[private] until the night turns

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you Mazikeen greets Nashua as well, and the feigned domestication in her voice brightens Gale’s already easy grin. He is not at all certain how this meeting will play out, but he does so enjoy Mazikeen’s quick shifting from polite to predator. Perhaps he will have the chance to see it play out. Amused, and thus slightly more relaxed than he;d been a moment ago, Gale looks toward the pale mare that Nasuha had brought with him. It is Noel, as he’d suspected, Bolder’s mother. She is soft and white, and for a moment he considers the possibility of collecting his brothers’ women and seeing how quickly Mazikeen might turn them all red. He smiles at the thought, his eyes warm with delight, and then turns back to Nashua. His brother’s face is far less stoney than that of his mate, and there is a curl to his lip that Gale recognizes from his own reflection. Nashua is furious, and the black rage in his green eyes is everything that Gale has wished for. He holds himself well despite it, the words civil despite the tone, and if the Curse were the sort to admire self-control rather than scoff at it, Nashua would be most worthy of it. Noel too, he admits, since she is neither sobbing nor screaming. But he is not the type of thing that finds strength in others an endearing trait (except, he thinks, for Mazikeen beside him), and so he only wonders how long they will hold themselves together. “Unharmed?” He cuts in, with enough amusement in his tone to suggest that the time for fetching him home unharmed was eons past. He watches them both - hoping for a flinch, a jerk, a reaction - but then Nashua mentions a predecessor, and Gale pauses. Most of the Curse had burnt up in Loess, and the bits of it that remain are mostly scorched and unreliable. He does, however, retain some memories of the white-faced mare that Nashua pictures. Her name and the banishment he no longer recalls, but the latter is no surprise. “I’d forgotten,” he says, shrugging as though that is the end of such things. “And Mazikeen has grown rather fond of Bolder, so I am sure you’ll understand us keeping him a while longer. I’m sure that if he wants to return to Taiga he’ll do so.” Perhaps he can ask the lightning bird to set the trees on fire so there’s nothing to go back to. Gale is also - for reasons he no longer tries to understand - rather fond of the boy, and has no intentions of giving him up so easily. Nashua and Noel had done rather well with him until this point, but it is always best to learn the breadth and depth of one’s power while young and malleable.

@Mazikeen