[private] but they just can't prove it

[Aela]

It all happens so fast.

The movement on the surface of the water stirs again with bubbles rising in a peculiar way that Aela has seen before. She has been dragged under the waves multiple times, and she knows what it is to have the air ripped from your lungs. There is something there, and Aela continues to stand perfectly still. She hopes that the yearling beside her will follow her lead. It was something that Kota had taught her when she had been younger than Creatice is now: ‘Never run from anything Immortal. It only attracts their attention.’

She has no way of knowing if whatever down there is some type of Immortal, or Baltian, or perhaps some other monster. But experience has taught her to wait and so she does, keeping that thousand-yard-stare on the shore. What happens next is chaos and confusion, but Aela doesn’t move from it. There are shadows and a creature that smells as if it had died a hundred times over. There is something familiar about the way it lunges forward. Even bogged down by debris and seawood, with barnacles clinging to its sopping skin, she begins to recognize him. If there had been any doubt before that this was Wherewolf, it fled the moment Aela sensed his rage.

That was familiar, more familiar to her than the uncouth mass that charged at the girl beside her. It happens quickly and though Aela rises on her hindquarters to strike a fiery foreleg out at her aggravated half-brother, he already has her in his jaws, shaking her like the palomino had seen him furiously attack his foal-sized mother before. Her gold ears pin and the slender mare half-rears again, snaking her long neck towards the pair in an attempt to separate them.

But then they are crashing, and rolling, and then the girl is up. There is pain that causes Aela to recoil away from the writhing pegasus; there is a glimpse of something odd and pale on Wherwolf’s neck; there is the girl behind. The former Seneschal lifted her refined head, glancing briefly back at the red-marked filly. Not a what, her knowing stare implies (though perhaps with the heightened emotions surrounding them, the girl can hear Aela’s thoughts in her mind), but a who.

The rest - whatever the filly has done to him - they can figure out later.

Turning her attention back to her brother, Aela scowls at his melodramatics.

”Wherewolf.”

@Creatrice @Wherewolf