[open] the nothing war, any

[Aela]

She shouldn't be out here looking for him, but she is.

He would be impossible to tell from the other creatures. Skandar was as skillful with that shape as any other - (and some prideful part of her knew he would be, he was the son of a God. How could he be anything less than supernaturally adept?) - but there is a frenzy of anger seething off her while she searches.

Maybe that is why the monsters give her such a wide berth.
Maybe that is while her glow grows from dim light to a piercing flame, nothing creeps or crawls from the shadows. It is nothing but obscurity and her frustration rises the longer she spends wandering the empty dark.

The longer she searches, Aela even reverts to their old childhood game.

Projections fill the air - borrowed memories and hers alike - in an attempt to fill the vacant spaces around her. The night becomes a brilliant flash of magic while it blasts Nerinian stone apart. The silence is broken by the trill of unseen predators. Daylight blazes as flames consume a forest. Over and over again, she pushes the images out. Hoping that perhaps one creature will remember.

Hoping that one creature will know.

Because those memories are easier to recall than their last one. Because the last memory had been about playing with fire and tampering with Magic and while they hadn't been swallowed, she thinks something far worse happened.

Skandar - who can be terrible and terrifying - had been neither.

(He had been himself and had done the unthinkable.
He had offered her his throat.)

Finally, after hours of searching and finding nothing, the Forest finally offers a sound.

Her mind instantly reaches out, hoping to find a trace of memory. A glimmer of what might be nearby. Aela knows the moment it looks at her - the unsettling yellow that stares through the darkness - that she hasn't found who she is looking for. There is nothing to this monster like the others, though. It's different in a way that makes her blazed head tilt as she stops and lifts towards the hazy creature (in greeting? in warning?).

@[jamie] remember that time we had three threads together?