[private] i'll be back at it, bad habits die hard

[Gale]

@Ryatah

i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do ---------- i hope you dream of me Winter has been mild in the common lands, and horses stand alone or in small groups, grazing on the brown grasses or standing out of the wind to talk. He drifts through them, pausing now and again to pursue an intriguing worry or frustration, but never straying long from his pursuit. Gale wears the shape of something lean and tall, with legs having a few too many joints. A long nose trails the ground, and wide erect ears flicker every way in search of sounds. His quarry is not far ahead. He’d immediately recognized the glittering trail of the angel when he’d crossed it. Her scent grows stronger - had she lingered here perhaps, engaged in conversation. Ahead, a pale glow illuminates the winter bare branches of the trees along the river bank. “Ryatah,” he says, her name feeling somehow strange as he says it aloud for the first time. He shakes his head, dismissing the thought, and drawing closer to her, shifts into the more familiar shape of a brindled navy horse. The sharp claws of his winged forelimbs dig into the earth as he moves nearer still. At last he finds her where the rolling Riverlands meet the sweeping open land of the Field. She’s going somewhere and he appears in front of the glittering angel, cutting off her progress with a delighted smile. “Ryatah.” This time he says it more smoothly, and it comes more easily from his physical mouth than the shadowy thing he’d been a moment before. “Fancy finding you here.” GALE

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

Hyaline has seemed quieter since Gale left, though not exactly what she would describe as peaceful. It was more of a silent tension, like the kind that exists waiting between a flash of lightning and the rumble of thunder. It made her uneasy, as if the storm itself was brewing beneath her skin, only she couldn’t pinpoint the reasoning for it. Perhaps because she has seen this far too many times to know that the cursed stallion was not finished, that he would likely not be content with just Tephra, but because she did not know him well enough she had no way of predicting what his retaliation might be.

Restless in a way that she is unaccustomed to, she steals away from Hyaline, but not before telling Atrox that she intended to go to the river. Whether or not that was where she would end up she was unsure since she had a way of deviating from her intended plans, but something about the roar of rapids rushing over rock seemed better than this incessant buzzing happening in her head.

She is away from the actual river when Gale appears suddenly in front of her, with a smile on his face that is far too pleased and altogether unnerving. “Gale,” her usual friendly tone is somewhat clipped off by the nerves that he had rattled when he startled her, but she smooths it over with a slight smile. “Same could be said for you,” she comments idly, doing her best to hide the suspicion that shadowed her dark eyes, her glittering wings held close to her sides.

EVEN ANGELS HAVE THEIR WICKED SCHEMES

@ Gale

[Gale]

@Ryatah

i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do ---------- i hope you dream of me The smile Ryatah wears does not quite reach her eyes. Gale moves in closer, too close, and nearly runs his blue muzzle across the feathers of her wings. These he will rip off, he decides, and rip out the feathers to fall like snow. For now though, he pulls away and begins to circle her, considering. She is an angel. He’s not yet sure what that entails, but by the time he leaves the Riverlands he is certain he will. Healing, he thinks, and that ephemeral glow; wings and the incessant need to achieve martyrdom. The angel had saved Mazikeen from him once, and Gale means to be sure she does not have another chance to do so. He’s certain he can kill her, but he is not yet sure how difficult the task will be. Ryatah had been allowed to stay in Hyaline despite her lack of shifting, but Gale knows that the growing feral cat population in Hyaline is at least partially her fault. The touch of the Dark God on her no longer feels fresh though, and Gale wonders if Carnage will eventually come for him if he kills her. It would be worth it, he decides, to ensure that Mazikeen would remain dead once he’d finished with her. Still circling Ryatah, Gale has changed with each step, and by the time he stops in front of her, his equine shape is gone. Instead, he is something close to the quetzalcoatlus whose wings he often wears, with a scythe-like tail whose design he’d borrowed from Malik’s pet, Ripley. His head tilts curiously, the dim light shines on his elongated beak, long, pointed, and perfect for prying out a heart. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again.” He continues their earlier pleasantries, the words inaudible from his clicking beak and instead reaching her mind. GALE

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

He is after something, but she is not sure what.

She feels it when he is suddenly pressing into her space, close enough to smell the way Tephra—a scent she is all too familiar with, her home for so many years before she moved to Hyaline—clings to him. More than that though there is the strange energy that radiates from him, a thing her empathy is trying to grasp at but can’t seem to find anything tangible enough to hold onto. She has been stared at before, and is used to being studied; she did not consider herself to be anything remarkable, but even Carnage has admitted to her that he could not always predict her.

The way Gale looks at her though is unlike anything she has experienced.
He looks at her much in the way predator analyzes its prey, yet this is nothing like the cat-and-mouse game she has grown accustomed to playing over the years.

What a strange thing, to again realize that she would rather endure Carnage's anger a hundred times over than to face a devil she doesn't know.

By the time he has fully shifted she is no longer trying to pretend she is not on edge, her eyes catching the familiar tail that she recognized from Ripley and her offspring. She backs away from him, her steps slow and deliberate, and the golden glow from her halo catches the spark of fear that she struggles to keep from igniting in her eyes. “What do you want?” the question might have been blunt coming from anyone besides her, might have grown sharp with the fear that is coiling in her chest, but she has never known how to be anything other than soft. Her dark eyes try to hold his and tentatively she pushes forward a sense of calm, though she is sure the cursed creature before her either will not feel it or will lash out against it.

EVEN ANGELS HAVE THEIR WICKED SCHEMES

@ Gale

[Gale]

@Ryatah

i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do ---------- i hope you dream of me “Your power,” he replies, “whatever it is that makes you angelic.” He has only bits and pieces of it - glowing, wings, healing - but he wants it all. Now, at last, the opportunity to take it has presented itself. Yet still he proceeds with caution. Gale does not yet know what being an angel might mean as far as abilities she might wield against him, but he knows for certain that she is god-touched and this is a terrible risk. Worth it though, he decides, and moves forward even as Ryatah tries to move away, matching her stride for stride as he does and making no allowance for his longer gait. Closer to her now than he’d been before, the navy creature must pull back his beaked head to meet her gaze and position himself for the strike. He’s nearly perfected it on smaller prey, the puncturing of flesh and bone and lung in a single movement, allowing him to wrest the heart from where it beats in her chest. If he listens hard he can hear it, pattering away rapidly in a way that betrays her soft voice. Focused on the quick beat, Gale is startled by a strange sensation of nothingness. The absence of emotion in the calmness that Ryatah spreads around him causes a flicker of Wrongness to dance along his spine beside the lightning. Gale narrows his blue eyes, shifts his head slightly to left, and plunges his sharp beak deep into her pale chest, feeling the delicious crunch and slide of a breaking body. GALE

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

“My power?” she repeats, confusion on her face. She has never considered herself powerful. Though she could do far more now than she ever has been able to do, she weighs herself against those like Carnage, or even Eight and Anaxarete, and knows that she is weak by comparison. She had nothing that would allow her to burn down lands, nothing that could possibly invoke fear into anyone else. That, to her, is power — fear. The kind of things that could make another quiver and bend, and she is only light and stardust.

She thinks there is a misunderstanding, that Gale must be equating her being an archangel to being close to the magic Carnage possesses. But she is nothing like him, has nothing about her that is worth taking. And besides, if he really wanted it so badly, he could simply have it. She knew, undoubtedly, that she is not worthy of being an angel. If he wanted her powers, he could have them.

“I don’t really think you want it—” she starts to protest, but the words grow stuck in her throat, frozen as he spears her chest.

The blood that blooms across her skin is bright, as it always is when set against that porcelain white, glistening beneath her golden glow. Instinctively she tries to pull back, tries to teleport herself away from him but all she can manage is a burst of blinding light. But even that stutters and flickers, fading as fast as the blood that spills from her chest.

She sinks to the ground into a pool of blood and stardust, and she is gone long before her body can even try to heal the gaping wound left on her chest.

She is familiar with dying, but it’s always different each time.

There is relief at first, when the black settles in and the pain fades. The fear ebbs away, and instead of fighting she sinks into the dark, lets it consume her. She knows what comes next, knows that she will wake up on the shores of the afterlife and thinks she will be able to make her way back to the living. There is no explanation for that confidence—only a bone-deep sense that she possesses the power to resurrect herself. That she will be able to make her way back, as she has before.

So she waits for the afterlife.
She waits for the dark to disappear and for those familiar shores to show themselves, for the strange sounds she associates with there, and the peculiar sense of peace that it brings.

Only, there is nothing.
The dark does not lift but instead seems to grow in weight, expanding and stretching infinitely. There are no sounds, only a silence that builds in her head, crawls inside her bones and sits there like an anchor. A ghost of an emotion—panic—begins to swell, because this is dark unlike any she has ever known. It is not like being blind and surrendering herself to her other senses, because there is nothing for her other senses to find—no sounds, no smells, nothing to touch or feel.

“Gail?” she tries, hopeful that maybe she is caught in the crossfire of a game between the death priestess and Carnage, because that is at least a game she knows how to play. But the dark swallows her voice in such a way that she may as well have not spoken at all. It echoes inside of her mind, and she tries again. And again. She calls for Atrox, for Firion, and out of sheer desperation even Carnage, but every time her voice is thrown back to her, never reaching the dark that surrounds her.

She is trapped in this black, soundless void, untethered and adrift, and no heart to guide her back.

EVEN ANGELS HAVE THEIR WICKED SCHEMES

tldr Gale killed Ryatah and now she's trapped in a black soundless void with (currently) no way to resurrect herself.