YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Why does his rapacious stare catch her off-guard?
Aela watches him - studies @[Skandar] as she always has done - and fights the rising emotions in her that tell her this is different. When they had been young, the contrast in their world had been clean and stark: Aela gave the orders and Skandar followed them. What she might imagine, Skandar would become.
But she fights it - Aela who had battled the monsters of the Eclipse - wrestles with the emotions stirring in her golden chest.
What she has started to feel for the constellation-marked male (Skandar, who has been marked by their God for greatness) is not something she could have ever imagined. It is not a shape that Skandar can simply become; Aela would have him simply as he is - divine and lethal, a maker of himself and an ender of others - and so she scowls as she bears her throat for him. Will he end her? The palomino stretches out her elegant neck further, gives him every opportunity to kill her here and now.
There is a flash - the brilliant white of his fangs - and then there is searing pain.
It is because of that, that her knees beg to buckle. It is the way that he grips her throat that sends lightning striking down her spine. His eyes glow read and the palomino doesn't move, doesn't shudder away from him. In the blaze igniting between them, there is no room for fear (though Aela has never been afraid of Skandar). She has seen prey struggle before, has glimpsed the dying moments of someone fighting to live. If Aela were to jerk her head or to move abruptly now, he could kill her.
She knows, though, that this is not her ending.
So confident and assured that she still has more to do, she lets Skandar bury his fangs into her gilded skin.
This is not how she dies.
(Skandar is a different type of ending, one she can feel settling into each corner of her soul.)
The golden mare looks up, up, up - anywhere but Skandar until he releases her. There is blood seeping down her neck, staining his indigo mouth and dripping down to his broad chest. The conflict brews between them like a storm: Skandar who wonders if he would rip her apart, Aela who watches him because she senses the fight within him and herself. There is an image of another way that they might come together and even imagining that kind of touch from him elicits a fevered feeling that dawns up her golden neck.
"Because I do nothing unless I wish to," she tells him, banishing the image. A shadow clouds her lovely features as she stares brazenly up at him. They are like planets and gravity pulls her towards him; he takes a step towards her (heaving sides and all) and Aela matches him, never questioning who might be the spark and who might be the flame.
They always seem to light each other on fire.
Her thoughts continue to race. Not for anyone, she thinks, not even for you.
Placing the Dark God's son on a pedestal all his own.
"The Pampas," Aela finally says, allowing Skandar this small detail. The land was filled with wildflowers and quiet but perhaps he would sense the opportunity as she had, her blue eyes still fixed on his.
