YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Aela had come into the world during a lull; the calm before the storm.
And when she had been separated from her birth mother, that was when she had started to truly learn how loud the world could be. The brief reunion with Lilliana had been a windstorm of grief and other raging emotions. Even nearly-silent Kota seemed to have her own stirring beneath her spotted skin.
Fate had changed for so many lives, all because one foal had been born dead in Taiga and another had been born alive outside it.
Funny how they remember different things but the thread of those emotions is very much the same: grief is portrayed on the faces of those they love. She's never been this close to another who remembers one thing and she another, never felt the faintest embrace of different moments in time as they brush past one another. If Aela had been in a different frame of mind - if this had happened with anyone but her half-brother - she might have wondered what recalling such powerful memories near each other might reveal? What ghosts and secrets might they stir?
It's like a humming in the back of Aela's mind as the fractured pictures come alive, tucked back away in the subconscious where things are best forgotten. The trees are tall and mighty, something that (for once) doesn't overwhelm her and the heavy fog shield them from the rest of the world: "She is to stay in Taiga," says a brittle voice, such a broken sound that even Aela knows there is no hope to repair what about is to be torn. The blue eyes of her look down and it is like the chestnut mare blames Aela for the shattering she finds glittering there (she hadn't - Lilliana never would - but what does a child know grief and loss when the world is still so new?) and the palomino had pressed all those emotions away, pressed herself into the pale side of her nurse-mother (though some part of wonders how much of that peace was thanks to Heartfire).
Before Aela can dive deeper, she pulled back. A force more powerful than her abilities and before Aela can be irritated by it, there is a sheen of blue. Blue roan, blue eyes, iridescent blue. It colors everything. There is grief and rage so raw that it even cuts her, an empath who is so often in control of her emotions and those around her.
"Of course it is," she tells Reave with a voice run ragged on the shared memories between them. "But at least I know the anger is my own," Aela says with a lift of her slender head, trying to regain some semblance of her usual austerity. Perhaps it's the blood they share or all the history that remains in the North, all the memories left behind by family; it does cloud her judgment and therefore it is better for her to stay away from it.
Whatever her future is, Aela doesn't think she will find it waiting for her there.
"And what do you want, @[Reave]?" she suddenly asks, turning an equally inquiring gaze on her half-sibling, and away from the past.
wow you got a novel