The news that her elder brother is no longer welcomed in Hyaline is surprising, but Aela welcomes it. Her striped sibling has always strived so hard to be perfect, and the palomino knows that why she doesn't fall in line with his ideal of "family". She was the one who made their mother sick while she had been in Pangea. She had been the one who broke Lilliana's heart when they had been separated. And when the former Guardian had gone missing during the Eclipse, Aela doesn't doubt that Nashua blamed her for that as well.
"You do understand why?" Aela counters to the horned mare. She assumes that she does; there are enough scars across Mazikeen's hide to reveal that he was not an easy beast to live with. Gale might be the Cursed one now, but its previous host had left a deep distrust of outsiders and shifters in the North. Her elder brothers had never apparently spoken of their sire, but what little Aela did learn, she found rather interesting. "Our father apparently became a little... unhinged."
Not that it meant all shifters did. Aela found the thought as ridiculous as Mazikeen did. One of the most brilliant (and brutal) minds that Aela knew belonged to a skinwalker; she had never found the blight of madness in star-marked Skandar.
What Mazikeen says next is another surprise, and it bursts out of Aela in a peel of bright laughter. Her brother's child, a shifter? Her blue eyes glittered, full of dark humor. "Oh, that is rich." The slender mare mused to this companion, and then gave her pretty head a slight toss. "But how perfect." She grinned at Mazikeen with a sideways glint in her gaze. This was the child that had been taken to Hyaline? She speaks the truth next, "I'm sure he will fair much better with you and Gale than he would have done in Taiga."
Which brought her to her next question.
"Neither of you have anything to do with the missing Guardian, do you?"
They doused your soul in water,
but the flames raged higher.
And they called you devil's daughter,
such a pretty liar.
@Mazikeen