He knows the name of her grandmother. (Heartfire is technically her great-grandmother but Aela has always known that Heartfire is great.) Her teasing stills and she regards the brindled pegasus, with something akin to curiosity sparking behind her blue eyes. What the striped girl knows of the paternal (and maternal) side of her family is very vague. It would have been revealed to her in time, she had always assumed.
(It didn't mean that Aela didn't ask. She had pieced together whoever her sire was, he wasn't related through the skeletal Dovev that Heartfire had gone searching for.)
"No," she says carefully. Nerine, what little respect she held for the granite kingdom, was solely for their mutual ancestor. A winged boy, a rather insufferable pegasus, had stained what little appreciation she had for that place. "I was born on the outskirts of Taiga," she explains to this stranger that she is coming to realize is a relation. Even more than that, he was a... a sibling?
There is more that she meant to say. She meant to ask him where he has come from. Why hadn't Heartfire mentioned him? All those questions are furrowing a line on her palomino brow but she asks none because the pegasus shifts and Aela watches him, studying the way that his shape falls away to a more slender one. His blue coat lightens and then turns to gold. The brindled stripes become more pronounced and jagged while the hue of them resembles the iridescent navy that he had just rid himself of. Her blue eyes trace over him to the mask that covers his face and the fangs that protrude just slightly from his mouth. The flames that emerge from his nostrils are even more impressive and when Aela realizes what he is showing her - their father - there is a small surge of pride in her chest.
Growing up, she had always hoped that she was a daughter of Carnage (because what else could she have been besides the child of a God?). There had been nothing of a father for her to see glimmering in Kota's memories but she has seen him before, shining through Heartfire's mind and once after.
"I've seen him," Aela says thoughtfully. "A piece of him anyway," she explains. There had been a corner of Pangea that she had come across, where the stone had been ravaged. More than that, there had been a rather powerful memory beneath the rune-stone-like markings. It had been a red, seething fury that seeped from beneath the sandstone. Coming across the devastated area had been an accident (though Aela could certainly admire the power behind the strokes that took to create the damage) but the anger had taken a shape at the very end. The shape that Gale now wears (apart from the fangs and fire).
"You know him?" she asks suddenly because she had never found the ravager. Aela hadn't sought him out either but that was before she realized who he was.
Before she realized who she was.
Gale is smiling and one curves along the edges of Aela's lips. "I'm Aela," she tells him and tilts her head up towards him, offering to share the only memory she has of striped man that @[Gale] resembles.