Gale
started under neon lights, then it all got dark
i only know how to go too far
It is the changes to the world that finally rouse the magician.
He takes a step forward, and the sand around him crumbles. The tide has nearly buried the navy blue horse, but he emerges and shakes himself clean in a shower of black sand. Time has passed but he had not counted the days, and as he stares out at the water he wonders how long it has been since he had come to Islandres
Erne still circles, high overhead, a silent sentry above the monster.
Though still, he has not been idle, and the blue eyes with which he traces the uneven horizon of Tephra are both bright and brittle, cobwebbed like broken glass and illuminated by sparking lightning. He has been playing and replaying a thousand possibilities in ways he’d never before thought possible. Winding and unwinding time, spinning and unspinning reality, powerful in ways of magic far beyond his wildest dreams. Each reality always seems to end the same: with his eventual death.
All except for one, the one where he is most prepared. He must reduce risk, if he wishes to survive, he must remove any chances he might slip up and make himself vulnerable. Though he has torn out his heart, he knows now that he’d have been better to destroy it. Instead it remains, just out of reach, beyond the grasp even of magic.
He searches for it nonetheless, crossing the newly flooded southern sea, circling the frozen northern island, walking the silver cove, weaving through the redwoods. Nowhere.
Gale is devouring a rocksheep when the solution comes to him, and he snarls at the obviousness of it. Shoving the partially eaten body down the side of the Nerenian cliff, he spreads white wings and sails south toward Hyaline.
If he cannot destroy his heart, he will destroy the woman who it protects.
She is the one that destroys him in every future.
He must destroy her first, leave her in that endless void he’d discovered when he’d killed the angel.
He lands high in the still-snowy mountains, allowing time for the young stallion who patrols these borders to come at the sound of Craft and Anatomy’s alarm, already on edge from the quaking earth and rising sea. Gale smiles, and can tell from the way that Malik winces that much of the magic he’d placed on the boy had come undone. Well, he supposes, that is to be expected. He’d not been a very good magician yet when he’d taken away Malik’s memories.
Malik refuses to tell him where his sister is, so Gale pries it from his mind, moving the unwilling colt with the bone bending he’d mastered long ago. Viszla is as easily controlled, and Gale laments that he’d not been fortunate enough to stumble across Bolder as he made his way down toward the lake with a child stumbling to either side. The pair of them are struggling, eyes rolling despite the way thier limbs carry them along and part of him is pleased at their refusal to be cowed.
That must be his blood in their veins, he thinks.
It’s almost a shame he’s going to kill them.
Almost.
Where the forest stretches down to meet the lake on its eastern shore, there is an outcropping of granite on which nothing but lichen grows. The rock face is too sheer, and on nights like these, the full moon reflects from the water and then to the rock face with a nearly white glow.
It is there that he cuts their throats with a scythe-like tail, just as Mazikeen steps into the clearing*.
Their blood spatters crimson on the bright stone, and Gale turns to face their mother with a smile. Even if they are not truly dead (given their heritage, they likely aren’t) he knows how the sight will affect the white mare, and watches her face with eager eyes as he hears the low thud of their bodies striking the ground.
He steps carelessly over Malik’s body with the hard scaled foot of a dragon, and the boy’s left horn gives beneath his weight with a sharp snap. Gale is focused only on the orange-eyed Mazikeen. He is going to kill her next and this time, he is going to make very certain that she stays dead.
@Mazikeen
|
|
*perfect timing brought to you by magic
|
