, and then like a phantom, the touch vanishes. The warmth, if it lasts, is the only haunting reminder that it happened at all.
Their conversation turns with the tide. The Freyr speaks of being asked this question before (by who? she wonders) and Lilliana listens as he speaks of his ambitions. How he stopped wanting things for himself. About how he has left chaos behind him. Leilan doesn't want anything for himself - at least not anymore - but there is nothing in him that shows (or that he says) that he doubts himself either. It emboldens Lilliana who flicks an ear in his direction and follows with a slight turn of her head, peering up at him from beneath her curling forelock. "What has Lethia told you of our aspirations for Taiga?"
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