Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Though Gale has regained some of the Curse memories, they have been piecemeal and incomplete, with no sense of when they had taken place. They had all been wrong in some way, tainted by something intangibly vile. Maikeen had been wrong in the memories, but he has done his best to not focus on how.
As she towers over him, ivory scaled against the snow pale sky, he looks up into her brilliant orange eyes and the matching fissures that cover her skin and erupt into horns to crown her head. She looks terrifying, but that is but one of a myriad of emotions that tumble through Gale’s dying mind.
The world shimmers, his eyes wavering, and everything shifts to those three shades: white and black and fire. The pain of his leg snapping is ember red, and the sick feeling of the muscle as it holds his limb together is black and wet. The tearing of her talons into his sides is white hot pain, followed by a hacking gasp that spews enough blood to set the snow around to smoking from the internal heat.
Coward, she calls him. One of the more mild things he considers himself. When he swallows to try and tell her why she’s wrong and that he is worse than a coward, the lightning is too eager to follow, fizzing at the edges of his mouth, dancing along his lips. The words die on his bloody tongue, and though he tries to keep them open, his eyelids are heavy and they keep falling closed. Every time he opens them is a little harder than the one before, but he is determined not to give in. He has fought the shadows too long.
So he dies, long and slow and agonizing.
Mazikeen is the last thing that he sees, blazing and brilliant.
His breathing stops first, having grown uneven and sporadic, melting the snow around him with its crimson spray. Then his heart, and then he supposes it had been his mind, because after that he remembers nothing more.
That is when the shadows too. Like those he’d possessed while Cursed, the inky tendrils rise from nothingness, twining like living creatures up his stockinged legs. They reach his brindled belly, climb his navy neck and just before they reach his face, there is the faintest flash of lighting. It comes from his eyes, or perhaps his nose like the second flicker, or with his breath like the third. The rest erupt where the others begin, thousands of sparks that dart between the shadows, pushing them back until the whole of the downed horse is aglow.
Just as quickly as the odd spectacle of magic had begun, it ends. The lightning sinks into Gale’s skin. It glows a moment longer over those places where he bleeds, sealing the puncture wounds from Mazikeen’s talons with sleek cremello* skin the same shade as the brindle markings along his sides.
When the lightning is gone, his lungs rise. When they fall, the sound is even and bloodless, healed and whole once more. They continue to rise and fall, and his heart beats once more in his chest. His eyes remain closed. He sleeps, it seems, though any efforts to wake him would be in vain.
For now, at least, while he is remembering.
@Mazikeen
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* is he cremello? perlino? why am i incapable of fixing this information into my brain ?!?
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Gale
