YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
Aela and Skandar have never needed words.
He was one of the few who had known her before she could speak. And those conversations had never been dull. The galaxy-marked stallion had never tried to shield his mind from Aela and she has never tried to keep her thoughts from him. There was a tether there, something that even if she never spoke of, the gilded mare knew it existed. Fate had woven them together and while Aela sometimes felt the heaviness of its yoke, she knew that whatever the future brought, it would involve Skandar in some shape or form.
So perhaps that is why she comes to him in the darkest part of the night, when he can still cling to the edges of his familiar shadows. Perhaps that is why she doesn't speak, because she knows how to communicate with Skandar without needing words. He doesn't need to say anything for Aela to know that he is unhappy about where they are headed, but Skandar follows her anyway. His agitation is there, simmering beneath the surface of his star-strewn coat much like she imagined that the magma simmered beneath the peak of the Tephran volcano.
It would be so easy to pull, to pluck that string of emotion and see how it might echo out through his reactions.
(But this is the one rule that Aela has: she might manipulate others but she will never manipulate Skandar with her emotions.)
The emotions that he feels in the shadow of the glowing mountain wash over her and as Aela looks towards it, she can feel the loneliness that he experienced here as a child. (And doesn't that make her reflect on her own, hidden away in the quiet of the Taigan fog.) They are alike this way, she thinks. They are certainly divinely crafted things (Aela will never consider her a birth an accident) but she had been like Skandar. An illegitimate child tucked out of sight so nobody would know the blunder of her parentage. When the inadequacy grazes across her golden skin, Aela burns it away.
She never has - and never will leave - room for doubt.
Beneath the fiery glow of the volcano, Aela basks in a confidence that comes from her certainty. She is destined for great things; the blood burning beneath the skin of the stallion next to her has assured him for greatness. Skandar only needs the assurance to step into it. They are both the brilliance of an inferno and she needs him to step out of the shadows, to shed the monsters off his always-changing skin, and become the God-like being she knows that he is capable of.
They've returned to Tephra because as much as Aela has tried to hide it, there is a still scar on her chest from Gale.
Aela needs it gone; the evidence wiped away as if what her half-brother had done never happened. There were rumors of a lake within this place that cure a horse of ailments, relieve them of suffering and return them to what they once were. She wants her beautiful skin pristine and unmarked. But it was only open to the residents of Tephra and those they were willing to open their borders to. Glancing at the stallion beside her, she knows that Skandar being Tephran-born wouldn't be enough.
So without speaking, Aela sends the skinwalker images of the healing lake (perhaps he remembers it?) and then tries something that she has only done with Beyza and Heartfire.
Take the shape of a Tephran, she thinks into the wilderness of his mind. Any would do, but perhaps there was one that he had always wanted to borrow (his father? One of his many family members that scorned his bastardy?). Let him take something from another, she thinks, if that is what he needs to remember all the ways they could burn together.
@Skandar
