[open] Shadows for Skin [ANY]

[Aela]

Aela would never consider herself a beggar. She would never beg for anything. She would take. But the thought of taking Taiga caused her pretty mouth to remain pursed in a thin line. Taiga was her past. Taiga was where she had been hidden in the mighty shadows of the Sequoias  and the damp fog. She had spent the entirety of her youth and adolescence there, never understanding why Kota didn’t simply take them to a place where the sun actually shined.

Until the day she did come to understand. Until she learned that they were forced to remain there, thanks to a bargain struck between the then-Guardian, Lilliana and her grandmother, Heartfire. It was some time before Aela realized the relationship between the three mares: that Kota was her milk-mother, the blue-eyed mare her birth-mother, and Heartfire had been the link to seal the deal between them.

The thought of returning to a place that forced her to do anything caused sparks to flicker in that reluctant gaze, a shade so similar to her ancestors. Aela watched Obscene go, no more eager to pursue the claiming of Taiga than she was to follow him. It was Cheri who had a message of warning; it was Aela who thought wryly to the departing stallion Don’t get lost in the fog.

That left her with the slow-forming smile on the dark face of the Loessian Queen. Aela’s golden head tilted skeptically. What was there to smile about?

”I have,” she said tentatively. In her pursuit of the magically gifted for the Pampas, Aela had done her best to educate herself about the reputations of certain powers and abilities. Perhaps it was her own personal bias, but she had always gravitated towards the mental ones as stronger and therefore, sought them out more. She always found pleasure in being underestimated and then watching as realization of exactly how gifted she was dawn on another’s face. Surprisingly, it had been something that she enjoyed teaching others as well.

Was this one of Cheri’s abilities then? It piqued her curiosity, and despite wanting to leave as Obscene had, she stayed. ”Do you know of any?” She asked before adding, ”I heard of a soul summoner to the East.” Like Fyr was. But that would be to accept that her son was lost beneath the waves.

But as skilled and gifted as he was?

He was her son, afterall.

And Wherewolf was too obstinate to simply drown.

”But I haven’t yet ventured that way.”

@Cheri