Aela, who always considers herself first, finds that he amuses her.
This boy who would melt at her touch. This boy who would move oceans to reach her. This boy who becomes a mountain because of her thoughtful whim.
She keeps reminding herself this all a game because Skandar could become something with teeth or claws. Skandar could assume the role of a predator thus reducing her to prey. That would be a mistake on his part. Aela will never be prey but it doesn't mean she will never be maimed or harmed in the pursuit of her ambition; it doesn't mean that there won't be some amount of measured risk to reach it. With each weighted step that Skandar takes, she is measuring it and assessing it over and over again in her mind.
What else? part of her hums. What else could he be?
But she cautions her imagination and tempers her dream-filled mind. The power they wield together is in this game. If he bores or tires of it, what is left? The spell is broken and they return to what they were before this chance encounter. Skandar with no purpose and with, perhaps, the greatest gift of their Gods (because can't he create and remake?) and Aela with a mind full of memories and her desire for more, whatever that more might be.
The ideas are there - hazy things that are shaping and molding themselves - and he helps make the images so much clearer. It is Skandar who brings them into sharp focus with each shape he takes. Every part of him has gone grey with granite and yet she remains fixated on the embers of his eyes. They are still burning and that, that transforms her pout into a simper. Aela takes one graceful step towards him and then another, emulating a walk that she has observed Heartfire do so many times: confidence that claims there little room for surprise when you have seen so much.
When she draws close enough that he might hear her, Aela speaks in such a quiet tone that @[Skandar] might question if he heard it at all. "Ice," she murmurs delicately and then floods them both with memories of icicles hanging from bare winter branches. Of pristine new-fallen snow. Of the few impressive white-blue glaciers she glimpsed once on a trek far North floating on the ocean.
They could be nearing the end of their game, her nearness says. Aela lingers close enough that he could touch her, if she'd allow it. She is so near to him and so sure of her magnetism that she doesn't doubt Skandar at all. She assumes he wants to touch her. But he exudes an enigma all his own and (young) Aela starts to realize how games like this can go too far as she takes in his heady scent; she had drawn a line somewhere but she can't quite remember where it was.
Ice, she reminds them both (with a forceful gust of winter memories) and shivers with the cold that she imagines.