YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
She had thought @[Skandar] beautiful before. Aela had never told him, but there hadn't been the words back then. The palomino had refused to speak. Her stammer would have ruined the illusion. She had known that she was the perfect image; slight and lovely and curved. But that beauty had just been another fact, just another skill that Aela could sharpen and hone in their world that almost always had claws laying in wait somewhere.
It seemed pointless to comment on something that was fact.
But when he steps from the shadows - when he comes from the writhing mass of darkness - Aela realizes just how much she has forgotten. Even if the memory she used was strong enough to force him into one shape - even if she shared a picture with him now of how he looked before - it is nothing to what he is now. He has always been beautiful because Carnage - who made Pangea - could make nothing less than perfection, she thinks.
There is a ferocity to him that has never been there before. And it is that, that captures her immediate attention. And as she looks at him, Aela is struck by how his terror and beauty are much the same thing. One couldn't exist without the other. It was like winter without its bitter chill; an angry storm without lightning strikes. A predator without its teeth or claws. A night without the moon or the stars.
His fiery gaze burns right through her and she can't stand it.
So she doesn't.
Aela goes to move and Skandar takes the first step. Not here, he says and her delicate ears flatten into the fine silk of her pale mane. Did he know that she had been searching for him? That she had traveled as far the as Isle, for any sight or shape of him? She had scoured miles of Beqanna for a trace of him and when she finally finds him, he tells her not here?
Before she can say anything, he has turned towards the canyons. Is it the sunlight, she wonders? The striped mare has never been good at following others and in the past, it had been her who had taken the lead with Skandar. Who had shared with him her plans and her ideas, who had lead him here, to Pangea. And now he dared to tell her where to go?
Knowing that if she spoke now, her emotions would betray her. So when they eventually stop at the mouth of one the caves and they are away from the glaring sun, Aela lifts her head and fixes those blue eyes on him. There is a soft glow emanating from her striped legs but it is her fury - at having him so close? That he had finally returned? That he had decided to take them to the mouth of this cave? - that burns brighter from her mind, those thousand suns that have blazed from his eyes and the stars that refuse to dim on his galaxy skin are directed blindingly into his thoughts.
