"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
04-23-2022, 07:23 AM (This post was last modified: 06-07-2022, 06:32 AM by kahzie.)
thread mature for violence/blood/death
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
He wakes to the distant rumble of thunder, or perhaps the trilling song of a lark that still rings through the bare-branched trees. The eastern sky, where the sun should be rising, is veiled instead by clouds through which a red sun appears only the palest of pink orbs. Autumn is a season of intermittent storms on Islandres, but this storm is different.
This is the third storm since Malik had come. This is the storm after which he’d promised - aloud, to a grown son that he doesn’t know, as if that might bind him to it more firmly - to begin his amends.
There are many places he might go, but the first is the most obvious.
It takes some time for him to make it to Hyaline, long enough that the morning storm has surely passed and been dried by the balmy afternoon sun. Long enough that he can feel the soft crackle of lightning dancing along his skin, because his muscles grow weary from the walking. Gale pauses, one hoof still raised, and the lightning fades, and as it goes he breathes a soft sigh of relief.
Never before has he been so careful of his every action, so diligent to avoid the use of magic. It is why he comes on foot, crossing the strange bridge of land that now links the realms, wading the River, and now climbing the rocky mountains. It would be easier with other feet, but Gale continues ever onward with the equine hooves he’d been born to even as they begin to ache. He’s grown soft-footed, Gale thinks, smiling for a moment before remembering his purpose and growing somber once more.
He wills the Self Healing away easily, as familiar with the ability as with the white tail that flicks behind him. It’s the other abilities that are harder, the ones that he doesn’t mean to use, the ones he doesn’t even realize he has until he accidentally uses them. The Curse had eaten a great many hearts, those abilities tell him, had slain a seemingly impossible number. (Or killed a Magician, a hopeful part of him once attempted to posit, perhaps just one magician. Gale knows that unlikely, and dismisses the hope)
Gale crosses the border of Hyaline, and though he tries not to, he feels the way the entity ripples at his intrusion. Lightning follows it, tracing an arc into the sky before fading away, and for just a moment Gale appreciates how fascinating the display had been. But then the shadows rush in to replace the missing bit of lightning, and with them a memory.
It is always a strange experience, to See through his own eyes into a past he does not recall. It is often a terrifying experience as well, insight into exactly what his body had been doing in his absence.
And it would be nice to complete the set of the entities’ Mazikeen is saying, but maybe it is not Mazikeen, because her eyes are the wrong shade of orange and she is standing much too close. The Gale-that-he-is-not uses magic fueled by his own pain to find that maybe-not-Mazikeen is with child, and then the memory is gone and he is once more standing knee deep snow, alone on the mountainside.
Malik had not spoken of his mother, and that had been the final piece in the puzzle. If he does not blame Gale for her death, she is not dead. The Curse hadn't killed her, and that can mean only one thing.
It had done something even worse.
What that might have been, he knows he will soon discover. Until then, he seeks lower altitudes and shallower snow, and a place out of the wind enough that he would not freeze.
Malik had told her that Gale was back, that he was different - his old self, not that her son had ever even gotten a chance to know what he had been before the Curse - and Mazikeen had not been able to sleep since. She knew, deep down through every bone and cell in her body, that it was only a matter of time before he showed back up here in Hyaline.
The news that he had been killed, really and truly killed - burned and ashes scattered to the wind - had brought her relief. They could all finally be free, they could continue to heal their wounds without the fear that they would be torn open again and again.
But not anymore.
It was very easy to believe it was the Curse tricking Malik, no matter how earnest he seemed - so she wasn’t going to take any risks. This time, she did not keep the news a secret. She wanted every eye in Hyaline on the look out - as much as it pained her to have to admit this particular threat still existed. Every single time the alarm went out that someone crossed their borders, Mazikeen went to investigate - and those few times when her body demanded sleep and she couldn’t, she fretted until Firion reported back.
On this autumn day, she is circling through the air as a golden (literally) eagle. Though the glint of metallic feathers in the corner of her eye does not completely ease away the troubled storm of her mind, it brings her some comfort all the same. A self-indulgent and embarrassing display of affection, maybe, but Mazikeen can’t bring herself to mind on the few occasions it happens - even when she’s caught doing it.
Iridescent blue moving through white snow causes all her thoughts to burst into flames. Neither Sickle nor Malik inherited their father’s white hair so it cannot be either of them. She hovers there, disbelief suspending all other emotions only for a second - before the tidal wave crashes back into her.
It’s fear that fuels the anger that illuminates her body with cracks of bright fire light when she spies him. Fear chokes whatever venomous words of warning she might have screamed at him and it drives her just to act immediately.
She shifts into a pale dragon with obsidian spikes and claws, and dives towards where he is moving down the slope. A furious roar escapes her just as she pivots her body for the attack - like an osprey descending for a fish, only the talons she possesses now are much, much larger.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
The cold wind tugs at his mane, and Gale narrows his ice-lashed eyes to peer down the slope of the mountain ahead of him. The way to the lake is a long one even in the heart of summer, when the snow was but an occasional dusting of powder. It is not nearly so easy now, when he must shove his way through the snow with his knees and chest.
It is hard, cold, miserable going, but it gives him something to focus on that is not the spiral of his thoughts. He becomes single-minded on his purpose, so intent that he does not think to look overhead for impossibly golden birds.
Instead, he realizes Mazikeen is coming only when her shadow passes over him, and Gale turns his electric blue gaze up. Mazikeen is shifting into a white dragon, black-spiked and glowing against the afternoon sky. He stops his downhill trek where he stands on a windswept stone ledge beside an impressive drop.
As Mazikeen begins to dive, Gale’s mind begins to wander. Should he let her kill him, as she seems intent upon? The magic spent to return him to life would surely be enough to restore all memories of his time cursed, but what are the alternatives? Expend just enough to keep himself alive and risk what memories might come with the magic?
Gale runs out of time just as this thought occurs to him, and is forced into action.
A pair of wings, white, feathered, one slashed in red, erupt from his sides just as the mountain quakes with her bellow. He leaps, and if he’d been quicker he might have avoided the talons digging into his hindquarters. But better that than be buffeted back against the cliff by the force of her wing, he thinks, catching the wind beneath his own wings.
He’d almost let himself forget how it felt to have wings, to fly.
He feels both free and solaced, a strange pair of emotions that he has no time to enjoy because just as the lightning dances along his white pinfeathers, so do the shadows.
Gale remembers Mazikeen as a white dragon, her eyes gone rage-blank as she devours him. The parched earth and dry canyons around them suggest Pangea, and there is an acrid smell in the air stronger even than the blood and dust.
He opens his eyes to find himself tumbling forward, wings half-folded as he falls through the open sky. Attempting to aim for a place where the snow has piled thick, the brindle pegasus slows himself as best he can before crashing into the mountainside. Pain lances through him, but as soon as he moves he begins to heal. The physical pain disappears, only to have its place taken by the black dread of consequence. When the memories have faded - he’d left Wishbone for dead and torn out Mazikeen’s eyes - he does not move, or even open his own eyes.
Perhaps she will swoop down again. This time he won’t run. While he is dead, he thinks, at least he will not have these memories.
He says nothing, which isn’t altogether strange - and she thinks nothing of it. The fact that he does not fight back against her is odd, but it only sets her more on edge. She can’t shake the feeling that she is diving headfirst into a trap - maybe she’ll die here, actually truly die, and no one will know. Maybe there will be something left of her to find, or maybe there won’t and there will just be the horrible betrayal of her absence, as if she would just walk away from everything and everyone she loved in these mountains.
Mazikeen fears losing them all so much but do they know that? Will they get a chance to learn that she would never be taken from them willingly? Some mistakes do not need to be made again.
This desolation for a fate that isn’t even set mixes with that steadfast stubbornness of hers and it all feeds the anger and fear driving her.
Gale takes to the skies on feathered wings, not shifting into anything particularly dangerous (though he had been just this pegasus when he had beaten her in the Alliance - so her guard is hardly down). He does not immediately leave Hyaline and she watches in frustration as he tumbles down again.
When Gale lands back on the mountain she is not far behind, keeping the dragon shape and landing with a heavy thud - aiming to collide with his form again and pin him down on the ground like a dog with a baby rabbit.
This time, she finds her voice and it shakes with her fury and the torrent of emotions behind it. “Why can’t you just leave us alone!” She bellows at him as she tries to dig her talons into his skin. The sensation of it makes her sick to her stomach, hurt and horrible memories rising up and burn her throat, but she does not dare show any more signs of weakness by recoiling from her own actions.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
The shadow that Mazikeen should cast is destroyed by her incandescent fury, and even if Gale had bothered to open his eyes, there would have been no way to know she was following after him so closely. One moment he is in cold darkness, tormented by nauseating memories, and the next moment Mazikeen is pinning him against the mountainside.
The brindle stallion can feel where each of her sharp talons dig into his navy hide, and though Gale draws in on himself in agony, he does not otherwise attempt to free himself. The lightning strains against his grasp, but he does not heal himself. No more magic. No more magic.
No more magic. Gale repeats the phrase to himself, feeling the rapid pulsing of his heart, and the way the blood seeps from the gashes in his skin that the white dragon’s talons have torn deep into his flesh. She does not stop, bellowing a question meant for a monster that no longer inhabits his body.
He’d met Malik, told him of the Curse breaking, and in all his fretting about what might happen afterwards, never once had it occurred to Gale that Mazikeen wouldn’t believe the curse broken. Yet as she screams loudly enough that he can feel the pain in his ears, Gale realizes that what he knows (and what he has slowly begun to remember) of the Curse makes this just the sort of thing the creature would attempt.
“It’s m–” His voice chokes off, the lightning attempting to use his distraction to flicker down his sides and neck and belly to heal where the dragon has clawed him. But he catches it, tucking it back with the rest and leaving no space for darkness in its absence.
“It’s me.” He tries again, his voice muffled by the snow and the effort it takes to speak with a dragon pinning him to the mountainside. “It’s not…” He speaks with each quick exhale, knowing she has no reason to believe him. “It’s me,” inhale, “so kill me,” inhale, “or get off.”
Mazikeen snarls at his words, the markings on her scales burning a little brighter. Malik had told her, had been convinced, but it was not so easy for her. The Curse has pretended to be Gale before, back in the beginning. Back when they were both busy making unbelievably stupid decisions.
The familiar voice, the accent different than what she had become accustomed to, and the words it carries are not enough. She notices how he does not heal but that is not so terribly strange - the wounds are still active, she has not moved. And she quickly decides that she will not move either. Mazikeen is so far beyond doing anything he tells her to, so she ignores both of the options given.
Her claws do not dig any deeper but they don’t retract - she remains still, coiled and tense and so stressed she’s sure she could combust from the pressure of it at any moment now.
The large head of this dragon tilts downwards, focusing her wrath-filled stare on his face. Her next words are not shouted but they are undeniably angry still, harsh words barked out. “What did you say to Malik to get him to believe you? How did you convince my son?”
My son, because Gale did not deserve to lay any claim to the children they shared.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Gale can feel the wet rattle of each shallow breath, and knows that at least one of her claws have punctured his lung. That will kill him eventually, but not while she clenches her talons firmly, refusing his demands entirely.
He breathes out, and is not surprised to see a spray of red on the snow in front of him this time, crimson droplets so bright against the white snow. It looks almost pretty, Gale thinks, finding that his thoughts have gone soft around the edges, as blurred and indistinct as the white dragon that looms over him, refusing to either kill him or let him be.
“Still…” Another breath, a deeper rouging of the snow, and he smiles deliriously. “So stubborn.” He can feel himself slipping, unsure exactly what he’d been holding on to, thinking it would be much more fun to just let it go. Lightning flickers from his half-closed eyes, bringing him back to wakefulness with a painful jolt.
No more magic.
He forces his blue eyes open, focused on the orange ones overhead. Eyes that he’d torn out, Gale remembers with a sick twist to his stomach, and swallowed before devouring her heart. Her words are not a roar this time, but she is no closer to believing him than when she’d been snarling. Even with his hazy vision, he can see the wrath in her eyes, hear the fury when she claims her son.
Taking deeper breaths means pressing further against the talons that pierce his navy skin, but he steels himself and gives an answer with each exhale. “That I don’t remember it. That it’s all blackness. That someone killed it for good.” By now there is no white at all in the snow around his mouth, and his eyes are hardly more than electric blue slits as he breathes out the last of the explanation, the paradox to the black magic of the Curse that had finally destroyed it. “White magic.”
She should have guessed how hearing his answer to her question about Malik would deepen her rage - imagining her son standing face-to-face with Gale. Her vision goes spotty with her anger and she barely registers those last few words. She digs her talons in a little deeper, but she is not consciously doing it. It’s like her tail curling behind her, a reaction of her body. Her words are a low rumble, snapping her sharp teeth close to his face - wanting to tear that stupid smile right off. “How fucking convenient that you don’t remember what you did to him.” What he did to all of them.
How easy of a trick this would be to make. Pretending not to remember, having that excuse.
The brightness of the red blood against the snow helps to bring her back into the present. It confuses her, and her attention focuses on the wounds she is causing, the ones that aren’t healing. She retracts her claws, lifting some of her weight off of him.
Mazikeen is not worried for him but she is confused and that feeling of being on-edge still has not eased up.
She does not move far, just enough so that her claws are not actively still causing wounds. So that she is standing in snow, smearing blood in the prints she leaves.
Suspicion is an icy chill down her spine. “Why aren’t you healing?”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Mazikeen clenches her talons tighter, but there is not enough air in Gale’s lungs for anything but a soft groan against the red snow. He can taste the blood on his lips when he inhales, and hear the furious rumble in the dragon’s voice as she leans closer.
The blood loss makes him delirious, a sensation that Gale has never experienced before. He has always healed before this point; his magic keeping him more than safe. He thinks: it is not so bad to be without magic. If he lets his mind go fuzzy, he can hardly even feel the pain. What she says next is wrong, so wrong that the absurdity of it makes him laugh.
It’s not a real laugh, just a single fast exhale and the barest twitch of his navy lips where they rest against the snow. That would be fucking convenient, if only it could remain true.
That he had done terrible things to Malik is not unexpected. Gale had seen far too much wariness in the boy’s eyes to suspect anything less, but he has thus far been spared the return of those memories. They’ll come eventually, he knows. They all will.
Gale is wondering how soon it will be, wondering exactly how long it will take for him to die, wondering if he will remember everything when waking or while in the nothingness before resurrection.
When Mazikeen pulls away, he feels the quick rivulets of blood from where her talons had pierced him, the missing weight registering a century-long millisecond later. Her voice sounds distorted, as though she is speaking from very far away. Or perhaps he is far away, falling down a dark cavern with no end while never moving at all. He can see the lightning where she is, shimmering in a familiar blue-white light, illuminating the world he’s slipping away from. It’s so much brighter there, where she is, but when he starts to reach for the lightning he remembers, speaking himself as he whispers:
“No more magic.” But he’s already dying, some part of him retorts, why continue to resist when the result will be the same? Wether he heals himself or dies, there will be magic, and the memories will return. There’s no escaping. He’d known that from the moment he’d chosen to come to Hyaline, just as he’d known that he would rather die than remember.
And yet it seems he is doubly cursed, for he cannot even die.
Mazikeen asks a question, and after a rattling breath, he finds himself repeating: “No more magic.” Another breath, and then another, because there’d not been enough air in the first, “When I use it the memories.” This time it takes a fourth breath, and the edges of his vision have begun to flicker with electric light. “The memories come back.”
“Coward.” She remembers spitting that word at the Curse when she was her other self, towards the end when she felt like she was burning and when the life she had made to trap themselves in Hyaline became a leash keeping her held back, keeping her tethered.
She hates these memories, hates that version of herself - the one without the love that drives her so fiercely.
And she hates that Gale has a way of avoiding the memories of what he has done. Like if he just does not think about them, it is like they do not exist. Mazikeen no longer carries the scars of their time together, not even the ones from her youth, but she still feels the weight of them.
Mazikeen does not know if this proves he is actually his old self or not but she continues to be unnerved as she stands there, watching someone she used to love die.
She could call for help, she could find someone to heal him, but he does not deserve such kindness. He should die and whatever guilt she might have once had over such thoughts had long since withered.
Mazikeen does not like to think that she is cruel, she knows there is a large heart in her chest - one she had gone so long denying. And yet, the dragon moves closer. Her scales are bright with burning orange cracks, and there’s such anger in her eyes. She fears getting lost in it, fears what she might do, but those worries feel so distant now. So far away from how she draws closer.
How she brings down one of her giant limbs, intending for her clawed foot to land on one of Gale’s legs and snap the bones there with the weight of her body. Her life, the warmth and happiness she has found here in Hyaline, feels so distant. She is cold despite the glowing ember horns that grow from her head, despite the way her entire body is fissured with firelight.
He will either die, or she will push him to the point of pain that he has no choice but to heal and, hopefully, remember why he is not welcome here anymore.
“You should have to suffer the memories just like the rest of us.”
Gale
