Aela is still figuring it out.
She doesn't have centuries worth of knowledge to have the kind of understanding that @[Eight] has. If a memory is particularly strong enough (and the ones that have the capability to last often are - emotions like betrayal and hatred, drowning sorrows and heartbreak), Aela might get a glimpse of it.
Aela only has two years worth of understanding but in that short time, she has come to understand some things while still striving to figure the rest out. The nearly-palomino filly is becoming determined that Beqanna will learn her name, even if she can't speak it aloud. Infamy will find Aela. There are plenty of things she doubts but that is not one of them. Her great-grandmother has said that there is greatness in her blood and Aela is certain she will rise to meet it.
It is just the figuring out how.
There are some obvious paths to the kind of immortality she is seeking. There are crowns (but they seem so trivial, so flimsy to her when the Queen of Nerine just let her granite tiara tumble and what of the Redwoods? The Forest in the North - Taiga - turned into nothing more than tinder for the fire-breathers). A crown is something that seems so easy to lose. Lands can be lost as easily as a horse might wander through Beqannan borders. There are battles, she supposes. But she recalls that day in the Nerine and Aela remembers being covered in sweat and soot and there had even been the chance that she might have been marred or maimed. No. She was far too lovely for something as blustering into battle. And well, there is martyrdom. But only fools make martyrs of themselves and Aela knows she is no fool.
So what then?
Her blood is calling with that greatness. It is pulsing in her veins, her heart begging between beats that she do something with it. Do something. Do something. Do something. It spurs her away from the canyons and ravines of Pangea. It keeps her well away from the North. It keeps her moving through the Common Lands as she tries to figure out what is that she will do.
The striped filly, distracted with those thoughts and aiming to keep herself away from others, will miss him. (He is brown, after all. Simple. There is nothing about him that gleams or dances in the dismal rays of sunlight that break through the viridian-covered branches. Not like she does.)
He might be looking for a grain of sand but what he will find is her.
Golden Aela.
bourbon words as promised