you were a shot in the dark
and aimed right at my throat
How does anybody learn to be whole when so much is gone? (And she'd wonder, where does it go?)
Lilliana has never claimed to be whole. She has never claimed that the heart beating in her chest wasn't fractured, wasn't chipped in some way (and in reality, she has been offering out small pieces of it since her very first breath). She has never been whole but she has tried to fill so many empty places, tried to fill the emptiness that others carry around with them because she has always believed that if everybody is fractured and broken, then maybe all the shards and splintered pieces of souls come together to make something new.
There are so many fractures in hers now, though. Even in her dreams (of a waterfall that she no longer hears, pressed against a golden woman who she has loved too much), Lilliana doesn't know what to make of them. She doesn't know what to do yet with the lines that have carved away parts of her and created new valleys, has yielded mountains, and opened rivers to run. (Sometimes it feels like the wilderness isn't around her but in her. Something wild, untamed. Something, she thinks, she might be afraid of. )
When the self-doubt comes creeping in with fog, when she has thoughts about what might have happened if she never returned from Pangea, she remembers that she did. She did and she is here, building towards a future that she has never allowed herself to have. It's one that she creates for her children because Lilliana thinks (hopes) they will be in the North long after she is gone. That it might become something that Paraiso should have been, that if they ever need shelter or protection, the reaching branches of Taiga will always be there to welcome and shield them.
She isn't in Taiga today, though. Lilliana roams the barren moorlands, looking for Brazen. The roan mare is always easy to find this time of year, like Lilli. The two of them stand out like a pair of flames, a vibrant fire-red against the vast frozen fields. Eurwen, on the other hand, is as pale as Lilliana is bright. The ice on her chest glistens in the daylight where her flame marking sparks to life. She approaches the spotted Nerinian, moving away from the path that she had been traveling to spy her friend with eyes closed and shielded. Like she was -
Remembering.
And then a voice whispers that I wish you hadn't run off. The memory isn't strong and Lilliana is careful with it. It feels almost fragile, that if her Magic tried to reveal more, the memory itself would fall apart. She takes a step forward and asks with concern clouding the present in a silver-plume of freezing vapors. "@[Eurwen]?"