Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Gale tries not to think, but in the silence that falls between them it is difficult for him to do anything else. His memory is like a line of clouds along a distant horizon, and as Casimira wonders if she is as much a villain as he, Gale’s blue eyes skim the tops of those clouds. They are dense until Hyaline, as thick as thunderclouds. A wind (no, the Curse, he thinks) had pulled them thin, leaving the clouds nothing more than wisps of vapor. He can tell when he came back to himself, when the clouds that are his memories once more hold a substantial shape against the horizon. But everything between is gone.
Almost everything. There are shadows between, shadows that the lightning threatens to illuminate.
Gale closes his eyes, and when he reopens them, Casimira is telling him that the shadows had lasted for years.
Gale smiles, but the expression is as bitter as it is faint, and accompanied by a shake of his head. The action sends a cascade of water down his already soaked skin, adding a physical layer of cold to the chill that feels permanently set in his bones.
“Years.” He repeats. How much damage could he have wrought in that time? Enough to merit the reaction that Casimira had greeted him with. She has lost her scales, Gales realizes belatedly; does she seem him as less of a threat now?
“I remember some things since then,” he tells her, because he does have those few memories of Tephra, and of Islandres, and of watching the sun return to the sky in Hyaline. But since then? “I am, no I was Cursed.” Magic is not an excuse for his behavior, but it had been the catalyst. “I have not been…myself these past years.”
@Casimira
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Gale
