She is restless.
It makes her irritable and Aela spends most of the night shifting her weight from one slender hip to the other. Some nights she dreams of the world opening up before her like she wished it would and some nights... some nights she just dreams of the way that the ground had swallowed Straia whole.
There is nothing left of the former Chamber Queen (though there are rumors of a daughter or two within the canyon country). Straia - magical entity who had commanded the sky in Nerine - had been reduced to nothing in a matter of seconds, devoured by her ambition. Aela hadn't missed the warning. It put her own existence into a whole new perspective and she had been struggling with it ever since. Heartfire had once said that Straia was an ant compared to Carnage and that made Aela... what?
What was one golden girl against the grand scheme of the cosmos?
But Aela reminds herself that she is more than that.
That she will be more than that and that thought always brings her back to him.
The way that Aela imagines and Skandar creates.
The moon is gone, waned into oblivion and so only a few distant stars remain in the sky above. Hours continue to pass with only the dark for company and as the night spins on, Aela finally accepts that there will be no rest for her.
And since there is no rest for her, she goes looking for him instead.
Aela knows where to find @[Skandar]. It annoys her that she does; where he lingers or how he occupies his time shouldn't be a concern of hers if she does not need him. (But then she soothes herself with the notion that if she didn't know where to find him, there would be time wasted in trying to locate the skin-changer.) Before dawn can come creeping along, Aela walks along one of the common Pangean trails towards where she knows to find the constellation-marked stallion.
In a language that speaks without words, Aela remembers Skandar with unusual clarity. She recalls each extraordinary shift - from lava to stone to ice - and then demands one from the shadows. That he unwraps himself from obscurity and take a shape.
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