It's funny that Aela knows so little of her paternal siblings but she knows much more about her paternal (great)-grandmother. Or at least as much Heartfire would show her. Her blue roan relative wasn't always forthcoming with information, and often, Aela was left on her own to figure out the former Nerinian's cryptic meanings.
But she did know some things: her father had been her actual grandchild. There was always a sense of loss lingering around the deeper memories, an ache she had once felt permeating from Lilliana. It was a void, a gaping hole in the soul that would eventually fill where the love of a child should have been. She had learned that her father had once been a King (which suited Aela well enough, better to be the spawn of a royal rather than a nobody).
And though Heartfire never said it, Aela knew she had been fond of the blue-and-gold palomino that sometimes emerged from the haze of the past.
She doesn't understand why she has so many siblings though. Not just through Wolfbane, but Lilliana as well. There was nowhere that Aela could go where she didn't stumble upon a relation - or somebody who had known either of her birth parents. For a young mare who aspired to make her own name, it was frustrating to constantly be compared to the chestnut former Guardian of Taiga, the winged once-Lord of Loess. And it was even more aggravating to be compared to a passel of siblings that she hardly knew, let alone acknowledged.
Gale was one of the few - an exception to her rule of ignoring the others - that Aela claimed.
Having a dark menace as a brother might have its uses, and she intended to use that to her advantage as she did everything (and everyone) else.
She listens curiously as Mazikeen mentions that Hyaline was open only to shifters, that it had been that way since before the Eclipse. The gold-striped mare isn't one but she admires a purpose. Something she had learned from Straia. Too many lands claimed to be a sanctuary, a haven.
From what?
Her recruits for the Pampas have been brought along with a similar ideal. Those that reside in the Flower Court are to be among the brightest across Beqanna, the most powerful and the most beautiful. They will either have a use or they will have no home among the wildflowers. "It must keep the Northerners out," Aela says at last. She says it in a way that implies while Maze want visitors for Hyaline, she would not want those from the North. "They harbor an old hatred for shifters."
Aela holds Mazikeen's burning gaze, listening as the horned mare asks about her other sibling.
"I don't," she says, and snorts softly, while a scowl forms. It had been her grandmother's home - and now Reave - and for them, Nerine was the only redeeming part of the North. "Too cold," she says with a shrug while her delicate ears flicked back. "I live in the Pampas," Aela continues on, "much warmer."
And more importantly, no brothers.
They doused your soul in water,
but the flames raged higher.
And they called you devil's daughter,
such a pretty liar.
@Mazikeen