"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Gale run away with me-- lost souls and reverie running wild and running free
He’d left moments after Eyas, winging his way through the plumes of smoke behind her. The soot was heavy in his nose and throat, and his eyes were shut tight. They fly close, and only when Eyas banks sharply away (her body language clear – she wishes to be alone) does Gale head upward for cleaner air.
Up and up and up, until his lungs (so recently healed from their second encounter with fire) burn instead from the cold. The soot on his coat is covered in ice, and when his wings can beat no more from exhaustion, they crumple down at his sides while he spins, head over hoof, until the world grows black.
---
Gale wakes, hours later.
He is rather high up in a tree, suspended across several branches.
He sighs.
@[savage]
i decided to use his brother's tagline because it was too good
hope this is what you wanted when you said you wanted to write with me (:
It is quiet in the forest and this is likely what draws her to it. There are secrets here, sometimes she thinks she can smell them. And, when she is bored, she imagines stories that go along with all of those secrets. She imagines so many things, something her mother taught her when she was small.
But she is no secret. Because, although she is the same deep black as her father (the same deep black of the forest’s shadows), she emits a soft glow. Pale pink like the horizon just before dawn. She cannot hide here, although she doesn’t think she would want to even if she could.
She wanders, something a friend taught her when she was small. Moving without any destination in mind, moving just for the sake of moving. And, though she had a friend once, she understands that most of her life will be spent alone. She will not always have a companion. Against all odds, she has made peace with this.
The crash in the canopy overhead startles her from her reverie and she skitters with fright, nostrils flared, eyes rolling. But there are no immediate threats that she can see. She does not see him until she tips back her head to investigate the source of the great, clamorous sound. She blinks him into focus, calls out to him, but there is no response.
So, she waits. For hours, she waits. Until he begins to stir, until his sigh makes her think that he must be awake. She looks up again and tries calling out again. “Are you awake?”
Gale run away with me-- lost souls and reverie running wild and running free
If Gale still had the memory of falling off his very first cliff, he would rank this fall just below it, at least in terms of damage left after waking up.
If he were not already blue, the bruises would color him brightly, the last remnants of his body healing itself from the inside out. A few hours of sleep have done the healing and intense rehabilitation it would take another horse years to accomplish. His rest has been taken by the healing, and Gale is near exhaustion even as he blinks bleary eyes down at the world below him.
It takes him a moment to realize that he is not seeing his shadow on the earth below, but rather a black horse. He blinks again, seeing two of her, then four. His stomach churns uncomfortably, and he closes his eyes with a quiet groan. There’s a voice from below, one that he knows to be the black horse. They’re the only one near enough (though he cannot be entirely sure of this, his vision having betrayed him in a myriad of ways).
“How long ago did Loess burn with dragonfire?” He asks. Or at least, he tries to ask, with the last words devolving into a hacking cough. His throat burns and he expels a mouthful of ash. He can heal, but his body cannot make foreign matter disappear entirely, it seems. The strangeness of his requests occurs to him only afterward, and he wonders what the stranger must think of him. A horse in a tree, streaked with soot that’s been washed away as the ice of high altitudes melted and dripped away and onto the leaves around him.
She knows nothing of Loess or the dragonfire it had succumbed to. Her dark brow furrows in confusion and she shakes her head something subtle but does not immediately answer. There is no way for her to know. And she is troubled by the sound of his cough, something that sounds like it’s been carved out of his lungs by force.
She keeps her head tipped back, her lilac eyes trained on his figure caught up there in the canopy. She can’t make out his face from this far down but she supposes it doesn’t matter.
He offers his name, apropos of nothing, but it doesn’t bother her any. She draws in a long breath and edges closer, as if might help to bring him into focus.
“Are you all right, Gale?” she asks, though it’s quite obvious that he is not. Between the cough and the way he’s tangled up in limbs and boughs. She doesn’t know why she’s stayed. It’s certainly none of her business, but her parents bred kindness into her and that’s as good a reason as any, she supposes.
“I’m afraid I can’t answer your question about Loess,” she says, “but I can try to find help to get you down if you need me to.”
Gale run away with me-- lost souls and reverie running wild and running free
Even as she moves through the shadows, Gale finds that he can see the outline of the dark mare beneath the tree. There is a strange hue to the light around her, but his eyes are always the very last to heal. They are likely untrustworthy with reality at the moment, so he closes them and focuses on what he is able to feel.
Is he alright? She asks, and without a moment of hesitation he answers: “I’m pretty sure I will be in a few minutes.” The answers is a bit cryptic, perhaps, but he is too focused on what she has to share about Loess to bother clarifying. But its nothing at all, it seems, and she ends with an offer to help get him down. Frustration, mostly with himself, roils across his face for a moment. He glares up at the clear blue sky, the same brilliant summer shade as his bright eyes.
“I got it.” He tells her, and then with a bit of warning in his tone: “But you’ll probably want to look away.”
Gale is fairly certain he can catch himself, but when it comes to tree extrications that often includes a flew broken bones. He is well accustomed to the crunch and the sharp tear of it, but he had noticed some horses were averse to the sound and sometimes even sight of rapidly healing flesh. In the end, he rolls about and snaps only his radius on a thick oak when he catches his weight before landing. In an effort to distract from the broken wing he stretches the other out for inspection. As he does so, he glances up at the lilac-eyed mare.
“I can tell we’re near the river, but you wouldn’t happen to know a good spot to get a drink, would you? Even a swim, perhaps?” The soot that remains on his coat is a constant reminder of the fire he had fled, and that he would prefer to forget about, at least for a while.
There is nothing strange about his answer, not to her. She, who has healed herself many times over, too. Mostly when her mother marched her across miles and miles to reach places Basilica had never seen before in order to meet people Basilica had never heard of. She had discovered her own ability to heal through a bout of anger she’d felt toward her mother, which made her flush with guilt every time she entertained the thought of using her magic.
But she nods her understanding now and then shuffles backward several paces to create more room for his landing. She shifts her weight and closes her eyes, heeding his advice. This commotion is louder even than the sound he’d made when he’d ended up entangled in the branches overhead and she does not open her eyes again until there is quiet.
It is only now that she gets her first good look at him, watching as he extends one wing and not the other. She almost offers to mend it for him before she remembers what he’d said and how it had sounded like he was capable of healing himself, too.
It is only after he asks about the river that she notices the soot splashed across his hide. She nods quickly and glances in the direction of the river. “Yes, of course,” she murmurs, “follow me.” And, with that, she sets off toward the water. She is silent as they walk purposefully and does not turn to him again until they reach the river’s edge.
“What happened?” she asks quietly, her expression troubled as she studies him.
Gale run away with me-- lost souls and reverie running wild and running free
A dull ache remains in his wing, like that of a months’ mended fracture, and he holds the limb tenderly as he follows the black mare. Her glance toward his sooty side suggests that her ‘of course’ includes the possibility of a swim, and Gale nods happily when they draw up along the water’s edge. There is no bank here, just a gradual descent into the water. Gale wades in a few paces, but stops rather than submerge the rest of his body. The water is fall-chilled after all, and his guide is asking something of him.
She looks concerned when she asks, and Gale turns away rather than answer.
The answer is a long one, but even if he wanted to speak it aloud, there is a hard knot of something in his chest that he knows would stop him. He shakes his head, just once, and then returns his gaze to hers with a wry smile.
“A lot of things happened.” He answers. “But that’s the past, isn’t it? No point dwelling on what I can’t change.” Gale shrugs, and the motion disturbs his still tender wing. He frowns, shakes it out a little, and reconsiders his plan to swim.
“So do you live around here?” The question sounds innocent enough, and Gale is looking out over the shallow river and bank curiously. “Or do you just make a habit of knowing good swimming holes?”
