YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Aela - like Skandar - is not what she once was.
This statement could be true for most of Beqanna, since the sun had finally returned. There were some now terrified, some who barely slept through the night, and if Aela was quiet enough during her nocturnal strolls, sometimes the Echo of a nightmare would find her. Some still dreamed about having the monsters rip the flesh away from their bodies, or worse, rip apart those they loved while they stayed intact. Those dreams - some real, some distorted memories of the trauma left behind - always made her think of him.
Had he been ripped into nothing?
Had been torn apart so much that there was nothing left?
(No, she thinks. Not Skandar. Not the Dark God's son who had ichor flowing in his veins, that was marked for greatness by the glowing constellations on his ever-changing skin.)
She's never worried about another before. Her thoughts have often been about carefully crafted plans and schemes, goals for the future. These are things that she can aspire to. What can she do with the weighing thoughts of worry? The palomino has learned the bitter truth: nothing. It is something beyond her control and it does nothing but stir up her irritation. The only thing she could do was search for Skandar (not that she would ever admit that she had) and all those attempts looking for the skinwalker had turned up nothing about where he might be. Of if he was anywhere at all.
So a year had passed and then the start of another before the sun finally returned.
One dawn came and then another and then another, until finally one morning -
As Aela moved through the canyons towards a tucked-away cave near an Acacia grove, one morning revealed a shadow. The golden mare slowed her trek to watch as the shape swirled in a way that no regular shadow would. Pangea was home to the wild and fantastic and a horse never knew what they might find in the place that Carnage had crafted. (It was one of the reasons Aela was so fond of it.) But the way that the shadow creature moves brings back memories of things with too many teeth and too many eyes and too many legs. She had crossed a few of the monsters during the Eternal Darkness - as Aela has come across others such as Narcisus and Sabra - and the girl is prepared to fight when she stops.
But there is an (familiar) flash of something bright and bold. Orange and blue swirl around like galaxies against the shadow figure. There are memories there that it had once been something else. Something more. It has eyes that gleam brilliantly like a thousand suns and even if there is no discernible shape, Aela knows it. She presses a memory back toward him - the solid shape that Skandar often took. Her delicate ears flick back as she concentrates and brazenly steps towards the hazy thing, shaping a word into a name, forcing him out into the light.
"@[Skandar]."
