Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Bolder shifts quickly, joining Gale on the rock in the shape of a red-tailed hawk with the suggestion of becoming a fish. The brindle creature is fond of swimming in the clear lake, even though the depths are chilly year round.
“What about a whale shark?” Gale asks, and sends the boy the image of the enormous shape he’d first taken while battling Mazikeen. That will make a colossal splash. It will also be large enough for Gale to find if him he hits the water with lungs that still require air. He is not sure why this occurs to him, or why he thinks it might slightly perturb him if the boy died, but he pushes it aside to answer Bolder’s question.
“No,” answers the Curse, which is true for the host he wears as well. “I learned it as an adult.” The Curse had learned as Wyrm, and Gale while on Islandres. “It runs in the family, but it was Carnage who gave it back to me, Carnage and the Monsters from the dark times.”
Gale had Looked Carnage in the eye, and there was no recovering from such a slight. His fury festered, merged with the darkness, and pulled out the last remnants of the Curse that had felled Wolfbane and been felled in return. That is what inhabits Gale now, that thing and all the emotions that a creature can feel, and everything positive he’d been able to steal from Mazikeen.
The Cursed creature is no longer quiet certain what it is anymore, but it does know that it had come to shifting later even than Bolder has. There is hope for him still, says the appraising look he gives his nephew’s shift. With a ripple of feathers, Gale becomes a hawk as well.
There is no blood or death or chaos in this, and some part of him is aware of that even as he goads the boy into a race, taking to the sky and soaring up. The adrenaline of flight is enough, and the swoop is his belly when he flips once, twice, three times. The telepathy that never seems to work with Mazikeen tells the boy it’s nearly time, and then Gale is diving down toward the water far below, and preparing to shift while also keeping a careful eye on the boy beside him.
|
Gale
