YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Aela comes from Taiga. Her golden coat is lathered in sweat. Her fine mane - normally so well-kept - is windswept and wild. As she continues to travel away from the North, as she remembers what she has found, the whites of her eyes manage to show from time to time. She didn't mean to find it - and she certainly hadn't meant to hurl the memory at the Northern King, but Nashua had infuriated her.
Who was he to tell her that she wasn't to come to Taiga?
Who was he to command her anything?
The two siblings had come together somewhere along the rocky Taigan coast. She had thought that he might be like the others siblings she had met - like Reave, like Gale - but the striped pegasus had wanted nothing to do with the sister his mother never brought home. The one that Lilliana had asked Nashua and Yanhua to keep away from. 'You are not welcome here,' the young King had decreed harshly. And Aela - who only follows mortal law when it suits her - had given the pegasus a slow, saccharine smile. She had taken a brazen step towards him, relieved that she atleast didn't have to give the precedence that she cared.
She stepped forward and fell into a memory.
It isn't far from where Aela stood in the present. The peninsula was surrounded on three sides by crashing waves and yet the silence was the loudest thing of all. 'What happened, Lilli?' a voice says. It is concrete; hard. It leaves no room for excuses. The waves continue to break along the shore and as the silver figure stares at her daughter - one that was missing a child and showing too many ribs - she gets no answer. So Aletta resumes the role of Regent, the bearing of the Queen that had ruled alongside Valerio. "Lilliana." She says, wielding her tongue like a sword and cutting straight to the heart of the red mare.
Slowly, she turns her refined head to look at her mother.
Her blue eyes had been dull and listless before; the light gone from them. But what burns there now is terrible - so terrible - that even Aletta recoils and steps back. 'I wish Frostbane would have torn my throat out that day,' Lilliana says, wild and gone in her grief. 'I wish that Cazador would have reduced me to ash.' It takes the gray mare a moment to understand. 'I wish I would have stayed in Culloden.' The dawning finally comes: her daughter speaks of the tragedies they had suffered in Beyond. Events beyond their control that sent so many lives reeling. 'I would have wished for anything else.' She finally says and that is when she breaks. 'Anything but this.' The ice in her voice thaws but there is no warmth left behind.
There is nothing but Aletta's blazing anger.
That memory had been powerful - potent enough that it been shared between both brother and sister - and when Aela looked up, Nashua's green eyes were full of their grandmother's wrath. 'Get out', he had told her, thinking that what she had done was intentional. For once, it hadn't been. The palomino had managed to share a few memories of their birth mother out of spite - pressing them into the grieving corners of his mind - and then fled from Taiga, away from what she had encountered there.
Its because the palomino is still running that she doesn't see the other. They almost collide (and wouldn't that be cataclysmic?), but Aela is as surefooted as she is lovely. "Are you blind?" she seethes at the other girl (Aela had obviously been at fault; in another life, these cousins might have been best friends as their mothers had been. In this one, Aela is merely furious for her having her path blocked.)
And there is nobody quite as ruthless as Aela to those who get in her way.
@Elliana sad enough for you?