01-22-2021, 09:21 PM
The unfamiliar stallion laughs at her question and Aela can feel her brow lift quietly while studies him from beneath her flaxen lashes. She is the very image of a demure thing; it only the smile that curves the edges of her pale lips that gives the picture away. Aela appears far too impish to be someone mistaken as naive. He is looking at her and she assumes that he sees what so many do - a slender mare who passes for more than passably fair (and Aela certainly has her own opinion on the more).
She isn't exactly keen on coming closer but the distance has always impacted her ability to pass along her projections and if there is a need for a second attack, she'd prefer to have a stronger position. One that gave her more of an advantage than where she stood now. And so the golden girl takes one deft step after another, walking lightly over the frozen ground.
When her blue eyes take a sweeping glance at him, she decides that he might be more than passably fair as well.
"Perhaps," she says carefully, as if she is considering her next words. "I simply did not understand what you meant." (This is the most she has ever said; Aela has always tried to count her words to keep them steady and she can only hope the rhythm of them comes as naturally as the waves that she caught glimpses of from his mind.) But the smile she wears implies anything but. It implies that there is nothing merely simple about her.
It's at that moment she pauses. She stills because the vision that comes into her left eye is not her own and while Aela has never minded intruding upon strangers, she minds greatly that another would dare to do it to her. It's a sunset - a blazing red sky - in a place that she has never seen before. Even as he pulls the vision away, Aela is already summoning memories of the sights of Pangea, of the many terrors that so many Beqanna natives claim to live there.
They remain below the surface of her near-palomino skin, just waiting for the memory-giver to unleash them.
Aela eyes the bird that settles atop his withers before giving a small shrug of her slender shoulders. She would never admit why she was out here; that she and Skandar had parted ways some time ago - when they attempted to light Straia's tree - and she had hoped for some news of him. The smile emerges again while Aela glances back at the brindled stallion, "You seem like a good shot." She plays along with a soft voice, "Are you offering?"
@[Gale]