This is what she has learned: Aela will always be more.
She had been a girl born mute. Her voice had been through the use of memories that often terrorized her. Glimpses of the past that she could never change or alter. (Not all the memories had been horrible, but even as a child, Aela saw things she should have not.) But through her determination and a little borrow magic from Beyza, Aela learned to speak. There had been a stutter at the beginning, but she overcame that, too.
Now when Aela spoke, she gave orders and made commands.
She made deals with devils and bargained with goddesses.
A far cry from the small child who had barely been heard.
Then, the Darkness came with the monsters and Aela learned how to be greater than both. She survived the Eclipse and saw a dawn that many others hadn't lived to see.
Aela has become many things since that first meeting with Kensley, but she had never forgotten the silver stallion. He had been a wonder to her then, a pristine silence in an overwhelmingly loud world. The young girl has grown into her limbs, the slightly too-long neck and odd curves to become something glowing and golden and ethereal. She is familiar with the sensation of being watched, now. She is familiar with the fact that she has grown so beautiful that she is capable of stealing away a breath, of making hearts stop.
He isn't what he was before, but Aela knows who he is beneath the swirling fog and the frost that glistens across his skin. There are glimpses of the live he's lived - about how these changes came about in the years since they've last crossed paths - and when the golden mare tilts her head up to him, her expression is warm with fascination. How different he seems, and yet as he approaches, his face is as familiar to her as Heartfire's. "Kensley," she says in a voice flourishing with pride, appreciating the chance to finally speak the ice-stallion's name. Aela reaches out in greeting and smiles slightly, "there was never any forgetting you."
Kensley had been the first to see her as something more than just a silent girl.
A child that could have been so easily dismissed and overlooked.
"Your heart is still beating?" the palomino asks, glancing at his broad chest. When the gray had come across her thoughts, that was something Aela had often wondered: had he become a ghost again, or had he - like her - become something more?
They doused your soul in water,
but the flames raged higher.
And they called you devil's daughter,
such a pretty liar.
@kensley