For a moment, Lilliana just stops.
She stands there and she waits for the shadowy stranger to tell that she is mistaken, that whoever Ori is, it is not her. (It wouldn't be the first time. No matter how much time has passed, Lilli is always searching the lines of unfamiliar faces for a glimpse of the family she left behind.) The rational part of her mind is preparing her for the taller mare to turn and look at her, for Lilliana to fully see her and find that the angles are all wrong. The eyes are a wrong shade of green. The brandished gold is muddier hue.
But even as Lilliana understands that her world is all wrong, she knows she is right about this. This is Ori. This is the playmate who had raced and kicked up her heels alongside herself and Elena and Orani. She had grown up with them in Murmuring Rivers, had listened to Jay recite the names of stars with the reverence of prayers as they fell asleep, and been tempted one too many times to find trouble with Brielle. They had all watched Marcelo struggle with his ability to see the future, the things that may or may not come to pass.
Lilli, her cousin calls her. Somebody who remembers who Lilli had been. That girl, the one that vividly remembers their last meeting (does Ori remember? When Aletta had brought her grandchildren out to the Pass with Brynn, Malachi and Kalina had followed with a newborn Kildare, and the yearling twins Tarian and Liam had kicked up the new-fallen snow. Ruth, Paraiso's beloved General, had been there with Marcelo and Ori and a spindle-legged Brighid had followed. Kildare had been persuaded to leave his mother's side and even Elena and Lilli had joined in, squealing and tossing their refined heads to the brisk breezes that whipped all around them. The laughter that day had been as bright as the winter sunshine. It is one of the last memories Lilliana has of her family together, one of the few happy ones that have helped hold her fragile heart together.)
"Ori?" she asks again, as if repeating the name will turn her cousin into a mirage. Lilliana is afraid to blink. Ori could be an apparition. If she closes her eyes, the champagne mare might vanish.
"It's been so long," and Lilliana exhales before laughing, a chiming sound that breaks the quiet between them. "It's been a lifetime," she tells the other mare. She is quick to close the space between them and her blue eyes trace over the slender shape of the long-limbed girl, seeing so much of Ruth in her (Lilliana had never known Zamier; she had only known him as one of their Legacy fables, a story of love and sacrifice and family). "I," she starts, still trying to grapple with the presence of her cousin.
Ori was here. In Beqanna.
She looks up briefly to where the faint halo of the eclipse hung in the sky and there a thousand things she wants to say.
"You're here," she says again when her blue eyes go seeking out the champagne mare again. "I've been," Lilliana starts to tell her cousin (there is more that story but how she explains dragons and Curses and her children and her home and all the time that has passed since they last saw each other is something she isn't sure how to yet tell) and then just gives her slender head a shake, a smiling blooming instead. "Winds, @[Ori]. It is so good to see you."
But what was she doing here?
"Your mother?" she asks, suddenly afraid that something has happened to her Valerio's right hand. Had something happened to Paraiso? Suddenly, the years come rushing back in a torrent and Lilliana finds herself starved for news of home, drowning in worries. "Marcelo?" she questions with a knot twisting in her chest, "Paraiso?"
And then comes the question that had been lodged at the back of her throat.
"My father?"
