Aela has never been sweet or soft (she might have been once, but that version of the near-palomino got swept away by the tide that her father had attempted to drag her out in).
The projection she gives is as skilled as the memories she wields. She is a small filly, slight of stature and slim-hipped. Traversing through the Common Lands, most horses don't notice that the girl slipping through their presence isn't a girl at all. She is more than that, but to reveal the secret means giving her game away and Aela will always enjoy the way she toys with others more than divulging what she is or what can do.
Fear, she has learned, is the most malleable of emotions.
And fear is the easiest way for Aela to get what she wants.
Maybe her memories had been the lure. Fierte - who exudes base extinct, who reminds Aela of the hawks who sit on the edge of the Meadow while they wait for prey, who reminds her of the cunning foxes that linger between shadows and burrows - waiting, always waiting. Maybe that is the difference between those predators and this one; natural law instructs that they mark their prey - however it comes, where it wanders - and then they strike.
This one does not wait.
This one comes.
Run, he tells her. (What is he? Aela's eyes are roaming over his shape in reserved delight, studying the tail, the shape of his head, the sharp teeth that mark him a carnivore.) She angles her body away from him, turns it away slightly so that she remains out of striking (and biting) range. It doesn't stop her from asking questions (because he is brilliantly feral, as wonderful as the aliens in Pangea): Run like the deer? she seems to ask with the projection of a white-tail doe who turns and flees from being hunted. What about the pheasants? The images of birds flushing to the sky beckons forward in a startled rush. A hare? she adds with the image of a long-eared creature fleeing the Meadow for the lush cover of the Forest.
Her head tilts, indicative of the messages she has sent. The expression on her lovely face, however, says nothing of what she is attempting: setting a snare of her own.
@[fierte]