[private] I’m falling under again | Aela

[Aela]

The rage of her fires burned all around them. It seemed to cut them off from the rest of the world, and for a moment, the only thing in existence was this ring of fire and the two mares encircled in it. The power that flickers around Cheri and Aela is also burning in her eyes, the blazing aura that was always burning beneath her golden skin threatening to emerge. But the appaloosa was not her enemy.

The things that had divided them in the past no longer existed.

Be patient, Cheri advises, and a sort of peace takes over Aela. She lets it flow through herself, through the mare before that shares her brother’s blood, and begins to think of the emotion like a hymn. She becomes reverent with it; thinking again and again of what they might achieve if they succeed, and in typical Aela fashion, she never considers what might happen if they fail.

They won’t.
They can’t.

Linked as they are, she feels the sensation of prodding against her magic. It feels like a shiver in a web, a leaf in fall not yet ready to abandon its branch. It was fluttering; it was straining, she realized. It was caught somewhere between the layers of their powers as they tried to combine. Aela never left herself vulnerable. If not for the sense of calm that she had been pouring into their woven net - the blending of their talents - the palomino might have felt true fear for the first time since Wolfbane had nearly chased her into the sea and Beryl swallowed her into the darkness.

Her gaze never wavers from the other mare. Aela never looks away or flinches when the link between them finally latches. Cheri had done something like this before (with the old Loessian lecher, Ledger) and the Magician speaks of how there needs to be a connection deeper than the one they’ve made. Having already given her own powers to Cheri’s growing arsenal, Aela glares back at the onyx-and-green woman.

A need, Aela nearly scowls.

It is the one thing in life she has purposefully avoided. She has never allowed herself to need anyone. To count on another was to inevitably find failure. Her son was one of those presumed missing - most likely dead - and Aela never allowed herself to succumb to the sorrow of that reality. Her one equal in this life never clawed his way back from beneath the waves, and Aela had to accept that whatever was beneath the sea was something greater than them. She refused to let that stand in the way of her ambition. And as much as she trusts Reave, Aela knows better than to need his partnership. It’s why they work so well together; it's a relationship of mutual offering and understanding.

But with the wind blowing wild and the fires growing higher, Aela begins to imagine the one face she has trusted her entire life.

She pulls on the deepest bond that she knows, one that goes back to a time when Craft and Anatomy had still been in the Taiga, when Aela’s desperate mother had pleaded with them for protection from the very man who had brought her into creation. Their daughter had been gifted with a link to an infamous ancestor, Heartfire. It had been her grandmother who had guided her into adulthood, who had taught Aela the importance of power and how to wield it in their brimming world of magic.

What would she make of this? Aela wondered. Her lips twitched briefly up in a smile, feeling the familiar warmth in her chest at the memory of her guardian, finally allowing the last of Cheri’s power in.

"Do it,” Aela gritted out, sensing everything in that moment so keenly that it felt as if every memory between them might implode into nothingness, that between them they might create an entirely new depth of feeling and then swallow the world into it. "Now."