Gale
started under neon lights, then it all got dark
i only know how to go too far
Tears well in her eyes, adding a layer of brilliance that he’d almost forgotten. She’s quiet as they travel down her face, making lines of clean white through the blood streaked across her cheek. She’s trying not to cry, he thinks, but brushing against her mind yields only unfamiliar faces, gold and white and icy, his magic frustratingly impotent in his effort to delve for something more interesting.
One of them had been Ryatah, and he thinks of the mare in the void, unmarred save the gaping wound across her chest where he’d torn her heart away. Had Mazikeen seen it in his mind, he wonders? Is that the impetus to the way her body morphs, making a fluid transition from wyvern to white wolf?
He knows it is the Dream, creating connections that he has severed, turning leagues of separation into nothing at all, unraveling what he’d wound up and locked away so tightly: love and lust and the brightness of desire. Though Mazikeen is no longer as striking without her scars or the gleam of madness in her eyes, the body he wears is delighted by the image she makes while she stalks him, her skin aglow and her eyes so bright they burn the space between them. His breath, already rapid from their battle, catches in his throat.
He has found no other woman like her, and while some part of him will miss Mazikeen when he kills her, that part is locked far away in the waking world. Not here though, not in the Dream. It is beside him, then inside him, bringing a forgotten warmth to his chest.
The realization brings an ugly snarl to the dragon’s navy face.
He doesn’t pull away, but lightning flashes through the sky, driven by his uncertainty. He turns himself to follow her with narrowed eyes, beginning to reach for a way out of the dream, feeling for the magnetic draw of his resting body. It will take some time, he thinks; no new magic is ever as immediate as he might want.
“You would have enjoyed it,” he tells Mazikeen, once more attempting to show her the broken body, to distract himself from where his mind might wander. “Well, the better you would have,” he amends. The better version of her that he had crafted, he means: the one who’d dropped him over the edge of a mountain, who’d been so vicious and cruel that she’d carved a place for herself in what passed for his black heart.
“You’ve gone soft,” he taunts, feeling the pull of his body, knowing that escape is near. Soft, he says, as though he is entirely without weakness. He can be gone in a heartbeat, already half-hearing the crash of the surf in his far distant ears. The certainty makes him step closer, cutting off the wolf’s circling, pressing closer, closer, one step at a time, knowing how thin a line he walks.
“You can’t protect them if you’re soft,” he says. Around them Sickle, Malik, and the pair of children from down by the lake appear and fade a moment later.
“I will wear your face when I hurt them,” he promises, remembering with a smile how Mazikeen had slit their daughter’s throat.
How long would it take to return her to that mindset, he wonders? How long to make her strong again? As his distant body stirs on the sand, he decides that he will find out. He'll remake her as she had once been, and then, then he'll kill her once and for all. When he wakes his power will return, and Hyaline is not so far away for a magician.
Perhaps he’ll even be able to spirit her away before she wakes from this dream. First though, he wants to see her leap for him, so that he might vanish at the last moment, disappearing from the Dream.
@Mazikeen
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there's fire in your blood
 | It is so easy to believe that he can see her fears because he speaks them in his taunts. It’s such an old fear - that she isn’t enough. The intensity of it is not what it once was, but here in this dream it tries to drown her as she fights desperately against it. Reassurances run like mantras through her mind, reminding her that she is stronger with those she loves, that she does not have to fight every battle alone.
The glowing in her fur flickers with her uncertainty as Gale’s is displayed by the lightning in the sky around them. It’s so hard to know whether he is just needling her with her insecurities or if he’s right. If she is too soft now to be any use as a protector.
And if she had been less soft, would she have tried harder to find a way to kill Gale before he had become what stands before her now?
She doesn’t know the young pair of foals that appear with Sickle and Malik but she recognizes the colours, the golden eyes, and feels a small thrill that disappears with them - and fades completely at Gale’s words.
Mazikeen feels as though she’s processing things in slow motion and her head seems to take forever to turn from where the apparitions of the children have faded and back to him. When she does, she feels… fine. Even though she is still actively crying.
She likes being soft. Likes seeing her children smile at her and hearing their laughter.
Even as broken as she feels, Mazikeen likes who she is now and the potential that it brings. And even if she has so much damage control to do still, she knows there are those she could reach out to for help.
So she repeats what he had told her when he had said he’d come for Viszla, only this time there’s a small, knowing smile on her face. And though the words are quiet, she puts effort into filling them with steel (even if that confidence is mostly just wishful thinking). “No, you won’t.”
And then she lunges for him, her wolf’s head morphing through every predator she can think of - each shape wanting the chance to tear blood from him.
m a z i k e e n . |
@  Gale
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