Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Gale no longer keeps the white feathers.
He had in the beginning. He’d tucked them into a hollow log, protected from the wind and the rain and the darkness. They’d been so bright to his enhanced vision, as pale as Mazikeen herself, with a few even black-barred like her dark hair.
Each time he added a feather, Gale had thought of her. She had gained her shifting back, the feathers tell him, and she is well enough to come here.
She still cares enough to come here, he thinks at first. But as time passed, and the feathers grew more numerous, his thoughts have changed. She comes to make sure she is still sane, to watch him not for his sake, but for the sake of others he might harm. She comes because she pities him. She’s not even coming anymore, he’s just finding feathers.
The doubt builds slowly, for Gale is at heart a hopeful creature, but the dark tendrils of the Curse are relentless. Eyas is watching him now too, not watching out for him, but watching him the way they had watched their father. Gale has closed his eyes to her, and to the rest of those who might pry though his Sight, preferring his solitude
When he’d found the feather a few months ago, Gale had blown it into the air with a flap of his wings, sending it back off into the dark sky where perhaps the ocean will carry it away from the black sand shore.
When he finds one today, he becomes enraged.
At the very same moment, he feels joy.
Even Gale, with his very late start at understanding and labeling emotions, knows that this is abnormal. He’d had two reactions to the same thing, two very different reactions. The sort of thing that might happen when one is Cursed and of many minds, and the familiar cold reality of it sends a chill down Gale’s pale spine.
Though he takes several long breaths, there remains an odd sensation in his chest. Neither the joy nor the rage had truly felt like Gale’s own emotions. But sure one had to have been his, for he still feels like himself and shouldn’t himself have feelings?
Gale’s weak healing has never been of much help with self-induced migraines, and when he finds himself heading that direction, he instead acts on instinct and takes to the air, shifting into a shape that requires his entire attention to hold steady.
He’s mastered many other shapes, but this is his first attempt at an eagle. It is similar to an osprey, but the white-tailed eagle on which he models his shape is far larger than the black osprey that flies beside him across the dark waves. Gale’s feathers are black as well, reverting without thought to the native colors of his homeland even though the true eagle would be deep brown.
Gale flies without knowing where he is going, focused entirely on learning this new form. Erne watches for him, the osprey’s sharp eyes taking in the world below as the summer winds carry them east. Deciding to test out his landing ability in this large avian shape, Gale spirals downward toward the bare tip of an old pine. He has to make a second, then a third pass, underestimating his wingspan both times. But when he lands, it is graceful enough that Erne gives a distant trill of approval, one that Gale hears only in his mind.
He closes his eye for just a moment, and when he reopens them he can see every detail in the world around him. The lake ahead of him ripples, and Gale thinks for a moment that it is almost like the sea, trapped and weakened by being so far inland. He is just wondering if the lake has tides when he realizes where he must be.
Gale grows very still, and shifts his coloring back to that of a normal white-tailed eagle, hoping that perhaps he will pass for a normal bird out for a flight, and not a shifter who’s arrived uninvited into the very last place he’d wanted to be.
@[Mazikeen]
Did you order this novel?
|
