at the ready [Gale]

[Gale]

Gale run away with me-- lost souls and reverie running wild and running free   The air changes somewhere between Tephra and Taiga. Gale is not certain of his exact location (having never been this far north before) but he is certain that he is headed the right way. The warm spring air of his near-tropic home grows cooler, then colder. By the time he lands on the southern tip of the Icicle Isle, Gale is beginning to wish he had never lost his winter coat. (In truth, he cannot even remember the last time he had grown one – had it been as a child, in Loess?). The name is fitting, he supposes. Overhead, a faint cry is Erne’s agreement, and Gale resist the temptation to cast his blue eyes upward to where he knows the osprey circles. Erne sends his intention to hunt for ‘cold fish that don’t know how to keep watch for a true hunter’, leaving Gale alone to face the frozen island – and its inhabitants. He looks around, his bright eyes curious. There is snow here, even in the spring, but with it too is the smell of old ash. He had heard of the burning of the Isle, but he had naively assumed it to be a story of the long-ago past. Then he turns around, and finds a stranger standing very close. “Oh sorry!” He exclaims, stumbling backwards in his haste to put space between them. “Totally didn’t even see you there. I was just, uh, looking for a place to land, I guess?” Gale very much hopes she’ll admit to a power like invisibility or teleporting to explain her sudden appearance behind him. If it were to be his own lack of attention…The brindle stallion coughs, and shakes his horned head a few times. “So…I’m Gale. What’s your name?” @[Jesla]