02-05-2021, 05:42 PM
He twists his head - (not that there is much of it she can actually see) - and Aela lifts hers while her blue eyes narrow on his silhouette. It's then that she notices how the white of his eyes glow; of how before all the light dims around them and they swim in darkness again, that something about the way he stares at her strikes like flint striking a stone.
There is a spark.
It makes her curious - more than she had been moments before - and she attempts to scrutinize it. Though Aela has found her voice, what comes next is instinct. Her curiosity peaks through the cracks of her mind and attempts to peer into his. It's another flash of images of what she had just seen: the glow of his eyes, the light a mimic of her silver-blue aura. He protests it and Aela blows sharply through her pale nostrils, wishing for once that might overlook her intrusion and see the possibilities instead.
"When I do that," she says readily enough, recalling their first meeting. When she hadn't yet found her voice. Aela is watching him, wondering if he might have anything further to say.
But he surprises her.
There is distress coloring the air and Aela rails against it. She pushes her own emotions out - confidence, certainty, perhaps even trust - but refrains from touch his mind again (for now). These are the emotions that Aela so often takes with her, because how else does one venture so boldly into the dark? (It's either stupid or a deathwish but Aela has her reasons to be here searching.)
The boy speaks and Aela studies him, wondering what his reasons were. Why he was roaming the Common Lands when it was far safer to be elsewhere. Did he still have nowhere to go? There is a flicker across his memories of the land where she had been born: Taiga and its misty forest. Aela bristles in anger; the sight of her birthland is still something that unsettles her. Her pale nostrils flare and her slender head lifts but it is just a memory, she reminds herself. There is another flash across her eyes - gold eyes, black eyes - and there is a sense of foreboding about them, something gleaming from their depths that she can't understand from such a brief image.
"So you break the cage." She tells him (not unkindly but her previous humor has fled). Because she had escaped the North. Because she had found her voice. Because she has seen one leader swallowed whole and she has watched the Night and its terrors descend and she is still here. She glances at the young stallion, appraising him. He is still here.
Aela knows nothing of what he is escaping (just as she knows nothing of her history, of why it had been so important that she stay within the confines of the Taiga). She could skim across his memories but Aela does something rare. She refrains and instead asks the colt, "What would keep you trapped?"
@[Meyer]