Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Gale’s memories of their childhood are patchy and incomplete, but he has continued to regain them. The rate at which they come is slower now, perhaps once or twice a year rather than every hour, but still frequent enough that he recognizes the familiar swooping sensation in his belly.
Their mother had been teaching him about something (the sound of her words are missing but he knows that particular stance and expression on the navy-winged mare), but he’d promised to meet Tiercel on the edge of the cliff to play a prank on Eyas. What the prank had been escapes him, but he Sees the fear and then the laughter as they flash across her face, and can almost feel the way they’d tussled to the ground afterward and Tiercel had to break up the scuffle so they could avoid being spotted by their father or Pteron on patrol.
When the memory fades, he blinks his bright eyes as if to refocus, and settles on Eyas just as she speaks again. She’s leaving. She’s leaving?
He’d been alright with solitude when he’d chosen it, but when faced with this feels suddenly rather alone. It’s not a comfortable sensation, but there is no arguing with the firm set of his sister’s mouth, no taking back what he’d said and done and chosen.
He’d thought it through, he reasons with himself, he knows this is the right choice even if in the moment it might feel otherwise. He has always trusted reasoning over feeling, and making a change feels unfathomable at this point in his life.
Five years, she says, and that sounds like a remarkably short time. Before, he’d had forever, the endless eternity of the immortal. He frowns, but doesn’t speak, not even when she turns to go.
This time, her words make him smile. Her promise is reassuring for reasons he can’t quite name, so instead he just nods in acknowledgement of her words. Talkative Gale says a single word: “Good”, and resigns himself to his fate.
The Monsters come when he is alone again, and though he fights them off, it comes at a cost. He knows better than to take their Sight, knows the splitting headache that always results, rendering him nearly helpless for days afterward. But there are too many of them and no other options, and in the end he is alone on the black sand of the beach and he is alive.
But the thing that was inside him, the thing that the Dark God had cursed him with, that has come alive as well. It is not quite the Curse of his father, nor the Curse that afflicts so many in the woods, making corpses of them in the moonlight. It is something else, something born of fear and worry and magic and the Monsters of the Darkness, and of Gale witnessing things behind their eyes that he was never meant to See.
@[Eyas]
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