YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
This is how Aela learned language. This is how she first learned to find a voice. And this - all these dancing images, all these fractured memories of lives come and gone - was how Aela first viewed the world.
The Echoes had been overwhelming at first because where didn't a memory hide? Under a bough of spring blossoms, Aela might sense a forgotten romance. Treading through the woods, while the leaves and bramble might hide what was long decomposing, the horrific last moments of a murder might resurface if she took a wrong turn. And it had been in misty Taiga where Aela had first felt it, coming from the rocky shore from that mother that Reave was so sure of. A lonely beach where a memory that taught her that grief was like the ocean, deep and drowning.
And that had been the moment - though she was still young - that Aela had decided her emotions (and these memories) would not drag her down.
Aela contemplates playing her usual games with @[Reave]. A flash of an image here - perhaps Nerine and her rolling moorlands, Pangea and the dark ravines that cut through like veins - or maybe she stretches her ability to try a place that she's never been: Gale's tropical Islandres. She's considering as she studies her brother from beneath the silk of her flaxen mane. She does something that she normally wouldn't: she hesitates. While Aela scrutinizes him and tries to decide the best course of action, the adolescent answers her questions about the murky place he had been born.
Her blue eyes lock with his and Reave is given another rarity. "Alright," says the palomino. She doubts that he has experienced much life outside of his Northern home but she'll (generously) give him this chance. "Show me otherwise."
