YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Aela wasn't the type of mull over the past. It was there for a reason. They were lives already lived, stories already told. The remnants came to her from to time, in the glimpses of those moments. She had grown used to it and it wasn't uncommon for Aela to swat those memories away like summer flies, or an attempt to move the stifling air around her when the humidity grew too thick with a flick of her pale tail.
Her work in the Pampas keeps her busy enough that she doesn't have to consider it often. But every so often (and it comes more and more the longer that Skandar remains away), she would remember their last meeting in Pangea. There are other memories as well - the way that they had bled beneath Straia's tree and the magic that infused them after - but Aela always comes back to the cave where she had bared her throat for Skandar.
(Had he forgotten?)
Those thoughts had come more frequently after her meeting with Mazikeen, and the scars that the Alpha of Hyaline had revealed to her. They were the marks of a fighter, but it had been a flickering in her orange-flame eyes that Aela had recognized. Perhaps some passions were gentler things, soft words and soft caresses. But Aela has never known life to be that way; it was hard and jagged and cruel. It was like her - like Skandar - brutal beneath the beauty. But the slender palomino had understood the other woman, because some passions were so brutal that the only thing they could do was rip each other apart.
She thought of that day with Skandar, and the way that his fangs had pierced her golden skin. She remembered the searing pain, and the way that her legs wanted to give out. She remembers thinking that he could murder her, and some treacherous (shameless) part of Aela thought she would endure a hundred deaths if it meant he would touch her again.
As she slips into the healing waters, Aela can sense his gaze on her back. The striped female stills, and turns to look behind her. This is the stallion who had followed her from the Common Lands to Pangea, from Pangea to the Pampas, who had come with her on this journey without question. He never has; Skandar has always been as certain of their divine aspirations as she has. She is the one who lights that path forward and he has been the one to bare his teeth and cut down anyone who might have opposed them.
But the scowl on Svedka's handsome face makes the palomino lift her head, unfamiliar with being questioned by him. There is no coy smile, only the shadow of a frown on her refined face. It has taken her years - and when they had first met - Aela hadn't known what trust would look like between them. Would it be trusting that he wouldn't turn dig fangs into her skin and tear her apart? Would it be trusting that in their shared dream of burning the world down, that he wouldn't burn her as well?
They are gods, the pair of them.
Aela knows that.
Between them, they can create. Whatever Aela imagines, Skandar can become.
So why can't she imagine that they would be anything other than destruction? (Because that always seem to be in all the fables and the legends; the Gods love to destroy and ruin the things they claimed to love to prove that it existed in the first place.)
There is light glowing beneath the water as her skin heals itself, as the places torn knit themselves back together. Aela becomes perfect again, as unblemished as she imagines a goddess should be. The palomino looks away from the Tephran-born stallion, trying to think of a way to tell him that they were in Tephra because of her and her machinations. Aela usually pushed against others with her Magic, and the mortals that pushed back against her did the only way they knew how: hoof and teeth. It left little knicks and cuts against her otherwise flawless skin and Aela would never stand any flaw.
But he asks her what they were doing, and where the dream that had started in the Pampas had once been so clear, it was now muddled. Like the churning lake-water that Skandar had stirred up as he came to stand beside her. And when his voice breaks through the thoughts in her mind, Aela obliges.
('What more do you want?' she asks Obscene, confused as to what else he could possibly ask of her when Aela had put his Pampas on the path to glory. 'You,' says the onyx-and-gold beast. 'I would have all of you Aela. Not just parts of you.' There is a silence, a darkness where the memory breaks off though the Prince's voice still echoes through: 'But that's not possible, is it?')
@Skandar
