"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
There is a certain kind of tension in Hyaline now, and it seeps even to her carved out corners, filling it like faint smoke.
Almost able to be ignored, but nagging and incessant enough that it eventually demanded attention.
It was as if the land was pulled taut like the strings of a bow, quivering and anxious, though the target seemed to be invisible — nothing in particular that it was aimed at, and perhaps that only added to the chaotic undercurrent of it all.
She could feel it, though; a strange kind of trembling heartbeat in the earth, a shuddering breath of the summer breeze.
At the epicenter, there seemed to be Gale and Mazikeen, their fire-and-gasoline dynamic radiating in waves across the kingdom, enough that it drew her from her own rather self-centered world. It was a rare thing for her to look up from her own romances and turmoils, but as it is, she is currently adrift in a beautiful lull. Her heart, once scattered into pieces, had slowly regenerated into what felt like something entirely new; something made for Atrox, a heart that was almost whole rather than fractured and splintered like bone.
A heart and soul that was only his, save for the single piece long-buried somewhere else.
She is alone when she walks to the lakeshore, the stardust of her wings glittering in the waning light, leaving behind a shimmering trail where some of it has drifted to the ground behind her. With impossibly dark eyes she stares out at the expanse of water, at the mountain peaks that currently sit backlit by a setting sun. It was strange to have been here for so long after so many years of being unmoored and lost; even stranger still that it was Atrox she anchored herself to, and that this was the place they settled on being theirs.
Pale and lucent, she stands stark against the dying day, unmoving, but listening.
EVEN ANGELS HAVE THEIR WICKED SCHEMES
i dont know what this is, i just felt like writing her. you cant tell since it didnt even turn out good though.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
The wind ripples through the iridescent fur of Gale’s blue wolfhide, carrying the smell of late blooming wisteria and the sound of croaking frogs up from the lake. From where he lays on a rocky outcropping, he can see a substantial bit of the shoreline. At least, he can see when his eyes are open, but now the electric blue irises are hidden behind long white-lashed eyes.
He is sleeping off an earlier meal of capretto, and the blood is still splashed along his face and chest, which rises and falls slowly as he dozes.
The tension that Ryatah feels is absent in Gale - at least here within Hyaline. In the outside world he feels it, thrumming near constantly within his head, but not here. Here, in Hyaline, he feels entirely at ease.
He wakes slowly, and when he rises to stretch sees that someone stands at the edge of the lake that hadn’t been there when he’d dozed off. The someone glows in a way that he now recognizes as angelic, and Gale slowly cleans some of the dried blood from his forelegs.
It would be faster to wash them in the lake, he thinks, and perhaps he could play with the angel a bit as well. Long ago he had promised Mazikeen not to hurt them, but as he picks his way down the slope toward Ryatah, the navy blue creature reasons that he’d never promised not to chase them a little.
He shifts before he breaks through the trees, returning to his mostly equine form, one with a white spinal mane, black horns, and a pair of white-feathered forelimbs that he’s borrowed from a prehistoric quetzalcoatlus. Gale considers breaking into a run, just to see how quickly she’d turn and flee, but refrains.
This was the angel that had saved Mazikeen, Gale realizes as he draws close enough to speak. She is a healer then, and so perhaps a less ideal choice for a meal than one of the other angels. Perhaps not even a good idea to chase, and that realization is rather disappointing.
He’s thinking all of this as he stands, staring at her with his very blue eyes. He doesn’t blink, and the only movement is the flicker of lightnings that originate from his irises and dance outward along his skin, and the slow crawl of his eyes across her. Gale doesn’t speak, only stares.
She feels someone approaching without having to look—a remnant skill from all those years being blind. It sounds so cliche, to say that she could feel him, but there is no other way to describe it. She felt the weight of his presence pressing into her vicinity, the way the air itself was displaced by his body. Once you learned how to sense another’s eyes landing on you or a stranger’s heartbeat interrupting the rhythm of your own, it was impossible to forget.
With a subtle tilt of her head her dark eyes are able to take him in, and she recognizes him instantly. They have never met, of course, but she has seen him with Mazikeen. If you or any of your family see an iridescent blue stallion or animal, stay as far away as you can, Maze had told her from her place on the blood-soaked ground, covered in the wounds Gale had inflicted and that Ryatah had healed. She had heeded the warning, mostly. Lost in her own world that she was, it simply had never happened that their paths would cross, though she had occasionally caught glimpses of creatures of similar coloring and dutifully, she had stayed away.
He was not, in her opinion, her battle to be fought, and she was hardly a fighter to begin with. It would have made sense then to have been fearful at the sight of him, but whatever it is that passes across her face at the recognition, it is not fear.
Something sparks in her chest, a peculiar glow that warms within her ribcage; her own twisted Pavlovian response to danger.
It is not the ember begging to escalate into a wildfire that Carnage had a way of igniting, though. It is more like a single flash in the dark, a flicker of intrigue, mostly. She knew what Gale was capable of—or what the curse was capable of. There is a false sense of security though, in the idea that she is not his to tear apart. Someone else has already done that, has broken her down to her core and rebuilt her in an impossible way; has drenched the ground with her blood and then wiped her clean, has filled her lungs with the ocean and then breathed life back into her.
He has ruined her for everyone else in more ways than one, but mostly, it is because he has all but decimated her fear of anyone that is not him, and maybe that is how Carnage will be her downfall.
“Are you looking for someone?” She asks him, her soft voice breaking the silence. The amber light of her halo catches the edges of a smile on her stark-white lips, and when she moves it is to angle herself towards him, stardust drifting lazily to the ground from the tips of her wings as she does.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Observant as he is, the blue stallion can feel the transient fear in the angel. It comes and goes swiftly, a curious thing, and his blue eyes narrow almost imperceptibly. The Curse has never encountered an angel before, and knows little of them. They can heal, he knows, but little else beyond the glowing appearance that he has finally finished taking in.
He is not fond of things he does not understand. When she smiles at him, Gale frowns.
“Why does Mazikeen want you alive?” He asks, giving no indication that he’d heard her question at all. His own is more important anyway. When Ryatah moves, a cascade of starlight falls from her wings, and Gale’s eyes move from her eyes (if she has them right now?) to the shimmering light.
Before the stardust fades away, he catches it and draws it toward him.
But then he isn’t sure what to do with it after that, so he drops it and it fades into darkness between them. Then he looks back at the angel as though just remembering her, and the frown returns.
He does not return her smile, or her kindness that borders on being a formal kind of cordial (a fallback to being a diplomat and queen for far too many years—always neutral, always polite). It goes mostly unnoticed by her. She has had far worse interactions, bringing the bar to what she finds pleasant to near ground level. Her kindness is a mostly shallow thing to begin with, a pretty veil hiding the ugly marks underneath. Not a facade so much as armor; her way that she learned to survive in a world that she did not stand a fighting chance against.
She is kind at the core, but so many different kinds of darkness have twisted their roots around it that it has become blemished, tainted.
After all, she has stood by here in Hyaline, entirely aware of what Gale is capable of and the things that he has done to Mazikeen. Trying to put a stop to it has never occurred to her, and most likely she would have warned anyone way had they tried to interfere.
“Obligation, probably,” she answers his question, her tone still light and a little nonchalant. “Remittance for saving her twice.” Her dark eyes fixate on his when she says this, an unspoken kind of knowing reflecting from them, accompanied by a nearly imperceptible smile. She is sure that he knows. Knows that she was the one to heal all that he had broken that second time around, when Mazikeen had nearly bled to death on the lake shore. She does not say that she finds him careless; she is no stranger to the dynamic of a violent romance, but, she wonders if he learned from his previous mistake.
Toying with death is a dangerous thing if you cannot undo it, as she has learned.
“Would you rather I was dead?” she asks him while watching him inspect the shimmering stardust, the question spoken with the eerie kind of calm of someone unafraid of death or dying. She is no stranger to it anymore.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Gale would prefer to drive most everyone out, the angels included. This is apparent on his face, making no effort to appear polite and cordial as he scowls at the glowing creature in front of him. He has seen the angels in the company of the black panther shifter, and though he’d rather they were gone Gale has also become accustomed to avoiding them in the years since his arrival in Hyaline.
Well, he thinks, Mazikeen won’t need the angel to save her a third time. Gale has taken responsibility for that. There is no answering smile on his own face, only a narrowing of his impossibly blue eyes.
‘Would you rather I was dead?’ She asks plainly, and something like surprise flashes across them for just an instant. Perhaps it was even just a flicker of lightning.
“No.” Gale answers, the word short and cold as the air around them, because he has learned caution from his experiences. He’s inflicted fewer wounds upon his spouse since his own death.
And though he’s not yet realized it yet, he’s not slain another horse since the Ischian mare from whom he’d taken the water wings that appear - just for a moment - at his sides. Flashes of magic are less common than lightning, but he’s no stranger to suppressing them. They are there and gone within the space of a few heartbeats, and Gale ignores them entirely as he reaches toward Ryatah with his magic.
Her bones have felt magic before, and Gale visibly recoils when he recognizes the source. The shadows within him originate in part from the Dark God. The cursed creature takes another step back, and the frown on his face is deepened by the awareness of Powers still far out of his reach.
Is there a chance that her presence might draw Carnage’s attention, Gale wonders? Perhaps it would be better for her to be dead after all. Or perhaps gone? Or keeping her here might even be some form of protection?
The thoughts swirl inside his head, the next always just out of reach as he tries to make sense of them. Soft tendrils of shadow dance at the edges of his vision. Gale sees them, knows what they signify, and the edge of his lip rises in a snarl of frustration.
He glances up to meet Ryatah’s intact eyeballs, which are right there in her head where they belong, and demands:
She is not sure what she had expected his answer to be, and truthfully it likely wouldn’t have mattered either way. What would she have done if he wished her dead? Begging for her life was never her first instinct, because what good would it do? If someone wants to kill her they would kill her whether there is a plea on her tongue or not; she knows they have made up their minds, and that she is beyond saving. And usually being alive was far more unbearable than the prospect of being dead—it is only now, because of Atrox, that she finds her mind clawing for what she would do should Gale tell her yes.
But, he says no, although the coldness to his voice tells her it’s not meant to be a reassurance. Her empathy is still new, but she thinks she can feel something similar to dislike radiating from him. Dislike for her? Dislike for anyone in general? She is not adept enough yet to untangle whatever she thinks is coming from him—is not sure she could even if she had been proficient, though she does not know it is magic he possesses. She just knows that whatever power he wields is stronger than anything she has, and she is wise enough to not search for ways to unleash it.
A lesson that has finally seemed to sink in, after all these years of seeing how far she had to push someone before they shattered her to dust.
The way that he visibly recoils makes her flinch, unsure of what triggered the sudden movement from him. She had not felt his magic touch her, had not felt the way it slipped beneath her skin and found the history carved there. There is not a single part of her that has not been touched by Carnage; her body that he has revived, the eyes that he has taken away only to return, the piece of her soul kept locked away. The way he has hollowed out pieces of her and filled it with himself is something that could never be undone, but save for the brand on her hip, their story was mostly only for them.
It wouldn't surprise her to find that was the reason Gale had pulled back so abruptly, but even if she had known, she would not have had an answer to any of his questions. Carnage was unpredictable, even (especially) to her. Whether or not he decided to respond should Gale kill or use her in some other fashion would depend entirely on how bored he was at the moment.
She regards him carefully after his demand, her dark eyes blinking, watchful. His frustration is palpable, and despite all her earlier restraint, there is an innate need to press into it—to see what his reaction will be if she were to push back, to find his limit of patience. How fast would Gale snap if she, a virtual stranger, did not bend to his whim?
She reminds herself though that this is not her game to play, and so instead she only obliges, reaching for him with her healing. She wraps him in the warmth of it, just as careful yet efficient as she would be for anyone else, stepping back only when she is done. “Do you get headaches often?” she ventures to ask cautiously, unable to resist the urge to pry into him just a little.
you do things VERY FAST so if you dont like Gale being in 100 different timelines you are absolutely welcome to close the thread and I will only cry a little bit.
Gale