Sometimes the question isn't what, but who.
Aela has poised this question before to other strangers. Sometimes she is given a name, catches the glimpse of a beloved face across their memories. Sometimes it is a place, a moment in time that they are chasing that the Empath knows they will never again capture. But sometimes, they surprise Aela and give her an answer that she might have given.
The champagne stallion isn't so different; he isn't searching for something. Not in the way that Aela does. He doesn't seem to be seeking power or infamy. He merely wants peace, escape from his troubled mind. But it's his troubles that interest her, because though his memories are slightly different than her own, the palomino can see the beach and the blood. There is Carnicus, and there is the prowling lion meeting another violent end. There is the sea, and Aela shifts her weight from one hip to the other, remembering the uncomfortable feeling of sinking with the full weight of her emotions to its murky depths.
Her slender head tilts inquisitively when the strange stallion mentions that his mind isn't the most pleasant to be, and Aela feels the start of a smile. "I'm sure there are far worse places to be in Beqanna." There was the fog and dampness of Taiga. The scalding heat of the Tephran volcano and the sweltering humidity that never seemed to fade, regardless of the season. Trivial things, perhaps, when pitted against monsters but at least in those moments, Aela had been filled with the sense of being alive.
She has never been able to stand the feeling of lingering, of being idle.
Not when there was still so much of this world that had yet to learn her name, to see what she could do.
"Greatness," she muses truthfully to the taller horse with a wry smile. "But that seems harder to find than Taigan trails." It would come, Aela knew that. She just had to be patient. She just had to keep focusing on that kind of immortality she was searching for: not a body that lived forever, but a name.
"Perhaps we might assist each other," the striped mare continues. The crackling flames beneath her hooves start to turn to embers and then Aela finally smothers them, leaving nothing but charred earth behind her. "I can distract you, and you can tell me about the monsters inside your mind."
They doused your soul in water,
but the flames raged higher.
And they called you devil's daughter,
such a pretty liar.