you were a shot in the dark
and aimed right at my throat
She doesn’t understand.
There isn’t a fiber in her being that understands at all what could have compelled Leilan to go to Pangea when he was clearly needed here. Walking this well-traveled path - the same one she has taken from Nerine to Taiga, Taiga to Nerine for years - does nothing to find reason in the decision that the Freyr had made. (But then, nothing about this trail is familiar anymore. It charred and scorched, smoldering with the steam from Straia’s rain and melding into the Redwood’s signature fog.)
Lilliana just thinks of the events that had unfurled in Nerine, again and again, and again. It’s like that past she always trying to put behind her and she becomes trapped in a maze of her own making. She keeps looking for another choice, another option, something she may have missed. She replays the events - the Magicians, the flagrant abuse of Magic, the fortitude and tenacity of the Northerners who had stood against the Pangeans - over and over again in her mind and it is only the presence of Yanhua that prevents her tears.
(The chestnut mare will be grateful later for Straia’s rain; it will muffle the sound of her sobs when she finally is alone.)
So many words come to life in her mind. So many words of comfort she wants to offer to Yanhua and yet it is all ash on her tongue.
When the horned stallion picks up a trot, Lilliana sees what (who) he was headed towards. For a moment, she thought about calling out to him. She thought about asking him to wait but she lets her star-marked son go. He has every right to the anger permeating off him and she will not tell him that he isn’t justified in it. So she lets him go.
His words roll low with the doldrums of distant thunder and Lilliana stops a few paces behind him, watching the interaction between the Dragon stallion and the Taigan warrior. Leilan had asked her once to trust him and she remembers the icy-coldness in his blue eyes as he had retorted: 'The North can’t what? Trust a dragon?'
And she had wanted too; Leilan has been one of her oldest friends.
Lilli can't fathom how a king (though she has always hated that word; it makes her think of Ichiro and how he had once said that a King is entitled, a Guardian owes) leaves behind those who had needed him. That there had been a battle roaring below him and he had flown over them like...
Yanhua’s anger is blazing through her and she finds it easier to hold than the sorrow.
It cuts through her and so she lets all her emotions go. The memories come flowing out - wave after wave of what happened in Nerine, of the way that Beryl had blown the beach apart and Brennen had almost died, Amarine charging the Pangeans, Yanhua leaping headlong without a thought for himself (so like her that it is terrifying to watch again), of Eurwen sapping the last of her own abilities and the others who had stood in Nerine.
The exhaustion from those events and her pregnancy seep into her bones, prevents her from barricading the rest. It ebbs out with her despondency. Loess burns through the last images that Neverwhere had sent down their shared bond. The vision Warden revealed of Nashua falling from the sky. (And where are they, some desolate part of her worries. Where is Neverwhere and Nash? Aela? What of the others in Taiga?)
Their world had fallen into chaos. Had it really been worth it to create more?
i've tried to rewrite this a hundred times but it always comes out with way too many words. i'm sorry.