Gale
started under neon lights, then it all got dark
i only know how to go too far
Gale lays in the shallow sea and overhead, the cerulean sky is shining. The soft white clouds that skim across the blue surface are blurred and refracted by the water, and his equine eyes take a moment to adjust to the saline. It is a beautiful summer day in the world above the water, with a gentle breeze frothing the peaks of the low waves.
When he’d been pulled beneath the waves last night, the brindle stallion had not expected to return. At least, not like he has, not waking and feeling completely himself. He had been sure that the Curse (writhing and cackling at Gale’s terror in being drowned) would break free and consume him, a pattern that has been repeated now for the better part of a decade.
Instead, Gale is free.
(He does not look too closely at the place within him where it dwells, because there are enough oily shadows at the edges of his vision. He knows those shadows, knows how they grow thicker and darker, knows they will eventually swallow him.)
For now.
The tide recedes as the morning turns to afternoon, and overhead schools of fish drift silently by and gulls wing their way through the sky
The navy stallion does not recognize the shape he has taken but appreciates the way it is suited for the water with dark eyes, gills, and no useless ears. He is waiting for the shadows to overtake him, yet the only darkness that comes is in the slowly clouding sky. Rain will fall this afternoon, promises those clouds, and Gale weighs the benefits of remaining beneath the water for the storm.
In the end its the lightning that draws him out, tugging at a part of himself that he does not recognize. It is not a Cursed part but rather something entirely his own, and it feels as odd as though he’d grown a fifth leg. No, he thinks, it feels more as if the lightning is a limb he’d always had and only just now discovered.
Gale rises wearing the shape of an iridescent navy Baltian, with a snow white spinal fin that runs from atop his earless poll to the tip of his white frilled shark tail and hind fins. The bottom of the white clouds have begun to turn blue grey, and Gale’s brilliant blue eyes seek the lightning that blows in with clouds darker still. The winds that carry them ruffle his mane, which as it dries turns once more to the horse hair he was born with.
By the time the tide is out entirely he is nothing more than a blue and gold stallion, standing on one of the outer shoals of the Ischian archipelago. His long white mane flutters in the wind as it dries, and Gale tastes salt when he licks his parched lips. He is desperately thirsty and waits with his attention focused on the sky, heedless to anything else around him.
@ Beyza
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