[open] chivalry fell upon his sword

[Gale]

Gale idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on his sword. innocence died screaming; honey, ask me, I should know Her gratitude bewilders him, but he only stares and does not respond. He only waits for her answer, counting the individual hairs beneath her left eye, and when she gives him a name it is not one he knows. He could know it, the lightning that flickers across Gale’s temple whispers, if he Looked. So he does, he uses the first of the magics he had known, the one he’d been born with, passed down by blood for generations. Just a Peek, a Glance through her eyes at the wife of whom she speaks and nothing more. He is a child to this lightning creature beside him, Gale realizes as he settles back into his own eyes; he is as insignificant as an oak to the ocean. The gratitude from earlier. He understands it now. If Cordis had not succeeded, there’d never been hope for him. He blinks, the unfamiliar emotion roiling uncomfortably within him. She asks who he tried to bring back, and he is buzzing with too much electricity to answer with anything but the truth. “A boy. My son.” A flash of lightning passes from one lip to the other, and the child’s name does quite not make it past them. Malik. He lives, still. Somewhere far away, Gale knows, so far that he can no longer sense Malik. But not so far Gale could not sense his death, if it came. That he knows as sure, as surely as he knows that something had not been right, that something about the boy had fractured, split away into something new. Malik considers it a Companion, still, but Gale is not so certain. He has succeeded in thinking of other things, and for a time he is contentedly lost in them. As contentedly as he can ever be, at least, and that lasts until the crackling of electricity brings him back to the present, to the silver creature in front of him. To the talk of necromancy, to what the lightning cannot do. “I was trying to get to Islandres,” he announces, opening (reopening?) the conversation after an unknowable amount of time. “I end up here, or in the Meadow or over there -” He’s gesturing with a white wing toward the rest of the Common Lands. “I’d heard of places vanishing, eaten up by magic, but I never thought I’d see it happen.” @Cordis