Author's Note: Greetings readers! This is my first fanfiction. I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to review after each chapter. Criticisms, comments, or praise, I don't mind at all, please tell me how you like Aela's story.
Also I have recently read Aela's wiki page online and I learned that her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother etc were Companions, and that she lived in the woods with her father until her Trial. This story follows my own idea to what I imagined Aela's life to have been like as a young girl.
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PROLOGUE
Shadows. Shadows are all that remain of my life. That, and the scars. One can never get rid of the scars.
Not once did I expect my life to become what it became. I knew grief and sorrow, joy and excitement, companionship and hope. I experienced all these things, and not once have I regretted devoting myself to the Companions.
I never have been one for writing, let alone writing out my entire life. At least, the parts of it that mattered to me. Whether they matter to you is for you alone to decide.
My name is Aela. I'm no longer a huntress. These days I'm too old to leave Whiterun. Unusual, is it not, that I linger around Jorrvaskr even when I can be nobody's Shield-Sibling anymore? But the others accept me. They treat me like some kind of heroine, someone who can be revered in song and in stories. They raise a mug to me each night when we gather at the table to drink and feast.
I'll never be that person, not like Alyssa was.
Songs are sung in her praise. She is revered by both the living and the dead, by mortals and immortals alike. In Jorrvaskr, we sing the Tale of the Tongues that spoke of her great victory, long ago. Even though she was once counted enemy to Whiterun, the townsfolk still honour her. Those who worshipped Talos, at least.
I've never been one to praise the Gods. I've been one to honour the Daedra, but not all of them. Only one. I hope I've served my Lord well enough to earn his favour when I am finally claimed by the Father of Manbeasts, and I join him and Skjor in the Hunting Grounds.
I've kept my secret well. Nobody outside the Companions had ever suspected me of being moonborn, until I was ready. And Alyssa held hers well, too; nobody suspected her to be moonborn, either. They call her something else that has so much more meaning than being lycanthropic. But here in Jorrvaskr, she will always be called Harbinger.
Why I revere her myself isn't just because she had the ancient powers flowing in her very soul, that she slew a nightmarish terror that would have devoured us all, that her talent with a bow and arrow far exceeded my own, and she defended herself against hordes of creatures I never imagined even existed. I remember her because Alyssa had been so much a friend to me. We hunted together, howled to the skies with one voice, fought bandits and beasts as Shield-Siblings. We gathered Totems of Hircine and stored them in the Underforge. She was like a sister to me. She's been a good Harbinger to us all, despite her other duties that more often than not keep her away from Whiterun...and her darker secrets which were revealed, in time, to us all.
The Companions often looked to the Circle for guidance whenever that happened, when a particularly long absence of our Harbinger made our whelps worried. Farkas and Vilkas never used to fear, though. Calmly they held the Companions together with me. As a trio we would help them, but we weren't Harbingers. We never will be; we were never meant to hold that post of leadership. I'm not sure I ever would have wanted to. I'm too reckless, too solitary for the younger generation of warriors to look to me as their leader.
There is another now in the Circle, a young Nord named Freia. She possesses all the skills and morals Alyssa held dear, though she never speaks of her much. It's obvious that she's to become the Harbinger one day. Everyone knows this. Even before Farkas and Vilkas passed they admitted Freia was the right young woman to lead the Companions, rather like Alyssa had been. She's small but hardy, and she's been through more experiences as a child than she has as an adult so far. Mention not that she has more mettle than most of our whelps who had been in the mead hall for some years earlier. Alyssa passed from this world a long time ago; her time had come then, the time when she needed to sacrifice herself to save the world once more from the dragon menace—so we are ready to accept Freia as Harbinger, when the time is right.
Some say that Alyssa ascended to godhood, as Tiber Septim had when he died. Some believe that the Daedric Lords claimed her spirit for their own strange and wonderful paradises. Farkas and Vilkas both thought that Hircine had taken her spirit and dragged her into the Hunting Grounds.
Me? I think that dragons are very hard to tame—and most never bore two spirits within them.
No, I think that Alyssa followed Kodlak. She went to Sovngarde in life. I'm sure she returned there in death.
And as for me, I am happy to join the Hunting Grounds when I die. I'll see Skjor again. I'll be able to hunt for eternity. Hunting's always been in my blood, even when I was a young girl. Besides, I'm too old to make the journey to the Flame of the Harbingers, to purify myself. Winterhold is such a long journey for an old woman. I'm sorry that I'll never see Vilkas or Farkas or Alyssa again. Or even Kodlak. But that's why I write now. I write like Kodlak wrote, when he first had the Dream that foretold Alyssa's coming, though none of us understood. I write to honour their memories, so that others can preserve them. They deserve to be remembered. And though I bear no foresight, I know that my story will be finished before I close my eyes, and wake in the Hunting Grounds, and hunt alongside my old friend Skjor forever.