YOU'RE ONLY AS SICK AS YOUR SECRETS
In another life, there is a version of this story that doesn't play out like this.
There is a version where the pair of cousins would meet, and perhaps they had been raised as their mothers before them had been, together. They might have been raised beside a lake and the two of them would have been raised on stories that told tales about horses turned into stars; about a waterfall that brought prophecies of the future; about Guardians and what it meant to be a Light in a world gone Dark.
Perhaps there is an alternate universe where the two of them had been reared together, and in that place, perhaps they learned the importance of the blood they shared.
But Aela had been born a girl to a fallen mother and a Cursed father. Lilliana had been so broken by the time that she came along, that she thought it was a kindness to keep the girl away from all the sharp edges of her family lines. The young mare knows that many can claim kinship with her. Her brothers have proven to be a never-ending obstacle - one emerging after the other - and the sole sister that she knows of is to like Lilliana to be of use to anyone.
Bumping into this mare is a reckoning, and the memories that bloom into her mind rattle Aela.
She knows nothing of the woman that she so strongly resembles. (That had been something that had broken her mother, but Aela had never learned about the Aunt from Beyond that carried a gold coat and blue eyes as she did.) The Seneschal only knows that this mare dares to stare so brazenly at her.
"Would you like to be?" she threatens and takes a bold step towards the other blue-eyed creature. Fire beckons from beneath her skin and the sparks that emerge by her white socks summon a trail of flame behind her as she approaches the small mare that had gotten in her way.
@Elliana