YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Maybe if the bond that Aela shared with their mutual ancestor had happened when she was older, the palomino might have held some resentment. To know what it might have been like before they shared such a tether. Maybe if she thought that some freedoms were being restrained or that she was being constrained in some way, Aela would have rebelled. She would have found a way to sever that tie the moment it hindered her; but Heartfire has never done any such thing.
If she makes herself known at all (the blue roan has had a few lifetimes to learn her ability; how to weave herself in and out of the mortality of other lives), Aela has always welcomed it.
She considers her Grandmother an inspiration and if she can become even a fraction like the immortal Seer, the striped girl would consider that a compliment. Aela tilts her blazed head towards Reave as he speaks that Heartfire coming to visit his mother after she became a statue. A statue? Her lovely brow furrows slightly - distorting the pretty vision of her face - as she turns it up to her half-brother. Loud was never a word that she would have associated with their grandmother; that would be the word she would have described for the other parent they both shared. "And you never thought," Aela doesn't say her name but shares a mental image of the Taigan Guardian with a questioning expression, "that she wasn't loud?"
It had been why Aela had given the fire-marked mare such a wide berth when she had lived in Taiga. The few times that she got near enough to the chestnut woman, her mind had been full of crashing waves (Aela still doesn't like the ocean) and gull's cries and agony. After that, she had kept her distance.
Aela spends very little of her own emotions wallowing in sorrow; she certainly won't do it for another.
Reave's piercing gaze is met with an equally fierce one. When he implies that she owes the North more credit than she gives it, her ears flick back into the fine strands of her pale mane. "I owe Grandmother much," Aela confirms. That she won't deny - Heartfire had instilled confidence (and perhaps arrogance, because even deities have their flaws) and certainty of a bright future in the palomino. And then her smile turns small and slight, like her; coy. "But I think you mean Nerine," she corrects @[Reave]. There are flashes of the moorlands like lightning in the air between them, fueled by Aela's association of that place with once ruled by their ancestor.
