She is sleeping.

Aela doesn’t know where. She is still young and her instinct had only told her to run. Run and run and run, as fast and swift as her spry legs could carry her. The girl had run away from the beach and the man and the only source of comfort she had known. She had run until she had only known exhaustion.

There is a storm brewing (and Aela doesn’t know her heritage yet; she doesn’t know the tenacity or the perseverance that blows in her veins).

In the other world - the real one where she sleeps in the Meadow and a silver mare keeps an eye on her (until the seeing one comes) - she is curled on the ground. In this world, in this dream, she is running but the blackness of exhaustion never finds her. She never crumbles or crashes to the ground. The child is a golden gleam of light that reflects off the fabricated lighting storms and she is trying to outrun a gale that brews on her young heels.

The wind is running wild with her.
('It’s playing with your mane,’ was one of the last things her mother had said to her. Trying to distract her from the dark shape that loomed ahead.)

This doesn’t feel like playing. She hasn’t learned the art of wind-chasing yet and all she knows is there is too much frenzy in her chest. It beats frantically and it only encourages the erratic tempo of her hooves. Too much, too much, the false Wind sings and the girl runs faster and faster as the world spirals in darkness and storm.

The world goes black (and maybe the dreamweaver sees it, the thing that Aela runs from) and then flashes bright again, lit up by the beacon of a lightning strike. There is no thing but there is someone and though the girl is wide-eyed with terror, the filly does something that she may never do in her waking life.

She talks.

"Please,” Aela cries to the Stormgiver as tears darken her gilded cheeks, "why is the Wind angry?”