Gale
10-03-2021, 11:07 AM
Gale opens his blue eyes to a familiar scene.
Thick clouds obscure much of the eastern sunrise, but even in the murky light the land around him shines. The grass on which he lays is thick and orange, and every shade between violet and teal is represented in the leafy canopy overhead. A chorus of birds greet the dawn, and the smell of blossoming citrus is thick in the humid air.
He has always enjoyed summer on Island Resort, and as he languidly rises to his feet, he is ready for another lazy day to follow the preceding half-decade of the same.
His reflection is the first indication that something is wrong.
Rather than the short, spiraled horns he expects, he bears instead a pair of sharply pointed antlers. The stallion turns his head curiously, first to the left and then to the right, trying to get a better view of them in the rippling waters of the island's central lake.
“Erne?” He calls, but his yellow-eyed companion is nowhere to be found. Perhaps he should find Ruinam, he thinks, perhaps the island’s leader will know what has happened, or maybe Isilya, the magician queen in Tephra.
Gale frowns.
His eyes roll back in his head, and the brindle stallion collapses.
---
The Curse forces its blue eyes open, only to close them immediately at the onslaught of noonday sun.
Its host’s sensitivity to light is not the worst symptom of magical overuse, but that knowledge makes it no less bothersome. It rolls to its side, propped up on a winged elbow, and immediately regrets the decision. Nausea roils in its belly, and a lancet of pain darts opposite the lightning and up his spine.
His host is becoming ever more difficult to kill, and the magic that the Curse must use to do it becomes increasingly complicated. Once more, it thinks, perhaps twice if luck is on his side.
With eyes closed and blue ears pinned against its head, the exhausted magician attempts to keep the bloody contents of its stomach down. Unable to rid itself of the Self-Sustenance that it had consumed, meals it consumes often make it ill in a way that its Self Healing refuses to mend. Why the magics combine in such a way is a mystery, some combination of ill-wishing and the indescribable, but it has been happening with ever increasing frequency.
---
By the time the blue stallion opens his eyes, red has begun to blossom in the western sky.
Hadn’t it just been dawn, Gale thinks? Where had the day gone? He frowns, the expression pensive but not deeply troubled. He often loses a lot of time in thought, he reminds himself. But then, why can he not recall what he had been thinking of?
He takes a long breath and a step forward. The front foot he puts down on the earth is not the white-stockinged foot he had expected, but instead was an odd winged claw. Lifting it up to inspect it, Gale sees that the left is marked with a crimson V shaped marking. Now where had that come from? It’s not dirt or a stain, he finds, but red feathers, extending down from the wrist of his wing, the same trail that blood from a bitten wrist might drip down. How interesting, he thinks, and shakes out the odd forelimb.
A heavy blow fells him.
It hadn’t come from anywhere. It was simply there where it had not been an instant ago, and then Gale was sent flying. He spins and tumbles, disoriented and terrified. The blows come from nowhere and everywhere, but when he tries to flinch away he finds that there is nothing left of himself to draw in at all. He’s nothing, in a nowhere place, and the whole universe is black and empty.
---
The Curse breathes heavily.
This time, it does not try to open its eyes. Instead Gale’s sides rise higher, inhaling the cool night air. It waits, and breathes, and does not try to move.
Dawn comes again, and again. Gale’s brindle body lays very still in the orange grass. The colors around him ripple from orange to pink to soft mint green as the monster gathers its strength.
The bones of the host’s body feel somehow insubstantial. As if they might crumble if he stands on them. Flexing the crumbs of what he’d stolen from Wishbone, he confirms that they’re solid, but he still cannot force himself up. Instead he opens his eyes, so he might look up at the stars overhead.
The constellations tell him summer has begun, though the temperate seasons are much the same here on the black sands. Spring is gone. His Empathy is not, and as he has lain still, some has leaked through the shadows imprisoning it, and he thinks for a moment of a golden-striped boy and a black-feathered one, and then of a girl: a better daughter than the first one.
When it recognizes the path that Empathy and its newly deceased host have begun to lead it down, the creature snarls. Shaking the long white mane along his neck, he rises quickly to his feat. He has not felt such things since he sealed his heart away inside Ciri over a year ago, and the ghost of it that now drifts across his mind sends a shiver down his spine.
They do not belong inside the thing that the Curse has become, and it rattles about in the hollows of his not-quite-soul with the other good things it stores away there. Weaknesses. They will grow, he knows, building atop each other into the memories that he’d done away with. He’d torn them out once before, and knows it is best to rid himself of this pesky ability before he grows another heart.
He’d meant to seal it away in a dead man. Except his encounter in the Pampas had not ended like he had expected, and instead he’d returned to the island with the Empathy intact, and collapsed on the shore when he’d arrived, worn down by its constant presence.
Falling asleep on the shore had allowed the body he wears to heal through regeneration, and as it always does, the soul of the brindle host heals as well with the Curse not there to prevent it.
In each incarnation he is equally oblivious to the passing of the last half decade, and each time the Curse must kill him again.
This time though, he remains, lurking at the very edges of the Curse’s awareness, just out of the reaches of its Sight. Gale is powerless, unsubstantial, far from consciousness. But he is still there. Still a stubborn stain on the host that even magic cannot remove.
At least, not the magic that he has now.
But what about new magic?
Better magic?
Slowly, he rolls to his side.
No nausea. He rises to his feet (two clawed, two hooves), and the pulse in his head becomes sharper.
Not sharp enough to keep him down, just enough to aggravate him.
Where might he get better magic?
“Djinni,” he says softly, and she appears, damp and forest green. The color fades, returning to her naturally rosey hue, and she meets the boy’s gaze with unusually hard brown eyes. She is not accustomed to being summoned, and it shows in the way she inspects the stallion in front of her.
He is taller than she remembers, with a massive scar across his neck that glows softly, the wound revealing the same dun markings that Djinni had inherited from her father. This boy is not her favorite descendent; she far prefers his younger brother and cousins. But he is a descendent nonetheless, and so she retains some vague sort of interest in his doings. Less so, of course, as they have become more violent. Though Djinni is not opposed to getting her hooves dirty, such brutality is better left to the less civilized.
Gale is looking rather worse for the wear, with dark hollows beneath his eyes and a brittleness to his blue eyes that brings to mind the great northern glaciers. That affliction from the other side of his family, she thinks, and the result of meddling with Monsters and Gods. She had tried to warn him, she thinks, had tried to caution the thing within him. But some things even she cannot control.
He asks her for new magic now, and eventually Djinni agrees.
Agrees that she will try, anyway, keeping her composure even as Gale describes what he will do were she to fail.
Time passes.
How much time she is not certain - an hour? a fortnight? - but when she opens her eyes at last, the rain is falling in sheets around them, and the pale midmorning sun is hidden behind grey veils. Gale’s white hair is plastered to his neck, but his eyes now burn brightly, reminding her of blue flames in the dim light.
“Your wish has been granted.” She tells him. Golden sand falls to the black below, and she is gone. Gale curses and reaches after her, but finds only empty air. He tries to find her with magic and finds…
Nothing.
She has Hidden herself from him, granting a wish of her own, and the cursed creature realizes that he has used the genie’s magic for the last time. He’ll have to kill her when he finds her, he decides, to be sure he has it all. But that will have to wait; he has more pressing matters.
Like ridding himself of this Empathy.
And learning this new Power, the one that flickers like lightning in his veins.
Thick clouds obscure much of the eastern sunrise, but even in the murky light the land around him shines. The grass on which he lays is thick and orange, and every shade between violet and teal is represented in the leafy canopy overhead. A chorus of birds greet the dawn, and the smell of blossoming citrus is thick in the humid air.
He has always enjoyed summer on Island Resort, and as he languidly rises to his feet, he is ready for another lazy day to follow the preceding half-decade of the same.
His reflection is the first indication that something is wrong.
Rather than the short, spiraled horns he expects, he bears instead a pair of sharply pointed antlers. The stallion turns his head curiously, first to the left and then to the right, trying to get a better view of them in the rippling waters of the island's central lake.
“Erne?” He calls, but his yellow-eyed companion is nowhere to be found. Perhaps he should find Ruinam, he thinks, perhaps the island’s leader will know what has happened, or maybe Isilya, the magician queen in Tephra.
Gale frowns.
His eyes roll back in his head, and the brindle stallion collapses.
---
The Curse forces its blue eyes open, only to close them immediately at the onslaught of noonday sun.
Its host’s sensitivity to light is not the worst symptom of magical overuse, but that knowledge makes it no less bothersome. It rolls to its side, propped up on a winged elbow, and immediately regrets the decision. Nausea roils in its belly, and a lancet of pain darts opposite the lightning and up his spine.
His host is becoming ever more difficult to kill, and the magic that the Curse must use to do it becomes increasingly complicated. Once more, it thinks, perhaps twice if luck is on his side.
With eyes closed and blue ears pinned against its head, the exhausted magician attempts to keep the bloody contents of its stomach down. Unable to rid itself of the Self-Sustenance that it had consumed, meals it consumes often make it ill in a way that its Self Healing refuses to mend. Why the magics combine in such a way is a mystery, some combination of ill-wishing and the indescribable, but it has been happening with ever increasing frequency.
---
By the time the blue stallion opens his eyes, red has begun to blossom in the western sky.
Hadn’t it just been dawn, Gale thinks? Where had the day gone? He frowns, the expression pensive but not deeply troubled. He often loses a lot of time in thought, he reminds himself. But then, why can he not recall what he had been thinking of?
He takes a long breath and a step forward. The front foot he puts down on the earth is not the white-stockinged foot he had expected, but instead was an odd winged claw. Lifting it up to inspect it, Gale sees that the left is marked with a crimson V shaped marking. Now where had that come from? It’s not dirt or a stain, he finds, but red feathers, extending down from the wrist of his wing, the same trail that blood from a bitten wrist might drip down. How interesting, he thinks, and shakes out the odd forelimb.
A heavy blow fells him.
It hadn’t come from anywhere. It was simply there where it had not been an instant ago, and then Gale was sent flying. He spins and tumbles, disoriented and terrified. The blows come from nowhere and everywhere, but when he tries to flinch away he finds that there is nothing left of himself to draw in at all. He’s nothing, in a nowhere place, and the whole universe is black and empty.
---
The Curse breathes heavily.
This time, it does not try to open its eyes. Instead Gale’s sides rise higher, inhaling the cool night air. It waits, and breathes, and does not try to move.
Dawn comes again, and again. Gale’s brindle body lays very still in the orange grass. The colors around him ripple from orange to pink to soft mint green as the monster gathers its strength.
The bones of the host’s body feel somehow insubstantial. As if they might crumble if he stands on them. Flexing the crumbs of what he’d stolen from Wishbone, he confirms that they’re solid, but he still cannot force himself up. Instead he opens his eyes, so he might look up at the stars overhead.
The constellations tell him summer has begun, though the temperate seasons are much the same here on the black sands. Spring is gone. His Empathy is not, and as he has lain still, some has leaked through the shadows imprisoning it, and he thinks for a moment of a golden-striped boy and a black-feathered one, and then of a girl: a better daughter than the first one.
When it recognizes the path that Empathy and its newly deceased host have begun to lead it down, the creature snarls. Shaking the long white mane along his neck, he rises quickly to his feat. He has not felt such things since he sealed his heart away inside Ciri over a year ago, and the ghost of it that now drifts across his mind sends a shiver down his spine.
They do not belong inside the thing that the Curse has become, and it rattles about in the hollows of his not-quite-soul with the other good things it stores away there. Weaknesses. They will grow, he knows, building atop each other into the memories that he’d done away with. He’d torn them out once before, and knows it is best to rid himself of this pesky ability before he grows another heart.
He’d meant to seal it away in a dead man. Except his encounter in the Pampas had not ended like he had expected, and instead he’d returned to the island with the Empathy intact, and collapsed on the shore when he’d arrived, worn down by its constant presence.
Falling asleep on the shore had allowed the body he wears to heal through regeneration, and as it always does, the soul of the brindle host heals as well with the Curse not there to prevent it.
In each incarnation he is equally oblivious to the passing of the last half decade, and each time the Curse must kill him again.
This time though, he remains, lurking at the very edges of the Curse’s awareness, just out of the reaches of its Sight. Gale is powerless, unsubstantial, far from consciousness. But he is still there. Still a stubborn stain on the host that even magic cannot remove.
At least, not the magic that he has now.
But what about new magic?
Better magic?
Slowly, he rolls to his side.
No nausea. He rises to his feet (two clawed, two hooves), and the pulse in his head becomes sharper.
Not sharp enough to keep him down, just enough to aggravate him.
Where might he get better magic?
“Djinni,” he says softly, and she appears, damp and forest green. The color fades, returning to her naturally rosey hue, and she meets the boy’s gaze with unusually hard brown eyes. She is not accustomed to being summoned, and it shows in the way she inspects the stallion in front of her.
He is taller than she remembers, with a massive scar across his neck that glows softly, the wound revealing the same dun markings that Djinni had inherited from her father. This boy is not her favorite descendent; she far prefers his younger brother and cousins. But he is a descendent nonetheless, and so she retains some vague sort of interest in his doings. Less so, of course, as they have become more violent. Though Djinni is not opposed to getting her hooves dirty, such brutality is better left to the less civilized.
Gale is looking rather worse for the wear, with dark hollows beneath his eyes and a brittleness to his blue eyes that brings to mind the great northern glaciers. That affliction from the other side of his family, she thinks, and the result of meddling with Monsters and Gods. She had tried to warn him, she thinks, had tried to caution the thing within him. But some things even she cannot control.
He asks her for new magic now, and eventually Djinni agrees.
Agrees that she will try, anyway, keeping her composure even as Gale describes what he will do were she to fail.
Time passes.
How much time she is not certain - an hour? a fortnight? - but when she opens her eyes at last, the rain is falling in sheets around them, and the pale midmorning sun is hidden behind grey veils. Gale’s white hair is plastered to his neck, but his eyes now burn brightly, reminding her of blue flames in the dim light.
“Your wish has been granted.” She tells him. Golden sand falls to the black below, and she is gone. Gale curses and reaches after her, but finds only empty air. He tries to find her with magic and finds…
Nothing.
She has Hidden herself from him, granting a wish of her own, and the cursed creature realizes that he has used the genie’s magic for the last time. He’ll have to kill her when he finds her, he decides, to be sure he has it all. But that will have to wait; he has more pressing matters.
Like ridding himself of this Empathy.
And learning this new Power, the one that flickers like lightning in his veins.