WE ARE ALL JUST FRAGILE THINGS /
SOFT AND SMALL /
BUT ALL THE BROKEN CAN FIND /
HOPE IN THE MOST UNEXPECTED PLACES /
Keep moving forward, she tells herself, as she's told herself a thousand times.
Lilliana keeps looking ahead, watching for the sunrise. She waits for the trickle of light to suddenly wash them both and the former Guardian tells herself over and over again that the darkness will be behind them. They will return to Taiga, and so she keeps looking North, moving North because every inch of her skin prickles with the sensation of fear and revulsion and an anger that she has now lived and died and been resurrected with.
You know, comes Ciri's cold accusation, and Lilliana nearly stumbles. You know what it is.
"I don't," she tells the injured pegasus, still staring ahead. (She can't look at Ciri. Not now, not when her mind is traveling down a thousand different paths and recalling a different thousand memories. Not unless she wants to drag them both down this path.) "I didn't know it all," Lilliana says, remembering all the ways she had tried to understand it and had failed. Remembering the ways that it had once taunted her, the way that it had mangled and twisted her and all the years it took to untangle the knots.
Of realizing how easy it was for it to become tangled again.
"I am Nashua's mother," she says quietly, a soft voice against Ciri's hard one. "And he'll do what's required to keep you whole."
The winged mare finally relents, and folds her scarred legs well past the Taigan border. Lilliana stands silently, glancing behind them to make sure nothing has followed, and then ahead to look for a face she recognizes. Surely, if not Nashua or Yanhua, there would be Amarine or Borderline. Perhaps even Memorie or Cheri or Reynard. It was the thing she had come to count on in Taiga, that there would be family.
Her delicate ears flick back as Ciri laughs harshly - and Lilliana reminds herself that the Curse is no easy thing to survive or cope with - but the deep inhale she takes emerges as a shuddering sob.
@Ciri
fragile things (reprise) - megan hilty
image credit to footybandit