She can’t bring herself to face the Meadow. What had once been her old home, her favorite place to stargaze, has now become a living nightmare. A place where all she can recall is the smile on Gale’s face when he had first seen her stars to the bloodied grin he gave her as he tasted her blood and magic before she died amongst the lush summer grass. It had been months since her encounter with the Curse, months since she had pulled the starlit shield down around her, months since her legs had been broken and healed.

She still remembers the fairies request on the Mountain but can find little motivation to seek death again. So she remains quiet and listless on the Isle until Nashua returns. One morning she simply finds her hooves moving on a mission of their own accord. Eventually she finds her way to the cold Forest, her heavily scarred legs pushing through the layers of snow with little difficulty. There is a moment when she looks through the trees and remembers the eternal darkness, the monster she had fought with Basilica when her star shield had been lost. It’s a memory that makes her bite at the inside off her lip, as she tries to remember what she had been before her death. Had she come back the same? Or was she wrong now?

Had death changed her?
She’s not sure anymore.

She can feel an edge within her that had been missing before, a hardness around her softer parts that makes her feel like something has changed. That she’s not quite the same Ciri that had been bled and broken on those meadow hills months before. The swirling silver of her eyes even looks different now, a sharper metallic hue that seems to pierce to the heart of a person when she whirls her gaze upon them. They had always said that the Northerners were a hardy breed and perhaps she had just adapted enough to the Isle to make that ring true for her too. But she suspects that there is something within her that had been shattered the moment Not Gale had carved her open, the moment he had hit her in the temple. Something he had managed to sever deep inside of her, something that had once tied into a kinder and tender version of herself.

All she feels now is that bubbling anger that bubbles in her stomach like the popping hot gas of the stars that twinkle around her. It’s the only heat that competes with the ice that frosts over the tundra of her soul. The part of her that is now afraid to love and care if it only leads to pain and destruction. If it means dying again for nothing.

-- Ciri

She freezes as a familiar voice says her name and the world around her seems to slow down as she turns her head to face him. A range of emotions flood the starlit mare but only one seems to find footing above the rest. Above the fear, the sadness, the surprise and disgust… Anger takes dominance. He is calm and curious, just like the old Gale. If there had ever been an old Gale to begin with. She says nothing as he comes closer, deathly still except for the swirling of her frigid silver eyes and a slight ruffling from the new wings across her back. The thought dawns on her that she could take flight right now but she smothers it as quickly as it comes. It would be pointless, when he can easily come after her in whatever form he wished.

Besides, she has no desire to run.
Not this time.

He looks down at her legs and she purses her lips as her gaze grows harder. When he asks who had healed her, she finally gives him a cold smile and ignores his question entirely. “What a pleasant surprise.” She states flatly, obviously anything but thrilled to see him. Despite wanting to go after Gale the moment Nashua had returned, she had enough common sense to see how that would go. They still needed more time, she still needed to be stronger. And until she could go back to the Mountain with her quest fulfilled, she was grossly disadvantaged.

This was not how things were suppose to go down. But as she had already died once, she doubts a second death could be much worse. It seems inevitable after all.

“Come for another taste have you?” The smile lingers but never seems to meet her eyes as she stares him down and lets her wings unfurl and flare behind her, letting the slow burn of her anger consume her. It was dangerous, provoking him like this, but she can’t find it in her to care. If it’s a fight he wants, she was happy to give it to him.

-- Ciri

The anger gives her blind courage and she burrows deep within it alongside the hatred for the Curse until her fear and grief are mere afterthoughts. She knows it’s name now but it’s still so hard to separate the thing she cannot see from the face she knows so well. He steps closer to her, enough so that the tips of her feathers tickle against his chest and she inhales sharply, feeling an intense rush of being so close to her murderer. “You wish.” She snarls softly, baring her blunted teeth and having half a mind to slap him across the face with that same outstretched wing. Nashua’s warning sounds then, an echoing voice of reason in the back of her head. A reminder that this would be a long game and one that could not easily be won as he licks his lips and reveals sharp teeth.

The snarl remains even as she slowly folds her wings behind her. She had come here for a reason, had come here so that she could be stronger for when she battled him again. He didn’t know that and she intended to keep it that way. Perhaps there was a way to trick Gale, the Curse, into actually helping her with her objective. If she could pull it off…. but how? Slowly she forces her expression into something more neutral. She can’t smother that anger inside of her but she tries to at least dampen it just a little. Just to get what she came here for.

Gale had only ever known the soft side of Ciri. The Curse probably didn’t even see her as a threat. So she would act as if she was not and see where that might lead. The long game like Nashua had said. “Why did you bring me back?” She finally asks, a question she hadn’t even been meaning to ask him but had wondered a thousand times since she had woken up stained in her own blood. Because it had to have been him who had healed her chest, one scar among many, and brought her back to life. But why? It was the one part of all this she truly didn’t understand.

“What do you want?”

-- Ciri

What dark thoughts are passing through that blue head of his, she wonders. He is not quick to answer her as if considering her questions with the solemn seriousness they deserve, as the real Gale might have once done. It makes her rage swell and keeping herself calm and patient is one of the hardest battles she’s faced thus far. Finally he smiles and simply states an answer that she should have expected. She would never get any truth from the Curse, Nashua had warned her of that. It would lie and play mind games until it achieved what it wanted. But what did it want?

Perhaps that was the key to the Curses’s downfall and she feels a sudden flare of hope when he avoids that question like she had done previously. He is quick to change the subject and if he was hoping to get further beneath her skin, the topic of her stars is a good one to start with. The stars along her back shine here in the dark cool forest, glittering and glowing around her wings and haloing around her head. But she knows these are not the ones he is referring to and her swirls darken as she forces a laugh that holds no happiness in it.

Had he done something when he had brought her back? Was that why it felt like slick oil when she had tentatively touched the source of her shield? She watches the mockery of his blue stars that he pulls around him now and simply smiles as he implies a desire for a second serving. She tilts her head at him, in that same annoying way he does to her, a grim determination hardening in the core of her metallic gaze.

“Perhaps you choked on some of them after all.” She states innocently. She is momentarily quiet, considering the monster before her that wears her friends face. There must be something that the Curse cared about. But what? What could she take from him that would cause an inkling of the damage he had done by taking from so many? “Out of all the things you can do it seems silly that you would waste your efforts on something so simple as stars.” She starts on her quest of discovery, flicking the ends of her wings as if she is no longer impressed by him, the stallion that had ended her life once and could easily do so again.

-- Ciri

”There’s more to you than stars, Ciri”

He speaks to her as if she was a petulant child being willfully ignorant. She knows this is not the Gale she had known. She still can't be certain that Gale had ever actually existed and wasn’t always a farce created by the Curse as a cover. Regardless, this is not the kind stallion she had grown to know so the statement, while offered in that patronizing way, don’t seem to fit with what she’s come to know and learn about the Curse. She is instantly suspicious but can’t deny her curiosity either. “Like what exactly?” She asks in that same flat tone, wariness in the swirling silver strands of her gaze.

She can’t help but wonder yet again what exactly was the darkness beyond the mask of Gale, what exactly was the thing that lived within the indigo stallion's body? What exactly was the Curse that had fooled her and so many others before her?

She almost has a master over her anger, smothering it just enough that it simmers beneath the surface and fuels her purpose for living. She almost has it controlled completely until he opens his mouth again and lets the insolence roll from his tongue, insults the death that she still can’t quite come to terms with. Nashua’s words of warning drown out in the buzz that fills her ears as the blaze of her rage erupts and inflames her, as the world around her bleeds red into her periphery and stains the Curse before her with a crimson hue.

A fierceness twists her lips into something feral and wild as the swirls of her silver eyes quicken until they are nearly a blur of shining white. “I have a better idea.” She says with eerie smoothness, knowing what exactly she could say that he truly deserved instead of a thank you. “Fuck you Gale.” And with a snap of a midnight feathered wing, she buffets it out in an attempt to slap Gale across the face at the same time that she lunges at him with with her front hooves flying, leaving nothing but stardust in her wake.

-- Ciri