This is what she has learned: Aela will always be more.

She had been a girl born mute. Her voice had been through the use of memories that often terrorized her. Glimpses of the past that she could never change or alter. (Not all the memories had been horrible, but even as a child, Aela saw things she should have not.) But through her determination and a little borrow magic from Beyza, Aela learned to speak. There had been a stutter at the beginning, but she overcame that, too.

Now when Aela spoke, she gave orders and made commands.
She made deals with devils and bargained with goddesses.

A far cry from the small child who had barely been heard.

Then, the Darkness came with the monsters and Aela learned how to be greater than both. She survived the Eclipse and saw a dawn that many others hadn't lived to see.

Aela has become many things since that first meeting with Kensley, but she had never forgotten the silver stallion. He had been a wonder to her then, a pristine silence in an overwhelmingly loud world. The young girl has grown into her limbs, the slightly too-long neck and odd curves to become something glowing and golden and ethereal. She is familiar with the sensation of being watched, now. She is familiar with the fact that she has grown so beautiful that she is capable of stealing away a breath, of making hearts stop.

He isn't what he was before, but Aela knows who he is beneath the swirling fog and the frost that glistens across his skin. There are glimpses of the live he's lived - about how these changes came about in the years since they've last crossed paths - and when the golden mare tilts her head up to him, her expression is warm with fascination. How different he seems, and yet as he approaches, his face is as familiar to her as Heartfire's. "Kensley," she says in a voice flourishing with pride, appreciating the chance to finally speak the ice-stallion's name. Aela reaches out in greeting and smiles slightly, "there was never any forgetting you."

Kensley had been the first to see her as something more than just a silent girl.
A child that could have been so easily dismissed and overlooked.

"Your heart is still beating?" the palomino asks, glancing at his broad chest. When the gray had come across her thoughts, that was something Aela had often wondered: had he become a ghost again, or had he - like her - become something more?

Aela had been afraid of the world when she had first been brought into it.

Perhaps it was because she remembered the crashing waves, the thundering sound of galloping hooves behind her. Maybe she lost her ability (or want to speak) somewhere along that shoreline, or maybe her mother had used her voice to plead so much, the Gods thought it would be fitting that the daughter should be silent.

She remembers very little about those early days (and that she does remember, Aela has to consider how the memories have been elaborated by others). She can't recall quite where Heartfire had stepped in, or how. She doesn't remember how her spotted milkmother became the familiar one while her birthmother started to fade.

But she remembers Kensley, because he had been so calm.
Because in a world that was roiling with emotion and rife with memories, he had been like finding a quiet copse in the wood or a serene spot by a stream. That world had left her chest so tight with emotions and memories that weren't her own, that almost left her gasping, Kensley had been where she had learned to really breathe.

So she means it, when she says there is no forgetting the man and his cool-hearted soul.

"Not too painful, I hope?" Aela asks, thinking that anyone who troubled him should meet the fury of her flames. He smiles, and the young palomino can feel the edges of her gift stirring, wanting to soften the razor edges in his life. She could help with that, if he wished.

(Would he feel it, if she tried harder? The dulling sensation against the sharp pain?)

"Trying to," she continues on, tilting her head to regard (and admire) the changes in him. The way that his mane curled like fog, the way that his dark eyes churned like coming thunderheads. "But you," she says, "you've become a storm."

Oh, Aela hopes.

She hopes for a future that she will be recognized for what she is: a goddess. She hopes that those who cross her will either recognize her greatness for what it is, or if they choose to remain blind, then they are willing to endure the darkness because that is what Aela will bring down upon them. She had begun as a girl who couldn't speak, who had been so overwhelmed by this world and the memories it still held that it silenced her into fear.

Aela has become so much more than what she originally was.
A girl with bastard beginnings, who had grown up with help from the Mountain.
A girl who had become a woman with not only a voice to be heard, but a power to be felt.

There are very few that Aela would help - not without a price - but Kensley says that he manages. She was at his disposal, if he had need of her. He only had to ask. (But there is a sense of pride for this man that she has thawed out; a sense of kinship that they have both grown into so much more since their last meeting.) The slight smile that she wears is not her usual one - nothing coy or wry - but uncommonly girlish.

What he says - that he woke up one morning different - is a regular occurence in Beqanna, and yet it isn't, because this was Kensley and he never would be ordinary to Aela.

"It suits you," she finally decides, in the that his ice heart never had. He had been the eye of the storm in her world, the first peace she had truly known, but Kensley should have never been forced to keep that all within. Better he let it all out, that the storm within him wreak on others rather than him. "Perhaps you were always meant to be this way," she offers, because to Aela, Kensley was like her.

Destined for better.

Kensley laughs and Aela joins him.

She prefers the sound of it to the sideways smile that he gives, where grief lingers at its edges. She is an Empath and isn't immune to feeling the weight in his soul; it wears her down as well. The flames beneath her skin flickering, begging to be set free so that might turn those emotions to ash.

But this is Kensley's grief - not hers - and so she quells her fire.

Aela lets him keep him out, as well his insistence that he wasn't meant for greater things. (They all are; her World will be for the Great Ones but she won't argue with the man who had been the spark that started everything.) She comes closer to him, and much like she had done as a girl, reaches out to lightly touch him on his dark muzzle. The palomino isn't entirely sure how to explain the journey that had started in Pangea - first with Straia and then continued on by Beyza - but she offers him a few glimpses into her past.

(There is the former Dominus telling Aela that her voice was within. Heartfire had said the same thing, and there had been countless hours spent between their shared bond as the young filly struggled to vocalize it. And then there had been pale Beyza, helping her to perfect it.)

Pulling away slowly, Aela glances up to the older stallion. He had been in Pangea, just as the White Magician had been.

"Do you know Beyza?"

Aela never had a father in this life.

Thanks to Gale and the memories of others, she knows what he is supposed to look like. He is gold and blue, like her. They even share a familial smile, one that curves toward ruin. But that is all they ever shared; they never had a quiet moment like the one she shares with Kensley. Brushing her pale muzzle against his is comforting and it makes her think of all the still nights that she had in Pangea.

The only place that she has ever considered as home.

That feeling returns as she stands next Kensley, sharing the memories of her past and catching glimpses of his. Beyza lights up between them (a friend, the Empath realizes; she might have one in the White Magician) until they grow dark and hazy. There is another in their shared visions and recognization bristles against Aela's mind. The black stallion is familiar. Rumor said that he had been the one to bring the Eternal Night and the one who beckoned forth shadow monsters. He had gained more fame by serving as Pangea's champion and there is a new appreciation for Jamie when she opens her blue eyes.

Would he still say that he wasn't meant for great things, when even the blood that flowed from him wrought great changes?

She lingers close, and her slender head tilts towards his, sensing that Kensley still had more to share. There is: not only had he known Beyza from Pangea, but she is the mother to his granddaughters. To three girls - (Aela recognizes the Magic in that number - a beginning, middle, and end); three children of the White Magician and the Nightmaker. Perhaps one might come to Aela's Pampas, where those who resided were making renown as the most beautiful and powerful horses in Beqanna.

Kensley's visions recede like a tide, and Aela braces for the emptiness; filling it with possibilities and plans instead, focusing on committing the images of the three Fates to mind for later.

"Is she still in Pangea?" Aela asks, though the same thought that comes is the same for Beyza as it is for Kensley. "It's been years."