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)
@[Mazikeen]
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