It is easy to fall into the rumblings of his desire. This is a game that the pair have played time and time again, and the outcome always yields a mutual benefit (or so Aela thought): the two of them come together in more ways than one to make this once-empty territory a thriving one. Their numbers were growing, they were gaining a reputation, and they came together in an understanding that came from the twining of limbs, shuddering sighs, and gasping groans.
Aela has never made it a secret that she wishes no crown; the weight of them can make a monarch an easy target when things go awry. Obscene had no ambition when they met, whereas Aela had plenty. It seemed like such a simple thing, the way that they could work together.
So why had it become so complicated?
She supposed that she could thread through Obscene's emotions, and find the strands of doubt. She could find a way to change or alter them somehow, a mistrust against Loess? It wouldn't be hard to redirect it to Tephra, knowing the history of that place through the red eyes of the Pampas Prince. But the deeper that Aela goes, the more she knows it's not just doubt. There are other emotions: jealousy, hurt, anger. They are buried deep within the dark chest of the onyx-and-gold stallion beside her and as Aela considers what she might do.
Does she even want to?
Her blue eyes turn perilous when Obscene reveals what he wants. You, he says, and the palomino feels the line in her golden brow furrow. That wasn't a surprise. Aela was used to being wanted, but this was somehow more than that. This went further than desire and lust. She had felt it before, Obscene's searching heart, and the way that it had tried to brush against her own. It had wanted a place to settle, but Aela isn't a mare for settling. She never has been and she never will be. She is made for praise, and she is crafted for cunning.
"If I gave all of myself to you," she tells Obscene, while a thousand storms blow across the brilliance of her gaze when she levels it on him. "What is left for me?"
He would have her give everything to him? And what would he do with that?
Aela had dreamed of grandeur since she had been a girl. She had dreamed of empires - of toppling them just for the sake of tipping scales, a breaking and re-making of something better - and grafting new kinds of Magic. She wanted to know what the limits of their world were and why; she meant to press every possibly boundary and limit that this life would throw at her because she has always known that she is much bigger than it. It's a path that her grandmother had warned her about, that she has seen Magicians decimated for.
"Anything is possible," she finally tells him as Aela pulls herself away from him. "But you have to be willing to work for it." She went missing each autumn, and the last two seasons they had been together, Obscene had never gone searching for her. She knows that she has been evasive over the years, slipping through his words when he had wanted something definitive. He has never demanded an answer. Aela might have placed those barriers between them, but Obscene had never bothered to knock them down. He had turned to his nectar and other women, which she hadn't minded.
She had always assumed it was part of their understanding.
There was a fight in Aela's soul, and for her match, she knew it would somebody who have never accepted those things. They would have considered Aela as much their due as she considered her eventual godhood was.
But Aela won't speak his name.
Not to Obscene, not to anyone.
They doused your soul in water,
but the flames raged higher.
And they called you devil's daughter,
such a pretty liar.
@Obscene