[private] consider how to find a place to stand | nashua

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you Despite the contentment he feels, wandering in the sunshine with his brother, something less pleasant lurks just at the back of his mind. Gale is reluctant to reach for it, and finds that if he pretends he does not See it, it remains still. Only when he peers closer does it begin to flex and grow, and Gale had well learned his lesson about leaving well enough alone with the Monsters. So he ignores it, and instead focuses on a very similar prospective future, one borrowed from Nashua’s mind’s eye and enhanced with what Gale can only assume his children will look like (the boy exactly like him, the girl just like Mazikeen). Gale cannot recall the sounds of his own childhood, but there had been running and jumping and swimming and flying through the red canyons of Loess, and he’s sure that he, Eyas, and Tiercel had not been too large a burden on their parents. Not until Gale had died, anyway, and there his memory trail grows more somber, so he abandons the path instead to listen to what Nashua asks. Does it bother him that the children will be shifters? “No.” he answers truthfully. Before Mazikeen, it might have. With anyone other than Mazikeen, it would have. But they have inherited her magic, the magician had reassured Gale - their shifting was not like his shifting. For the life of him, Gale cannot recall why his type of shifting is not something he’d wanted the children to get. The memory is just out of reach, at the edge of the shadowy mass in the back of his mind. He has been quiet after his single word answer for some time, but long pauses are not unusual for Gale, and his blue legs have continued to carry him along the river path. He is glad they didn’t get his shifting, that he is sure of. Something (something dark , something stretching from that shadowy space) tells him that should be a relief, and so Gale smiles, as though a happy thought has just crossed his mind. And then one does, because the pair of them round a curve in the path and ahead of them stretches a smooth stretch of flat land beside the river, one that looks like the perfect place to run. “Last one to that log’s a rotten egg!” Gale calls over his shoulder, having already broken into a run. A head start is the only way he might beat Nashua in a flat-out race, Gale knows, and there’s laughter in his blue eyes as he meets the chestnut’s, who he is sure knows as well. @[Nashua]