Oh, Aela hopes.
She hopes for a future that she will be recognized for what she is: a goddess. She hopes that those who cross her will either recognize her greatness for what it is, or if they choose to remain blind, then they are willing to endure the darkness because that is what Aela will bring down upon them. She had begun as a girl who couldn't speak, who had been so overwhelmed by this world and the memories it still held that it silenced her into fear.
Aela has become so much more than what she originally was.
A girl with bastard beginnings, who had grown up with help from the Mountain.
A girl who had become a woman with not only a voice to be heard, but a power to be felt.
There are very few that Aela would help - not without a price - but Kensley says that he manages. She was at his disposal, if he had need of her. He only had to ask. (But there is a sense of pride for this man that she has thawed out; a sense of kinship that they have both grown into so much more since their last meeting.) The slight smile that she wears is not her usual one - nothing coy or wry - but uncommonly girlish.
What he says - that he woke up one morning different - is a regular occurence in Beqanna, and yet it isn't, because this was Kensley and he never would be ordinary to Aela.
"It suits you," she finally decides, in the that his ice heart never had. He had been the eye of the storm in her world, the first peace she had truly known, but Kensley should have never been forced to keep that all within. Better he let it all out, that the storm within him wreak on others rather than him. "Perhaps you were always meant to be this way," she offers, because to Aela, Kensley was like her.
Destined for better.
They doused your soul in water,
but the flames raged higher.
And they called you devil's daughter,
such a pretty liar.
@kensley