"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
He rises with the dawn, where the sun is not yet over the horizon but its rays have already begun to chase away the blackness of night. Stars begin to fade, twinkling gently as they give way to the sun’s warmth. His horned head gently tips upwards, a mixture of moonlight and sunlight dimly illuminating the blue opal that spirals from his head. His dark eyes enjoy the way the colors of the sky changes, melting into each other as night steps back and day takes over. Pink, orange and peach clouds slowly make their way towards Tephra, all lit up with the sun’s strength as it rises. The warmth against his auburn back causes the stallion’s shoulders to roll beneath it, his feathers ruffling gently to catch each ray as it hits the earth.
Black and blue marbled hooves bring the winged stallion inland, where the rivers of lava and freshwater twist and cross. His mind is blank (or, at least, he attempts to make it so) as he wanders purposelessly, trying to shake the tiredness from his muscles. Warden’s nights are often sleepless and if he finds himself able to close his eyes, his mind is racked with previous visions, terrible nightmares that only remind him of his burden and the weight that it bears across his shoulders.
His aimless wandering leads him towards the thicker part of Tephra, where the foliage intertwine, their broad and fat leaves dripping with moisture from humidity, dampening his shoulders and flanks as he passes through without a thought. It is soon nearly midday and he only comes to realize it because the sound of rushing water interrupts his turbulent thoughts. He must be near the waterfall, he mildly thinks to himself, as the overwhelming scent of freshwater permeates his senses. He has no reason to head closer to it and is flexing the muscles at his withers in preparation to take flight, towards the sea.
However, a terribly familiar sensation plagues the center of his ivory forehead and with a gasp, he nearly finds himself stumbling to his knees. With a shuddering halt, the stallion lifts his head with a groan as the burning intensifies, jerkingly peering through the thick jungle for what has triggered the vision that would soon overtake him.
08-06-2020, 07:31 PM (This post was last modified: 08-06-2020, 07:40 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
It does take all night. Between her limited healing abilities and the power of Tephra’s lake, it takes all night to heal Warlight. When the painted woman finally regains enough of her strength to leave, Lilliana finds a place along the shore and beds down for the last remaining hours of nightfall. She waits (hopes) anxiously for dawn.
Her rest - when it does come - is fitful. It's full of shifting the weight from her thoughts from her mind to her hips and back again. Nothing stills. When she finally decides that there is no more point in (pretending to) rest, the copper mare leaves the lovely alcove behind - strung with tropical fruits and made alluring with blossoming orchids. Perhaps it’s because she is already tired or perhaps it’s because of the humidity already hanging like a heavy curtain around her but Lilliana moves sluggishly. Despite her increasing desire to get home, each step feels weighted. Like her hooves should be made of stone, like her legs long to root themselves where they step.
North, she tells herself.
Lilliana’s absence - any amount of time that she has been gone - will be noticed. The former captive knows this and can hear Izora Lethia in her mind asking her not to leave again. She thinks of Yanhua’s (anxious?) blue eyes in the Redwood forest and forces herself to move at a faster pace than she might have otherwise taken.
Home, she thinks.
The day goes on and so do her travels. The sun goes peeking from the East to rising above her and the day grows hotter, the humidity rising steadily like the steam from Tephra's volcano. Lilliana is made for this kind of climate; her red pelt is sleek and fine. She shines and glints a fiery-gold sheen in the sunlight that manages to catch her, that manages to keep up with her determined stride. The only part that dampens with sweat is where her thick, wavy mane crashes along her long neck and slender shoulder.
Her thoughts are distracted - full of home and yet lulled by the rushing sound of her ancestors - when she comes across him. Her blue eyes sweep first to his ivory wings (of course, they do) and if it were possible for her face to blanch, it would. Only her eyes show this, draining their usual intensity. They dim with worry and she stops, freezing as she peers to the pale (troubled) face that emerges from the density of Tephra’s jungle. "I’m sorry,” she says, apologizing for an intrusion she creates. She’d leave, keep moving and leave him but the troubles are painted plainly on his white face.
She never leaves well enough alone. But she never leaves anyone - even a stranger - when they look as this one does. Like they are anything but well.
"Are you,” she starts though she knows otherwise, knows it with a lead certainty that sinks to the bottom of her stomach. "Alright?”
It does not take long for his deep ocean-colored eyes to find hers, an essence of fear within their depths as he makes that first initial eye contact, his forehead pulsing wildly in warning. There is an apology on her lips but it’s barely heard as his head pounds fervently, causing him to close his white lids around his eyes, champing as he presses his chin to his auburn chest. Then for a moment’s breath he is perfectly still. When Warden’s head lifts, his eyes are a milky white, looking beyond the chestnut mare at something she would not be able to see and in a time only he would be able to venture into.
This time, his vision is pressing.
There is no gradual flow towards the event he is to see - he has come in as it is happening and Warden can taste the bile that threatens to rise in his throat as his stomach sours. Like a terrible angel of death he stands over the mottled red woman, horror painted across his face as bone and marrow trap her from the inside out. The screams are mortifying and Warden attempts to close his eyes from the sight, but there is no turning away for even behind his eyelids the vision still plays infinitely.
She is a stranger and he does not know how she has come to such an end - where her own skeleton betrays her, growing like tree roots across her skin, gripping her tight and relentlessly. Her voice becomes strangled as the press of the bones is becoming too much, struggling now just to breathe as her fate slowly and perilously creeps forward. He’s there with her, until the end, even though it hasn’t actually taken place in time, and his eyes are moist with tears as she finally stills, her body shuddering to a complete halt.
In a single blink he is back in the present, the breath that was caught in his throat now escaping in a rush of wind from his open mouth, his eyes deep and dark as the ocean in the distance. Without hesitation his gaze falls to the woman before him - not the same woman from his vision, however - and merely stares at her as he gasps as if having run miles and miles, pain and guilt darkening his ivory face.
“No,” he replies, his voice thin and stripped. As the burning sensation on his forehead fades his vision does not, her choking gasps still in his ears, her frightened eyes still boring into him. The stallion shudders, ripping his gaze from the stranger before him, unfurling the perfect white of his large wings to take to the skies - he did not like to share company after a premonition and sought the solemnity of Tephra’s black sand beaches and perhaps its unforgiving waters.
Warden
@[lilliana]
i'm assuming she'll use her echoes and reference the vision to keep him from leaving? <3
08-07-2020, 11:44 PM (This post was last modified: 08-07-2020, 11:47 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
He is the very vision of something she fears. Lilliana is drowning in the depths of his ocean eyes (a reminder of someone else she has encountered here) before he closes them, hiding the white that had breaking around the rims like waves. Warden tucks his chin to chest and the chestnut mare stands with locked knees and a held breath - a tendril she (unknowingly) holds like it might unravel the rest of her.
What happens next is quick.
It is a flash.
Lilliana knows something is wrong. It’s like he has gone somewhere she can’t know about or even follow. The breath she had been cradling releases when she notices movement from the overo stallion. A twitch of an eyelid. A quiver of his pale lips. The tensing of his shoulders. Subtle things that betray nothing about what is happening beneath his two-toned skin, subtle things that give nothing away.
He blinks and wherever his soul has flown, it comes back to his body. He exhales - a gust of demanding air - and he looks at Lilliana. Her head tilts slightly though she says nothing. It seems like the pegasus has come crashing back into his body and she isn’t sure if there are any words that could be considered comforting.
Only his face wracks with guilt like a coastline.
No, he says and something wrecks in her, too. Catching a memory is no easy thing and for every one that Lilliana has ever found (at least deliberately), it has been through touch and elaborated through storytelling. It - like her - is practiced and controlled. This is a tsunami, something that roars in her ears before she finally succumbs and sinks to the bottom of it.
There are glimmers and gleams. She doesn’t stand in the future (she can’t, not when the woman is so closely bound to the past) that Warden knows. But there are the proud ledges on the horizon. Nerine. Lilliana knows that. Another flash and the memory catches on something hard. Bone. White on red. Only this time there are no wounds to ease, there is no place her healing can that it might alleviate some of the pain that Brazen carried through the years.
There is nothing at all.
No, she furiously echoes back. Anger that stems from being ripped from her children (She thinks of them, Nashua and Yanhua, still needing their mother when she had been stolen. She thinks of the child she hadn't been given the chance to raise. She thinks of Neverwhere and Eurwen and finally, Brazen. Everything that they have endured in the last year.)
She is all rage and finds a voice that had been devoid in Pangea, when she had hidden in caverns and wept in the dark. The stallion is turning away from her and showing his back - an angle that Lilliana is far too familiar with - when they stand on Tephra again.
"No,” she tells him flatly (though she wants to shout, to scream, to curse). Her mind is running from the altered memory but threatens to spill from her eyes, instead.
"Take it back,” Lilliana says. It’s not a memory. Something in her knows that much. Was this a manipulation of her mind? Had her memories mangled with him in some way? There are other things lingering beneath the surface of the antlered stallion and Lilli is wary of all them. "Change it back. You don't get to ruin them."
Her voice trickles through the air - firm yet with some give - like the fervent drizzle before a storm; a warning.
Warden freezes, surprised immensely by her responding to him at all (why would she, for in his mind, there is no reason), still facing away from her with his wings outspread. The single word brings him to a standstill, his chest tightening with fear as to what the reason would be for her to stop him.
Take it back.
He whirls around to meet her, his ocean eyes rife with confusion and anguish, his brow creasing and creating a darkening shadow across the ivory white of his face, complete with disbelief. The stallion’s wings fold in, striding towards her as her words continue to fall foolishly from her mouth, like she knows anything about the future or what he has seen. Even with the intense emotion that comes from her - You don’t get to ruin them like that - he continues to rush towards her, the hurt and pain within him (she's right, you've ruined them) brimming to the surface as anger.
The guilt fuels him, coming to a near sliding halt before her with flaring nostrils and ears that have fallen deep into the tangles of his onyx mane. He looks her in the eye, this stranger, this accuser, and part of him wishes to shove the spiralings of his blue opal horns into the chestnut’s face. He doesn’t, so instead his voice rises.
“You think there’s a choice?!” Warden spits at her, his face burning with rage. “There is no taking it back and you are a fool if you think I have that power!” The stallion snorts sharply in her face, a single black foreleg stomping furiously at the ground beneath him. His white lips quiver, as if he is about to explain himself more, but then gives up. He rolls his shoulders and straightens, taking a few steps back from her. Anger still pulses just beneath the surface of his auburn and white skin, simmering hotly like embers amongst a fire.
He inhales deeply, raising his head to look down at her with disappointment on his face. He doesn’t know how she has seen his vision, or why she blames him for what he has seen, but the curiosity of it somehow quells him enough to speak without yelling, though he does not curb the harshness and accusation in his voice. “Don’t speak on things you don’t understand.”
The silvery voice of Aletta speaks thinly in his mind, like a long lost memory.
The future always comes.
Warden’s teeth clench tightly, sharply turning his face away from this stranger with a snort. He pulls at Aletta's wisdom for clarity and compassion, despite the defensiveness in his posture and the obvious anger that still rattles through him. He repeats his friend’s words, but with a grimness that will only bring heartache to the poor woman before him. “The future always comes.”
08-13-2020, 03:25 PM (This post was last modified: 08-13-2020, 03:30 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
He storms around and she steels herself when Warden approaches. There are warning signs flaring in the back of her mind - run, run, run! - her blood hums in her delicate ears. This is not her first time dealing with anger that burns from the eyes and so she smolders him back. She lifts her head, determined not to give up the ground she is standing on.
She is no Tephran - no, she is like her Redwoods. She is rooted and firm and unyielding. She can handle the fury of this storm. Let him rage, she thinks. Let him fury. He blusters forward with all the grace of a hurricane, sending emotions whipping around him like a gale.
What was he so angry about? He was the one who had warped her mind. He was the one who taken something beloved and tried to destroy it. (Though something in the back of her mind is whirling too, asking: why Brazen?) The painted pegasus doesn’t stop coming. He doesn’t halt or yield despite how she grounds herself to this spot. She’s a stupid woman, she knows. She’s a stupid woman not to run.
Lilliana should have turned and left nothing of herself for him to see.
(She’s promised herself that it’s not something she will ever do again.)
Lilliana burns back at him, fueled off his fire. "There is always a choice,” she seethes, not understanding what he’d done was involuntary. Her mind jumps to the worst - that he has toyed with her mind because he could. Because he was more powerful than her. "Stay out of my memories,” she blazes. Her emotions - a wildfire at this point - show around the whites of her marked ankles, from the gold of her tattoo.
Her mind - still lingering on the edge of ruin and demise - swings back at Warden.
The chestnut mare thinks of the most terrifying thing she can. The first memory is bright and brilliant, radiant like new-fallen snow. It’s a pale man who smiles with destruction in his green eyes and Lilliana remembers how afraid she had been - barely a year old - frozen into place by fear with Elena beside her. There are other things: the serrated glint of kelpie teeth in the spring sunshine as Celina lurches forward. The helpless cry of a child on a cold, winter night who screams her name - 'Lilliana!’ The dark stallion who lingered on the other side of a sand dune, staining it with blood and his tears as he tears himself apart. 'Is this enough, Mother? Is this enough?’
Warden calls (dismisses) her a fool. He tells her not to speak of things she does not understand. Like this is all above her.
It makes her angrier and so she pushes back again, glaring up into his monsoon eyes.
The second wave is forceful, stronger than the first. Lilliana fills it with the very thing he’d disarmed her with. Brazen.
She shows a fearsome face made of bone, one that might intimidate some but not Lilliana (at least not then). "I’m still figuring this place out,” explains a much younger Lilli, one much more optimistic than this guarded woman. "Would you like some company while you figure things out? I can’t promise I’ll be much help,” Brazen laughs, "but I can probably make things more interesting.”
Lilliana sends wave after wave of memory at Warden. Brazen - strong, fierce, alive - as the two of them ventured into Pangea. The bone-armored mare walking quietly near Brinly on the pebbled beaches of Nerine. The way that Brazen watched after the lost mares - Lilliana included - when they arrived haunted and still looked over their shoulders for the ghosts behind them. Brazen teaching Nashua how to fight - a sharp pivot, a clash of hoof - and comparing her own horns with Yanhua with a playful grin.
Let @[Warden] see that what he toys with is not something to be toyed with at all. She hopes that when the flood of memories leaves him, he might feel something similar to what she had felt. Helpless. Desolate. Agony. She hopes that they crash over him and leave him empty. She hopes-
And then the memories stop.
The future always comes.
Only it is not Warden who says it. Another memory dawns from the back of her mind. It’s a gray stallion, dressed in the dappled hues of their mother with her dark neverending eyes. He looks tired, defeated and yet he smiles to the girl who asks: 'But why, Malachi? Why won’t she speak to me?’ The stallion had smiled - an indulgent, lopsided grin that let him get away with anything as a colt - and said, 'Give her time, Lillibird. Keep a listening ear and a waiting smile.’ A pause as he looks towards to the setting sun and where the sky had already turned into a canvas of pastels with a few shimmering stars, waiting in the midnight eaves. 'The future always comes,’ he says, 'and there is always the hope that tomorrow will be a better day.’
Her anger is gone when she blinks again, but she is left with something worse. Distressed and disturbed with her ears hidden beneath the curls of her copper mane and her sides heaving like she has done the very thing she swore she wouldn't. How was he doing this?
But more importantly, she has to know: "Why?”
image credit to rigardatta
i'm sorry, apparently my characters love giving you novels
The ivory of his lips twitch in simmering rage, the muscle in his jawline pulsing as he fights to regain composure, but all the hurt and guilt have manifested themselves into this irrational anger, fierce and wild. His nostrils flare wildly to steady himself, but his eyes fixate on her again and resume their smoldering blaze as she reminds him that there is always a choice. With a sweeping step he finds himself close to her again, black-tipped ears hidden beneath a wild mane and long, spiraling horns. “Then you do something, then.” He spits through clenched teeth, throwing his head up violently and backing away.
She glows, pulsates with magic, and for a moment there is a surprised expression on the hardness of his face. His eyes narrow, a glimmer of confusion finding the dark navy of their depths as she speaks of memories, her own, as if he had violated them. Even with the threat of her looming magic he sneers at her, knowing that he was in fact correct - she speaks of what she doesn’t understand. He’s about to inform her, to tell her how wrong she truly was, and perhaps even make matters worse by making sure she understood just how this curse of his really works.
But his own mind throws a mutiny, causing the stallion to stumble and freeze as his eyes widen. Not unlike a premonition, the visions of teeth and fear run rampant, burning into the back of his mind with such a searing jolt that Warden finds himself frightened, unsure of what was happening or what he was even seeing. And then, for a beautiful moment, his mind is his own and he is able to breath only but a quick inhale before the wave hits him again, causing him to stagger backward as she infiltrates his own memories, feeding him forcefully images of the woman he had just watched suffocate to death by her own skeleton.
“Stop it!” he cries out, stepping towards her in an attempt to cease the memories that flood his mind, making his guilt all the heavier.
But she only stops when he bitterly reminds her of the future and all its impending doom.
His sides heave, his sharp eyes fixating to her with a helplessness and solemnity that is somehow darker than it had been before his vision of Brazen, finding it extremely painful that someone has seen his visions, and watched the death of a dear friend. Warden’s head is lowered in weariness, emotionally and physically, steadying his breath with deep intakes of the night air.
The sheer despair in her “why” makes Warden want to crumble into the ground and shatter, already knowing that he has no answers for her that will ease any of the pain. He cannot even tell her when it will occur, only that it will. The long pause between him holds the weight of his lack of an answer and all he can offer her is the smallest shake of his head and words that are not in the least bit comforting.
“I don’t know.”
Warden’s face hardens as it twists into a grimace, turning away from her with a shuddering inhale. “I’m sorry you had to see it.”Now it is a burden we both bear.
08-22-2020, 06:17 PM (This post was last modified: 08-22-2020, 06:25 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 trembles.
Lilliana stands lost somewhere between the past and the future. Some part of her mind can rationalize that this the present - that she is standing here with a stranger in a reality that constantly tests and trials (her, him, Neverwhere, Brazen, all of them. Sometimes she thinks all she sees is struggle). Her mind had fled to the safest place it could go, back to the place she had been born. Where the rivers had run swift and the laughter that echoed had been bright. From her siblings and cousins, from the streams and creeks that shared in their foalhood antics.
So some part of her - that one that always seems lost, the one that had seen searching - flees to the past.
Malachi tells her that there is always the hope that tomorrow will be a better day. For one beautiful, blissful moment, she had been looking up at him and even though his smile was fatigued, Lilliana had believed him. The days they had spent traveling - trying to find sanctuary - were tiring. The dappled stallion was a father of five and yet he still found time to comfort his youngest sister.
She is still trembling when she comes back to the present. She is still looking up but there is a bitter disappointment when she glances up. Lilliana is staring into the storm-gaze of Warden. Not Malachi. And like so many things in Lilliana’s life, there is no explanation for this either. There is no reason to seeing what will become of Brazen; it just another facet of this life (this reality) that strangles her once fire-bright spirit. The spark turns again to an ember, a flickering thing among the shadows.
The Taigan mare doesn’t say anything at first. There are flames licking at the back of her throat and scorching her tongue. Lilliana knows that if she says something, it might raze them both. Warden doesn’t deserve her anger. She reminds herself that once upon a time, she wouldn’t have acted this way. She wouldn’t have been this way at all. In another time, Lilli might have tried to convince Warden that there was a reason or a purpose to what they had both shared.
Some things for Lilliana, however, do not change. Even drowning in her despair, there is still his to consider before her own. His spiraling horns turn away from her and the chestnut mare quietly says, "I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-,” she stops herself because this is a lie. She had meant to hurt him. In a white flash of panic, she had thought that he was intentionally hurting her and so she had harmed him in return.
Her gaze drops again when she remembers. Brazen. The bone-armored mare is one of the pillars that holds Lilliana together and this knowledge that @[Warden] has shared starts to crumble her infantile strength that had barely begun to grow. The image hits her again and again. Brazen - who is fierce, who is tenacious - becomes absolutely nothing at all.
Those blue eyes stare absently at the ground and she reminds herself that this is the present. She is standing in Tephra, simmering emotions below the silhouette of its volcano. A foreshadowing, perhaps, that one day she too will erupt.
"How am I supposed to tell her?” she faintly asks them both. The knowing is the worst, he says.
And Lilliana, who has stopped trembling, disagrees.
She is torn between the present and future; it is written across the angles of her chestnut face, the confusion written there as plain as day. The ivory of his own face hardens with a grimace, turning away from her a moment to force his stony gaze into the ground, bitter and full of resentment. She’s seen what he has seen and he can recognize the reaction - one that he has had numerous times and now has become numb to feeling. He snorts softly, allowing her this moment of in-between and uncertainty. She is still but a stranger - a red lady that has riddled him with accusations and blame, yet in the same moment, stepped back and saw what he truly is. He is merely a messenger, nothing more.
Nothing more.
When his dark oceanic gaze meets hers once again he is not surprised to find the look of disappointment filtering across her gentle face. What else could he expect? He is a harbinger of death and the reality of it is painted across the expression of her face. She holds back, he can sense it, and the grimace that coats his own ivory face does not attempt to fade. She even attempts to apologize - as if his visions and her seeing them had somehow been her fault - and the sneer of dissatisfaction on his face grows as his white ears fall into the deep black of his mane. He does not crave sympathy, even though he knows he might deserve it.
How am I supposed to tell her?
His ocean eyes flick to hers within a moment, a dark brow cascading over their navy depths. He’s about to reply - his mouth opens, but he pauses deliberately and purposefully. A sigh escapes Warden, shuddered, and defeated. “You don’t,” he admits quietly, his nostrils flaring as he lifts his head solemnly, those great blue and opaled horns spiraling like spyres from his forehead. His voice is incredibly even as if there was no other answer besides the one he has given her.
He watches Lilliana but he only sees this stranger’s chestnut color as a glimmering of glass, shining and shimmering in the sun’s light, crested with violet flowers. The stallion’s eyes close in reminiscence, watching as those perfect rubied pieces of her fall apart into nothingness, into shattered oblivion, and how he’d do anything to keep her from knowing her fate. The watcher swallows, refocusing his gaze on the woman before him, indifference falling across the ivory planes of his face.
08-28-2020, 11:07 PM (This post was last modified: 08-28-2020, 11:09 PM by lilliana.)
Her coat wasn't the only thing that used shine fire-bright.
There used to be more to than just the flecks of gold that catch and gleam in the Tephran sunglow. There used to be more than just the red glint of a spark catching the daylight. There used to be more.
There used to be a part of Lilliana that would have once shone for someone like Warden. It might have come from a speculative tilt of her slender head. It might have come from the questioning brilliance of her blue eyes. It might have come from a smile that would have tempted the world to hold itself together while it fractured apart. The woman standing in front of Warden has never been a fighter; she has neither the build nor the heart for a fight like that. But Lilli, despite the dubiety of those who know her best, has never been left unguarded or undefended.
Her smile has always been her shield.
It had served as her protection, a barrier from the ragged edges of their harsh reality. It had been a barrier to keep the dark out while drawing out the warmth in someone else. Her smile had been the thing of summer meadows and wildflowers. Her smile been the dawn, of the light to come. It had been illuminating and warm and kind. It had been something she had never hesitated in sharing. It had been wide and wild and daring, full of open spaces because Lilliana would have illuminated everything and everyone she could. It had been a smile that had tempted the stars and it had brought the whole sky crashing down.
@[Warden] can't see it because her future has already come and gone.
If he had called himself the Harbinger of Death, if he had acclaimed himself the Watcher of Endings, heralded himself as a Prophet of Desolation, she could have told him there are so much worse things than dying. There is grace in death. There is peace, she thinks. There is agony in living. (It is seeing dearest friends lined with the scars she should have worn. It is not stepping foot in a kingdom because of knowing that she had broken something sacred and in turn broke herself, unable to put anything back together. It was not being able to hold her youngest child to her breast and whisper to her about all those wonderful places the Winds blow, about all the things the stars might dream.)
"I can't do that," Lilliana says. Even if she thought herself capable of keeping her emotions in control to keep the vision away from Brazen, there is no room for lies in the North. Not anymore. Not for her. The Redwoods are too clustered, the ledges of Nerine too high and the Isle aspires for new heights. "I can't keep that from her." The chestnut mare states looking up into the pale face of Warden. Is that what he does? she wonders. He carries around these visions of doom and death and destruction and then harbors them? Tephra might as well be a sea for the way he drowns in despair.
Lilliana swallows because there is nothing else to do. The way that the horned stallion answers her broaches no room for argument and yet-
And yet.
She catches a shine in the back of her mind that isn't her own. There is a blazing that isn't her. There is a burning that becomes an ember until finally, it becomes nothing at all. It all becomes ash. It all turns to dust, as Warden sees them. As he sees all their Endings.
"Have you ever been wrong?"
It isn't, You are wrong.
It isn't, Fate needs to change.
It isn't what it might once have been.
(There used to be more.)
But this, this might be a start. A beginning.
Remember when our songs were just like prayers
Like gospel hymns that you caught in the air?
Remember when our songs were just like prayers