so i listen to the    wind for an answer

This was not a game Lyanna had ever played. Yes, she’d had siblings, but Corbin had been too busy being perfect prince charming and learning to rule to play games. His version of a game was a spar. And Adelene didn’t get dirty. Gods forbid she run around in the trees. So Lyanna had wandered alone, playing tag with the squirrels that always won, or racing the birds and pushing herself to be stronger, faster. That game had perhaps paid off. She was a confident flyer, if nothing else. She was not the fastest on the ground, she was certainly not the strongest, and she was only vaguely capable as a fighter. But she fly. She could dive off the cliff in nearly unsafe winds without fear, she could dive and twirl, and she could teach others.

Erthe yells back at her, taunting her more, and Lyanna keeps chasing, trying to figure out where the girl is going and cut her off somewhere. It’s almost impossibly dark, but Lyanna’s hardly paying attention to this (and oh, how she should be), instead wrapped up in the game they are playing. Wrapped up, really, in playing a game. Of feeling like she has friends here, of knowing with a growing certainty that life wasn’t over for her. It was just beginning.

Erthe’s cry of ow finally snaps Lyanna out of her childlike fun. Instantly, she follows the sound to find the girl, ready to heal whatever injury the other might have. Though when she gets there, Erthe looks relatively okay if not a little dazzed. But she doesn’t see blood or anything broken, so instead settles for, “Are you okay?” At least, if they were going to play tag in the dark with rather dense underbrush, they decided to do so with healing magic readily available.

Though the next question snaps Lyanna completely back to reality. From child, to Doctor, to simply Lyanna. And it is dark. Has she ever come this far in the forest before? She thought she knew it all, but nothing had ever been so dark on her travels before. Perhaps night has fallen, though if so, it seems to be a starless night. It’s hard to tell if the night is simply cloudy (the sky full to bursting with snow clouds) or if they were staring at nothing but trees. “I’m not sure. It’s so dark I’d say night, but it’s hard to tell…”

She pauses, taking a few steps this way and that, wondering if she can catch sight of the sky. But all she can find is darkness, a few branches and leaves breaking up the nearly tangible black. “Do you know where we are?” she finally asks, because she cannot figure out just where they are. There’s no sky to orient herself with. Just leaves and darkness and an worthless little trickle of gray light.

lyanna