The wars that she has learned of have always been about mortal means, like the mortals who have fought them. For petulant things, things like betrayals and heartbreak. For simple things, like the expanding of borders or the weakening of another kingdom. The borders and boundaries that others draw around themselves are perceived as nothing to Aela; only limitations that she would break and reassemble, if she could.
But that is not in her power (yet) and so she amuses herself by breaking the things she could: hearts, men, morals.
The champagne stranger says that he doesn't have a taste for war, and for know himself well enough to admit that, Aela decides not to break him. A gift for not wasting her time in thinking that he might be somebody else to start a war for her favor. So she smiles instead, and tilts her head prettily at him, listening as he speaks about the men and monsters that he has known. His mention of terrible softens her face - just momentarily - as she remembers the small son that she keeps tucked away in the Pampas, and how she once told him that terrible didn't necessarily mean the evil that his birth mother imposed on him.
Her blue eyes gleam as he speaks of those terrible and powerful men, a curiosity rising at the possibility of learning more. What could they do? What had they done? Had they met untimely demises as her father had?
She can't help herself. As Rapt speaks of their overwhelming abilities, Aela drifts towards the easiest of hers. Just enough to bring more emotion behind the word, filling the air around them with every overwhelming feeling that the Empath can imagine: from anxious fear to drowning despair. A single golden ear flicks towards him, the only visible sign that she has changed the atmosphere around them.
If she touched him, she knows he would feel it. Aela's gifts had always worked easiest that way, but summoning a storm of swirling emotions around, she doesn't want easy. She wants to test herself - as she always does - and to push herself to the very edges of her ability. She wants to press those emotions into him, to see if the emotions that he had felt in that other place could be resurrected.
"I think it's a feeling," she tells him with a wry smile and then lifts her blazed head, wondering if he felt them rioting against his golden skin.
They doused your soul in water,
but the flames raged higher.
And they called you devil's daughter,
such a pretty liar.
@rapt