Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you Eyas' words had echoed in his head throughout the dark winter. She'd sown seeds of doubt in his mind, and they've grown in the darkness like noxious weeds, wrapping barbed vines around his thoughts and poisoning most of his waking hours. Or is that just the manifestation of the Curse? The shapeshifting has been coming easier, and while that is perhaps indicative of the dark magic’s progression, Gale has found that time spent in other shapes is far more freeing than when trapped in his own. Today he is a bat, large-winged but small eared, but with a remarkable way of using sound that makes the darkness around him seem not so dark at all. He hangs upside down from a large turquoise palm using his hind feet, and marvels at how different they are from his equine hooves. Erne is perched near enough that if Gale were to stretch out the full length of his nearly six-foot wingspan he could tap the black bird, but the osprey’s eyes are closed as he rests. Life for the bird has been difficult since the eclipse, and Gale knows that is true for the other residents of the island as well. How are @[Aedan] and @[Vita], he wonders, and the children he’d rarely seen even in the light - @[Bran] and @[Islay]? Had the glowing mare from the Field, @[Fenwe], made it to Islandres and its relative safety? What about that stranger with the dangling tongue, whose name he’d later learned was the incredibly apt @[Crackjaw]? And then @[Eyas] herself - had she really meant what she’d meant about not sticking around? He needs to know the answer to those questions. He has put them off long enough, distracted by the darkness of his own future, but he owes it to the rest of them to be sure Islandres is in good hands after he is gone. So with a long sigh, Gale releases his grip on the palm and flips his body midair, landing in the black sand as a blue brindled stallion. His mane, long and stretching from his poll to his tail, is as white as the wings he wears at his sides. There is a crimson marking on the left, where an inverted crimson V adorns the snow-white feathers. Gale stretches those wings, a piece of his shapeshifting handiwork, and then folds them back against his sides as he sets out into the bright-as-daylight-to-him darkness in search of the other residents of Islandres.