[private] brought the dark to the light

[Gale]

Gale started under neon lights, then it all got dark i only know how to go too far Dawn is just coming to Islandres, replacing the starry black eastern sky with one of molten gold. Though the water will be turquoise in full light, this morning the waves are still charcoal grey, foaming with white where they climb the obsidian sand. Farther and farther they climb, until they brush along the half buried body of a horse in the sand. The touch of the cool spring waves does not wake him immediately. Gale is lost, his mind somewhere between the endless Void and nightmares. The self-healing with which the pegasus had been born has always kept the smallest piece of him alive, immune from the infestation of the Curse that had struck him at the start of the Eclipse. Losing himself had been a progressive thing, and every now and then Gale would wake - fully himself - with no memory at all of his recent life. Those moments (meeting Sabal, wandering in the woods, blinking for what he’d have sworn was a half-second only to find Mazikeen mid-sentence instead of asleep beside him) had been few and far between. As he stands, shaking off the sand, Gale finally recognizes them for what they were. Moments when the Curse inside him had been distracted or weakened. Weakened like it is now, reduced to something not unlike Gale so often was - a shadow in the back of the mind. It will return, Gale knows. It will come back, and there is not anything he can do to stop it, only wait for it to happen. He feels drained, Gale decides, as though his body has been fighting many battles. It is more than physical, he finds; the exhaustion is deeper than that. Gale does not remember the explosion of light, or the way his very existence was twisted about by the dark god. He knows only that he goes to pull his wings tighter to his sides to comfort himself just to find that they are not there. He is nothing but a horse, each bit of his magic stripped away. His back feels uncomfortably cool even on this warm spring day, void as it is of the white spinal mane. He shivers, but remains standing at the water’s edge, enjoying the sunrise as he waits for what he knows is inevitable.