"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 this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Time passes, though Gale has no way of knowing how much. An hour? Half a day?
Long enough that he feels fully rested, the brindle stallion finds, and fully recovered as well. His head no longer aches, and he tosses his head as if to test it, which sends the length of his white mine rippling. His head feels light, and when he goes to stretch his wings he finds nothing there. The dark blue stallion turns his head, eyeing the bare expanse of his ribcage. He’s never seen the pale stripes there, but he struggles to see them in the darkness. Recalling the way he’d shifted his eyes to see differently before, Gale squints his blue eyes and all of sudden the world looks different.
Everything is soft and grey, with soft shapes of brighter lights deep in the gray shadows he knows to be the trees.
No longer does the flora wave in a rainbow of shades, but instead is just part of the grey blur that Beqanna has become. The only color now is in the warmth of the living, and when Gale’s searching eyes find some coming toward him, he stops.
“Mazikeen?” He calls out, trying to reconcile the colorful shape with a body he knows. He’s not entirely sure that whatever he sees is a horse, but he is sure that it is not a monster. (Not this newest kind, at least, he reminds himself – the kelpies are warm-blooded) “Is that you?”
The desire to move his wings – to take flight or pull them tighter he is not sure – comes quickly, and Gale feels something like a phantom limb as he sighs in frustration. He shakes his head, trying to push away the hallucination. He’s heard of this phenomenon before; his father had known someone who’d dreamt his missing leg was real. The black wings (identical to Erne’s) that have grown from his sides fit more sleekly than his white ones, and in the darkness he does not look at himself.
01-10-2021, 12:04 PM (This post was last modified: 01-10-2021, 12:05 PM by Mazikeen.)
Mazikeen had also lost track of time, but that’s what happens when you’re having fun. In the end, only one of the shadows had come - it was smaller than she had expected (though she fully plans on inflating its size in the stories she tells of it afterwards). She’s sure she killed it even though there’s no carcass, which helps those inflation intentions but the fact that it has disappeared is disquieting. She hopes the sea has just claimed it but the abilities of these creatures are still unknown to her and so she does not relent in her patrol.
She’s shifted back into herself after the scuffle, making sure that the wounds she had earned were not deep or serious, but she kept the eyes of the lion to help her see more easily. Her hoof-falls are quiet on the sand and Maze is contemplating a bath in the ocean when movement catches her attention. Not from the shore but from the direction where Gale had gone. There’s a distracting moment where she’s worried one of the creatures had slipped by her unnoticed but it is soothed away as she closes the distance and Gale speaks.
Mazikeen comes to stand a few paces away, amusement wrinkling her face. She looks down at herself, at the splattering of dark red and black on her white coat. “What do you mean is that you? It’s not that much blood.” At least half of it wasn’t hers anyway, though now that she thinks about it she’s not sure it is at all blood that’s pumping through the veins of the monsters. Better to think of it as blood, though, than consider the other possibilities.
Those feline eyes now they focus on the feathered wings resting at Gale’s sides. Only, they aren’t the white ones he had during their battle and her head may have gotten rattled by a monster but she’s pretty sure he had no wings at all when he had walked away to nap. So where did these black ones come from?
“Wait. Did you seriously grow wings while you napped?”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
It is Mazikeen, her familiar voice confirms. As she draws closer, the smell of the blood and the not-blood reach him, but he’s distracted from what was sure to have been a retort both witty and charming, by Mazikeen’s startled exclamation.
“Did I…did I what?!.” Gale glances down at his left side, and sure enough, there’s a sleek dark wing there. Gale startles, and there is an involuntary desire to leap away, if only he weren’t worried the thing would come along with him. He does flinch, but recovers quickly, stretching out the wing. It feels similar to those he’d been born with, but not exactly the same. It’s more than the color, but rather the shape and weight of them are different than those he’d known so well.
“You’re doing this, right? This is some kind of magic trick?” The questions sound certain, and he’s nodding as he looks over the unfamiliar black appendage and In the darkness, it would be difficult to make out the expression on her face, but is sure that she’s is playing some sort of trick on him. He’s not disturbed by it (very little disturbs him after a childhood spent with magically gifted siblings) but he’s curious how she’s done it.
He stretches it out and then up, and then folds it back against his side and finally turns back to Mazikeen.
Closer now, he can smell the blood she’d mentioned, and is frustratingly unable to see it. The type of vision he’s been using (unknowingly borrowed from the eyes of a goldfish) is not detailed enough to show him her injuries or her face, and Gale narrows his blue eyes once more before he settles on better vision, one that leaves her face looking nearly well-lit even in the magical darkness. Gale, who enjoys looking at her face, decides to keep this type of sight for a while.
He doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the idea that this could be a magic trick she is somehow doing, but his question is met with a low laugh and a shake of her head before she tilts it to the side a little - regarding him. “Gale. If I could grow extra body parts on you I would have given you another head to weigh you down or 50 legs to trip over during our battle.” She can’t quite help the smile that spreads at this visual as she speaks it.
When he stretched them out, the shape of the wings was familiar and she muses aloud about these thoughts - thinking about all the times she’s shifted into an osprey. “They actually look kinda like Erne’s wings…” She takes a step forward, driven by curiosity and a desire to touch them, to investigate closer, but a single step is all she makes before she appears to remember herself and remains stationary once more (but does not step back). Perhaps she’s thinking about how she probably reeks like death or how new this friendship is and how she doesn’t know the rules of it yet - Mazikeen wouldn’t even be able to guess at her own thoughts in that small moment. They’re a blur and she feels the same uncomfortable skip in her heart as when she had fumbled over her words earlier in the day (night? Unfathomable blackness?).
She does not pause long enough to give the uncertainty a chance to consume her.
“This isn’t me. And if you're not messing with me, I’d think you’ve got a bit of a shapeshifter in you.” Her tone is light and curious instead of accusing. Mazikeen’s experience with other magic is limited. Gale had played with her eyesight before, but could he do this? Was he playing at being surprised just to mess with her?
The world is filled with other traits, some she’s never even heard of, but shapeshifting is what she knows. It’s her default and it’s the only idea she has.
To demonstrate this idea, a pair of wings that match Gale’s unfurl from her sides and she stretches them out to their full length before folding them against her blood-splattered sides. The black colouring of the wings takes a little more concentration for her, but she thinks of the black osprey and hopes he doesn't mind.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
When Mazikeen denies that she’s responsible for the black wings, Gale frowns at her in the darkness. He’d been amused by the thought of them as a joke, some sort of tangible illusion. Mazikeen is smiling, and now Gale is uncertain if it’s at the joke she’s just made or because she is pushing the lie about not having created these wings even farther.
Perhaps both, he is thinking, when she steps a little closer. Gale is unbothered by her nearness (and would have gladly let her have a closer look), but the clear curiosity he can see with these new eyes is worrisome. She promises again that it’s not her, and the worry in the pit of his belly grows tighter still.
If she’s not doing this, that means that he is.
And if he’s shifting…
Gale does not want to think about what that means. Because he does have a bit of shapeshifter in him, and the familial susceptibility to the Curse that comes with it. The Curse should have ended, burned up in the fire with his parents, and yet…
“I hope not,” he replies, and though it is difficult to tell that his smile has fallen away in the darkness, his voice is laden with worry. He doesn’t immediately elaborate, because he is not yet ready to crush the friendship they’re building with the knowledge that with this shifting will eventually come other, far less pleasant things. The Curse takes a long time to sink in, Gale remembers; he has several good years ahead of him yet. But what about when it ends? What then? He can’t be killed; the volcano had proven that. But he can’t be left free, either. Gale mentally shivers at the idea of being locked away for eternity, and when that shiver ends, so do the wings.
“Shifting is not a good thing in my family,” he finally continues, a moment before Mazikeen grows her own pair of angled black wings. They look striking against her pale sides. The weight of his earlier realization still has not quite sunk in, and the uncertainty of it leaves him unsettled, with his heart beating quickly, and his breath tight in his throat. The undercurrent of excitement worries him the most, that brief realization that – at least for a while – he will be incredibly gifted. Worries him because it and yet calls to him most strongly, a glowing beacon in what has just become an unspeakably dark future. There’s a heat too, like lightning in his veins, and it only grows stronger as he mirrors her earlier interest in seeing the other’s wings. Mirrors the step closer too, even if it means their breath now mingles in the cool winter air, and only barely refrains from learning through touch if her black wings are exactly like Erne’s sized up to fit her equine frame.
“They look very nice,” he says instead, and even though worry still darkens his blue eyes, there is honesty in his voice when he speaks.
Inherently curious despite his current inner turmoil, Gale takes a half-step closer, and finds that his heart pounds even louder. It drowns out some of the worry, he finds, and says with a small but real smile: “At this rate, our rematch might not even happen before the next Alliance.” He raises his brows, leans in closer, and says just above a whisper, “You need a bath. I’m not getting risking getting any of that…ew. On me.” Glancing back at the blood and not-blood streaked across what’s visible of her white sides while he spoke was a bit disconcerting, and despite his playful tone suspects she might like a rest of her own as well.
Mazikeen’s ears twitch backwards in annoyance when Gale responds to her mention of being a shapeshifter by saying he hopes not. What the hell did that mean? She automatically assumes it’s an insult, that he didn’t want to be like her, even though the worry that leeches into his voice doesn’t suggest that at all. She’s in the process of deciding which insult would be best to fling back at him when he continues, sort of. A family thing, then.
It distresses Maze that this news isn’t as exciting for him as it was for her, that it’s overshadowed by some other history.
But those thoughts are forgotten in an instant when Gale steps towards her after she displays her own set of wings. Mazikeen can feel herself go on edge, as though every muscle in her body has just tensed up at the same time. Her wings squeeze against her sides and her entire focus is intent upon him. She despises the uncertainty that coils around her rapidly beating heart at this proximity (and a fear that she cannot name). She hears the compliment but it does not fully register with her because she’s thinking about another time a boy inched closer with smooth words. Thinking about how uncomfortable she had felt knowing it was all a falsehood played to get under her skin (and how it worked). Thinking about how she had torn his face apart when he had touched her.
Would it feel the same with Gale?
Those black feathered wings squeeze even tighter at the next half-step, and when he leans in closer and speaks it feels as though every single hair on Mazikeen’s body is standing on edge in anticipation. If it came down to fight or flight, she always knew her answer.
In the end, the pale mare does not have time to wonder if she’s relieved or disappointed when the gap between them doesn’t fully disappear. His playful tease about her fragrant and blood-stained state defuses everything churning within her and she laughs, a note that’s bright and a touch too loud - like when thunder and lightning occur at the same time.
She shakes her head then, orange eyes dancing, and without thinking about it extends one of her black wings to shove against him. “Who would’ve thought it. Gale, Alliance warrior, vision stealer, and defender of Islandres, is afraid to get a little dirty.” She inhales dramatically and fakes a cough. “You’re not wrong though. Come on, you big baby. Keep me company? Tell me why shapeshifting is so terrible in your family…” She says it just because she’s curious, because it bothers her more than she’ll admit that she thought she had noticed worry in his voice over something she loved so much. But once the words are out she realizes that he might not want to talk about it at all and she won't press him. So she continues after the smallest of pauses as she turns towards the ocean and a much-needed bath, shrugging with one of her wings. “Or you know, say that’s none of my business and tell me something else like - how you came to be living here on this tropical paradise.”
Mazikeen moves across the soft sand to the ocean and steps into the black water without hesitation - hoping that even if Gale does not join her in the water, he will stick around nearby until she is done. Salt-water splashing into her wounds causes her to gasp but she clamps her mouth shut to cut out the noise - forces herself to believe the pain is welcome, refreshing. It effectively clears her head, at any rate. As soon as all four hooves are in the water she shifts into a pale spider monkey (even though wet fur is gross). Partially because she can scrub at herself easily with the deft fingers and partially because there’s something she’s always found funny about monkeys with their expressive faces and hands. She’s hoping to at least inspire a smile in her new friend as she sits in the shallow water, her small form rocking ever so gently with each movement of the tide.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Due to the combination of his social ineptitude and the distraction of realizing that he is Cursed, the brindle stallion remains blissfully unaware of Mazikeen’s tension as he draws near. He’s physically affectionate with those close to him, and that those close to him are also his physically affectionate family doesn’t translate to an understanding that perhaps not everyone is as comfortable with such casually intimate proximity. She pulls the black wings closer to her, and he watches the way the muscle flexes beneath the joint of fur and feather, black against white. It’s a rather stark contrast, like the black snip on her nose.
Gale is surprised that he remembers that little detail so clearly, and he turns his gaze back toward Mazikeen’s face just as she laughs, and he thinks it sounds just like sunshine used to feel on his skin.
He’d been the one to make her laugh again, and that same victorious sensation from earlier swoops through his belly. It’s far better than worry about the future, and as she teases him he grins widely, shrugging his broad and wingless shoulders as though in admittance of the accuracy of her barbs. He’s turning to follow her even before she asks for his company, and the automatic flinch in response to her question is hidden in the motion. As she steps toward the water, warmth seems to goes with her, and Gale follows as though drawn in her wake despite the reminder of what he tries to avoid.
She saves him with another question, and he smiles even though she cannot see, grateful in ways he cannot quite articulate, and falls back to humor as he so often does.
“I suppose if kicking your ass the first time we met didn’t scare you away, I shouldn’t be so worried about my family Curse being the thing that does it.” He does not elaborate, but does leave an opening for Mazikeen to ask again if her feline curiosity is not satisfied before he begins the tale of his arrival in Islandres. He started with arriving in the Field (leaving out the forward of the tale, where he climbed out of his red dirt grave and ambled aimlessly east for countless days before ending up in the Common Lands). “Ruinam, the previous leader, invited me here years ago. He promised quiet and peace, and until recently that was true.” He glances up at the sky with a soft sigh. It’s most enjoyable in the daylight, he thinks, when the rainbow of flora shines against the black sands.
When he looks back, Mazikeen is monkey instead of a mare, and he laughs aloud at the hairy little face with the wide and luminescent eyes. “You do that so quickly,” he muses aloud, “Have you always been able to change your shape?” Was she born the ability, he wonders? Were her parents shifters too? What if she’s not even a horse at all, but rather some other creature that wears that shape for convenience in equine-ruled Beqanna? His curiosity serves the same purpose that her nearness had, and the glowing beacon of hope grows brighter. Perhaps he can master shifting quickly, extend the length of time he is strong and use that to fend off the madness. There’s little he won’t try.
Gale follows her and it’s surprising how much that pleases Maze. Truthfully, she’s not sure what she would’ve done if he hadn’t. Probably promptly attacked him, bring that ever-delayed rematch to light just for the insult of it all.
It’s not needed, though, and he partially answers the first question as she moves into the ocean. She wants to know about the curse - she is powerfully interested in hearing about a family curse that involves shapeshifting - but she’s temporarily sidetracked by the idea that Gale had been worried about scaring her off. Or had that been a joke? It’s difficult to tell, but if it wasn’t - here she was, being an idiot worried about making him dig up some horrible family memories.
She listens as he explains how he came to live here - finding it curious all the different ways homes are found. “It’s not so bad now.” She comments with a small grin - though she does find herself wondering what it looks like under the sunshine.
And then he asks her about her shifting, her smile brightens - it’s a subject she’s very fond of. She scrubs at some of the stubborn patches of blood on her arm as she answers and there’s a note of fondness in her voice when she speaks of shifting - like she’s talking about a dear friend. “Yup, all my life. It’s common in my family, but well - without a curse or anything on it.” She makes an apologetic grimace as she realizes belatedly this may not be the sort of thing she should tease him about. “A snow leopard was the first - that’s my mom’s favourite shape. Then I just started trying everything I could see. It was tough at the beginning but now -”
Mazikeen trails off, trying to find the right words to describe how much this part of her life means to her. When she can’t, she buys herself a few more seconds when she dunks her head under the dark water for a quick second. As she rises up, she shifts again - back into a mare (with feline eyes) and the only marks on her pristine white coat are the shallow slashes she had earned in her battle along her legs and shoulders. They sting but her eyes find Gale’s face again and no pain diminishes the grin that shines in her orange eyes. “It’s gotten much easier. It might sound dumb, but don’t know what I’d be without this ability.”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
At the compliment to his home, Gale smiles. He agrees, it is still nice now, even in the dark. If he imagines that the shadows around them are those of a moonless spring night, the darkness does not feel so oppressive. In the water ahead of him, Mazikeen scrubs away the darker-than-blood from her short white fur, and he marvels at the dexterity of those little fingers. They are far more deft than anything he can do, and the briefly considered offer to help Mazikeen get the hard-to-reach places dies long before he says it aloud. Instead, he listens as she speaks of her shifting, and the fondness she feels for it radiates in the warmth of her voice and the brightening of her smile as she speaks.
Her mother is shifter too, he learns, and it hadn’t hurt at all when she’d teased him. Gale had always suspected that the lifting of worry weight that followed the death of his parents was only temporary, but it is good to know that he is no longer so affected as he had been in the weeks that followed Eyas’ explanation of what the Curse entailed. He even manages to smile, even if it’s small and he glances down at his hooves for a moment to gather his thoughts before looking back up. The sound of a larger splash draws his attention away from where he’d been imagining Mazikeen in the shape of one of those mountain cats, and the blue-eyed stallion looks up to see that she’d changed once more.
He marvels at her speed, and then at the way the seawater pulls her dark-tipped hair into a single sheet that drips down her well-muscled chest and then onto a shapely battle-marked leg. The tightness in his throat returns, and he coughs to clear it just as he meets Mazikeen’s bright orange eyes. That makes it worse, and he wonders if perhaps the darkness has brought with it some sort of illness. (Another plague? He makes a mental note to think more about that later.) He does not wonder long, because she is telling him that shifting is easy and most importantly a part of her identity.
“I feel that way about my eyes,” he answers to break the silence that he falsely assumes has stretched awkwardly long. “They run in my family as well, though I’ve never met another with the gift except my sister Eyas.” Speaking of them reminds him that he’d promised to show her the sunset over the River, and after asking permission shows her the brilliant sky, filtering the sun itself so it glows only as brightly as a full moon and is pleasant to look at in the darkness. He shares the vision with her, seeing it as she does, and when he lets it fade he is smiling.
It almost feels as though Tiercel is casting peace at them, and Gale takes a deep breath of the sea-scented air. It is too cold for spring, and lacks the sweetness of flowers, but at least it is fresh and crisp. Good weather to fly, Gale thinks, and stretches his wings like he always does at the idea of a morning flight. And just like that, the wings are back, and this time they are his own – long and white and marked with starkly contrasting crimson V. Gale laughs in surprise, and decides that he might as well show all his cards if he really wants to be friends.
“Shifting comes with Madness.” He says, adjusting his wings back against his sides. They feel better than the black wings had, missing limbs returned. “At first it is harmless, and it comes on so slowly that by the time anyone else notices it is always too late.” That is how it had happened with his father. The madness had begun to creep in not long after Gale’s birth, and for many years there were no signs at all. “At first it starts out harmless, like mischief, and in the end. Well…” He trails off, discomforted by the thought of his listing his sire’s crimes.
“I can’t imagine myself capable of those things” Gale admits, a verbal continuation of something he’d only been thinking. Could Mazikeen? They’d met violently, after all, striking out at each other long before they’d spoken. Yet she doesn’t seem afraid of him, and he reassures himself of this by running his eyes across her again, sure he sees no signs on tension now that he looks for it. (Does this second plague come with a fever, perhaps? He feels flushed all of a sudden)
At some point, she’s going to stop being surprised when Gale doesn’t mock her for being honest - right? Maybe? She’s only really met other shifters that think of their ability in the same way she does, not someone else who understands about something else entirely. Maze genuinely thought she would only be able to make friends with those that were like her, other members of the pack, and it’s nice to be proven wrong. Nice to know they have this in common.
Though she is curious, Maze gives her permission for him to show the sunset with wariness. She doesn’t like not being able to see the present, doesn’t like the idea that someone (even someone as nice as Gale) can have control over her in any way. And yet, her orange eyes widen when she takes in the brilliant sky he shares with her and a very soft and appreciative “Wow” escapes her. She much prefers this version to the one he had used in their battle - she tells him as much in her usual, blunt way and when the vision falls away she wears a smile that matches his.
There’s a part of her that is afraid of the dark, though it is almost always easily squashed by an overabundance of stubbornness. And she appreciates this small reprieve from it more than she’ll admit.
She’s managing to recover from that when Gale’s wings return, only white like before this time. Mazikeen cannot name the feeling that rises thick in her throat when she once again can see the mark where her bite had landed - and hearing his laughter has the same effect. Her heart rate picks up much the way it had when they were close together and it does not occur to her to try looking away from him to see if that will help.
The explanation about the shifting curse and madness in his family does not help her heartbeat to slow down - though now she knows this feeling. She’s somehow back to being worried about him.
This worry, while faintly annoying, helps distract her from the way her skin tickles as she notices his vivid blue eyes trail across her skin.
“I can’t either.” She offers with what she hopes is an encouraging smile as she steps a little closer, seawater dripping off of her body. They had fought in the Alliance, and there was the promise of a rematch between then, and yet she had a hard time thinking senseless violence was something her new friend was capable of. “But, if this Curse is the reason why you can change your wings, if it gets to that point, I’ll stop you.” She does not and cannot know what she would be facing if it were true - but there’s a finality in her voice fueled by that ever-present stubbornness. Whatever comes after mischief, whatever is worrying Gale so much, she’s not afraid of it. That fierce glint in her eyes is softened by humour before long, as is the growing theme between them, and she adds with a crooked grin “Any excuse to kick your ass.”
