"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
Gale no longer keeps the white feathers.
He had in the beginning. He’d tucked them into a hollow log, protected from the wind and the rain and the darkness. They’d been so bright to his enhanced vision, as pale as Mazikeen herself, with a few even black-barred like her dark hair.
Each time he added a feather, Gale had thought of her. She had gained her shifting back, the feathers tell him, and she is well enough to come here.
She still cares enough to come here, he thinks at first. But as time passed, and the feathers grew more numerous, his thoughts have changed. She comes to make sure she is still sane, to watch him not for his sake, but for the sake of others he might harm. She comes because she pities him. She’s not even coming anymore, he’s just finding feathers.
The doubt builds slowly, for Gale is at heart a hopeful creature, but the dark tendrils of the Curse are relentless. Eyas is watching him now too, not watching out for him, but watching him the way they had watched their father. Gale has closed his eyes to her, and to the rest of those who might pry though his Sight, preferring his solitude
When he’d found the feather a few months ago, Gale had blown it into the air with a flap of his wings, sending it back off into the dark sky where perhaps the ocean will carry it away from the black sand shore.
When he finds one today, he becomes enraged.
At the very same moment, he feels joy.
Even Gale, with his very late start at understanding and labeling emotions, knows that this is abnormal. He’d had two reactions to the same thing, two very different reactions. The sort of thing that might happen when one is Cursed and of many minds, and the familiar cold reality of it sends a chill down Gale’s pale spine.
Though he takes several long breaths, there remains an odd sensation in his chest. Neither the joy nor the rage had truly felt like Gale’s own emotions. But sure one had to have been his, for he still feels like himself and shouldn’t himself have feelings?
Gale’s weak healing has never been of much help with self-induced migraines, and when he finds himself heading that direction, he instead acts on instinct and takes to the air, shifting into a shape that requires his entire attention to hold steady.
He’s mastered many other shapes, but this is his first attempt at an eagle. It is similar to an osprey, but the white-tailed eagle on which he models his shape is far larger than the black osprey that flies beside him across the dark waves. Gale’s feathers are black as well, reverting without thought to the native colors of his homeland even though the true eagle would be deep brown.
Gale flies without knowing where he is going, focused entirely on learning this new form. Erne watches for him, the osprey’s sharp eyes taking in the world below as the summer winds carry them east. Deciding to test out his landing ability in this large avian shape, Gale spirals downward toward the bare tip of an old pine. He has to make a second, then a third pass, underestimating his wingspan both times. But when he lands, it is graceful enough that Erne gives a distant trill of approval, one that Gale hears only in his mind.
He closes his eye for just a moment, and when he reopens them he can see every detail in the world around him. The lake ahead of him ripples, and Gale thinks for a moment that it is almost like the sea, trapped and weakened by being so far inland. He is just wondering if the lake has tides when he realizes where he must be.
Gale grows very still, and shifts his coloring back to that of a normal white-tailed eagle, hoping that perhaps he will pass for a normal bird out for a flight, and not a shifter who’s arrived uninvited into the very last place he’d wanted to be.
Mazikeen was almost always in a bad mood after returning from Islandres. There was some comfort in not seeing Gale disembowel the other inhabitants of the island, or whatever the curse was going to make him do, for longer and longer periods of time and yet the short blips where she watched him soured her stomach. She wouldn’t abandon her promise but that didn’t make it any easier. Not when she knew she missed him, this enemy-turned-friend-turned-???, and missed the possibility of what she'd wanted with him. Not when she knew she still harboured a secret hope that it would all work out fine. None of that made these excursions easy.
Nearly every visit involved an argument with herself about whether to just show up and tell him to deal with it.
Nearly every visit, she told herself she won’t feel the same quickening of her pulse when she stole her glimpses. The cloud of confusing thoughts that follows her undoubtedly contributes to why her mood is as dark as the world around her as she flies back to Hyaline. She will not allow herself to land until she’s drained every speck of energy from her body so she will pass out and be incapable of dreaming. Between Breach, Gale, being alpha, the world being what it is, and nearly dying, there’s never anything good waiting for her in her dreams lately.
As she scouts Hyaline from the air she practices shifting between wing strokes - welcoming this completely reasonable drop in her stomach in that sliver of time between shapes. Whatever changed with her shifting since the mountain has given her a host of other animals, most of which she doesn’t even know the name of, but she can try them on by letting it sort of fill in the blanks. If she thinks feline, she might get a lion or she might get one of her newest favourite shapes - a sabre-toothed cat, showing off her broken canine.
Now she settles into a single shape when she’s given a large eagle, larger than any she’s ever seen. A Haast’s eagle. She keeps her usual colouration, white with black upon her wing tips, beak, and her feet - and always those burning orange eyes.
Eyes that catch on the black eagle as it lands on a pine. This is only mildly interesting until she happens to catch the change from black plumage to brown. A solid pit forms in her stomach that tells her she knows exactly what shifter this is. Someone from a place where all the animals are black.
She feels dread, confusion, annoyance, and a small flutter of something else that she does her best to squash with reality. After all, she had worked on resigning herself to the idea that their next proper encounter would involve her trying to kill him to rid the world of his curse before he could do too much damage.
It makes no sense for this eagle to be Gale.
Unless this is another ‘I came to visit to tell you I don’t want to be friends in the most confusing way ever’ visit. Unless he’s sick of seeing the feathers and is here to try to convince her to stop coming. Unless something is wrong.
That thought, combined with her near-supernatural stubbornness, keeps her from the tempting idea of getting Sabal to climb out of her lake and take care of this visitor for her. She needs to know why he's here.
So Mazikeen lands on a neighbouring pine, taking a little bit of pleasure in her eagle shape being approximately twice as large than whoever. Her orange eyes are focused intensely on the brown eagle and she tells herself that is it because it is a (possible) stranger in her home and not because of who her thundering heart and all of her instincts seem to think it is.
“If you were trying to blend in with that plumage change, the animals here are pastel coloured.” She keeps her voice carefully neutral. What she wants to ask is why the fuck are you here but hostility is no longer her first instinct when it comes to him. Everything might be easier if it was.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Gale shifts the moment that she speaks of it, the changes rippling across first his head, then down across his chest and feathered wings. His beak grows more curved and his body shrinks in size. The rich brown and grey feathers of his body become instead the very palest shade of salmon, and his wings turn to pale white, the left streaked with a not at all pastel red V.
The pastel osprey looks quite at home now in the bald pine above Hyaline, but in becoming so has revealed his identity without speaking a single word; he is no longer just a shifter from Islandres.
He’s been practicing, the quick shifting also says, and he’s gotten quite good. Not nearly as impressive as Mazikeen has, though, says the curious tilt of his blue-eyed head as he takes in her shape. It’s a bird, a predator, but larger than any he has ever Seen. He attempts to mimic it, but not a thing about his appearance changes, and he finds that there is a growing ache in the back of his head. The ache of magic beyond him, Gale knows, and he returns to focus on Mazikeen with an intent curiosity.
She’d taken back more from the Fairies than what they had taken from her, Gale realizes, and if he were in a shape that could express pride, his would be bright with it. He wants to tell her this and nearly does, but instead turns his open mouth into a click of the curved beak, and shakes out his wings.
He needs to tell her that he has felt it. That there is something inside him, something that had come from the Dark God, something that has taken pieces of his memory and replaced it with blackness in which he cannot See a thing.
He needs to tell her that he can’t be trusted anymore, that the possibility of the Curse has become a surety. He needs to tell her that the ending has begun, and the promise that he’d tried to get her to break would finally be tested.
“I doubt that blends in with the birds around here.” He says instead, gesturing at her impressively large shape. “I thought you were a dragon at first. Bit feathery for a dragon though. What are you exactly?”
It’s exactly the sort of question that is typical of Gale, and is said just the way he might have asked her prior to his first trip to Hyaline. That was when things had gotten...complicated, and so that is what he has - just for this moment - forgotten, the memory snatched away by a wickedly black tendril.
Mazikeen watches him shift into a pastel osprey and cannot decide if he’s teasing her or not. While she’s trying to figure that out, her eyes catch on the bright red marking on one of his wings and her mind turns to white noise for a moment. She averts her eyes quickly, does her best not to look at it directly, and welcomes the fog in her mind that saves her from thinking about how she’d left such a small mark on him compared to the invisible one he’d left on her.
Good to know her instincts aren’t useless but she would not have necessarily minded if they had been wrong this time.
When he speaks, Mazikeen closes her eyes against the pain that rises up. She doesn’t have to wonder at the cause. It hurts because this is (part of) what she’s missed. Hurts because she knows it isn’t going to last - it can’t - but she also knows immediately that she’s going to answer his question. She’s going to delay watching this tiny sliver of peace burst into flames because she’s weak and selfish and stupid and will take all the good memories she can get. Even if they’re just chatting about shifting.
Sabal has told her that having feelings doesn’t make her weak but this does feel like weakness. Wanting just another minute of this normal conversation before it crumbles again.
Because it will. She doesn’t trust this rather normal conversation - his last visit to Hyaline had started out this way too and then the ground had shifted from underneath her. The talkative, curious Gale that she had gone from wanting to crush to wanting to spend as much time with as she could. The one she thought she could trade questions with all day, the one who made her laugh and who she enjoyed trying to make laugh in return.
When she opens her eyes again, she has a vision of launching off of this pine and gripping Gale in her black talons and giving him a good shake while demanding to know what the hell he’s getting out of this game he’s playing with her. The feeling inside of her reminds her of what she felt with Firion, that there are rules she doesn't understand but everyone else does and she being made a fool of.
In the end, all she does is ruffle her feathers a little - stretching out a large black-tipped wing to look at it before focusing back on the osprey. “I don’t know the name of it, I’ve never seen one in the wild. Something prehistoric, I think. A lot of the new animals I can shift into are… larger than the ones that exist now. Wilder, in a way.” The bizarre versions of lions and bears and birds that were close to the species she knew and had been practicing all her life, but entirely off at the same time.
This is her chance to ask him what he wants, but instead she says something else - again trying for a carefully neutral tone, though a note of praise sneaks in. “You’re getting good.”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Watching her as intently as he is, Gale does not miss the way she looks away from his Alliance insignia. Her insignia, he thinks, though he’s never said such a thing out loud. He’s not frequently asked - not in this world of magnificently colored creatures - but he’s always flared it to show the inverted V where blood had once stained his feathers and said it came from a fight he’d very nearly lost.
He wonders, sometimes, what might have happened if he had lost. Would the world still be shrouded in darkness? Would Mazikeen have been able to defeat Jamie and kept the Monsters at bay to stop the eclipse? This Mazikeen might have, he thinks as he admires the majestic shape of the Haast’s eagle, listening to her explanation.
Dragons are very old, Gale thinks, recalling the stone skeleton in Loess. Perhaps they have remained when the rest of these prehistoric creatures she speaks of live only in their descendents. What have dragons become, he finds himself thinking? Gale might have become lost in this line of thought for some time, and indeed he is quiet for some time and his blue gaze goes soft in a way that says he is thinking and not Seeing.
But then Mazikeen’s compliment interrupts him, and he looks back just in time to lock eyes with her as she tells him that he is getting good. He tilts his osprey’s head, which is less telling than a blush across an unfeathered face.
The memories he’d lost return to him, pulled back by the strong emotions, and the words he’d just spoken feel as though a stranger had said them. He scowls. Or he would have if he were a horse, and as an osprey just shuffles his feet which could mean a dozen things.
The tumultuous clash of emotions is immensely uncomfortable, and Gale draws in on himself, an expression familiar across all species. He needs to tell her.
But she doesn’t seem angry or sad or anything bad at all, and the thought of changing that, of sharing the news that he has begun to slowly lose his mind, seem suddenly insurmountable. Gale opens his mouth to tell her, and again closes it with a click. Odd behavior for a creature so chatty as Gale. The silent battle, the urge to lie and tell the truth, play out behind a blank expression, until he finally says something that satiates the darkness and his own need to be truthful:
“I miss you. I think about you all the time.” The darkness withdraws, and Gale seizes the chance to add three quick words just a moment behind it. “I’ve felt it.” The bird’s sharp eyes are inscrutable, and he soons breaks her gaze as he turns to face the lake.
By the time his blue eyes settle on the distant water, he has changed from an osprey to an ocelot, and the salmon in his feathers has become the central color of yellow rosettes on a summer sky blue body.
He’s showing off, and then he casually stretches his body forward and moves to a lower branch. It’s placed him just out of reach of Mazikeen’s sharp talons were she to lunge, and the way he looks up at her with wide blue feline eyes is with over-exaggerated innocence.
He lifts a paw to move again, but waits, his blue paw poised as he watches Mazikeen overhead for a reaction.
Sometime during their conversation, Erne had disappeared. Gale, absorbed entirely by the shifter overhead, doesn’t even notice.
It is like being kicked in the chest when he tells her he misses her, that he thinks about her. What the hell was she supposed to do with that? A few quick blinks are her only initial reaction, as though she’s not quite sure she heard him correctly. There would be a scowl if this shape could form that expression easily. Mazikeen had lost whatever ability she had to keep her emotions from openly displaying on her face and it is only the stoic shape of the large eagle that helps her keep her secrets now.
She feels the rise of the usual confusing storm of emotions that Gale often inspires in her. Unwilling to deal with most of them, she holds tight onto the anger and tries to let the others slip away. Her head is shouting all sorts of thoughts in response to these words, spoken so casually as if they weren’t now branded in her mind.
Mazikeen is just about to tell him that he doesn’t get to miss her because he’s the one that pushed her away when he continues talking. The storm inside her mind pauses just as she falls utterly still, orange eyes locked on him, watching as he becomes a blue and yellow ocelot - as he moves down a branch.
There's a small instinct to smile at the innocent look she's given but she doesn't give into it.
“The curse?” Mazikeen asks quietly, wanting to make sure she understands - hoping he means anything else though that doesn't seem likely. Her black talons grip the branch she is perched on more tightly, and she eases up only when she hears the strain of the wood - not wanting to snap it.
Is she ready for this?
Mazikeen is sure she’s capable of what she’s promised - she can do it though she certainly does not want to. She doesn’t want this to be how she loses another friend in this endless night, doesn’t want this to be how Gale’s story ends. “How much time do you think until you become…” She trails off, unsure of what word to use, but she soon gives up because she thinks he’ll get the point anyway. Are they doing this today? Or is there still time before the curse becomes a real problem? It doesn’t feel right, trying to kill him if it’s just starting, if it’s just mischief.
It’s annoying that she didn’t take the chance to learn whatever she could about it because now she needs to rely on Gale to tell her when it’s time. He had told her the curse came with madness and Mazikeen doesn’t know if that means he’ll even be reliable in determining when it’s time for her to fulfill her promise. She doesn't have a choice though - this doesn't feel like the type of thing you just guess at.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Gale knows better than to try to interpret the eagle’s behavior; he’s barely any good at horses. There’s blinking, a lot of blinking, and then she becomes very still, watching him as intently as he watches her.
She looks marvelous, from the tip of her sharp talons to her hooked beak. Her wingspan must be at least twice as large as the osprey he’d just been, and he’s willing to bet she’s wickedly fast.
Not fast enough to catch him without hitting branches though, Gale thinks, tilting his spotted head curiously. The sound of creaking wood catches his attention, and he glances at the tight grip the eagle has on her perch. She doesn’t seem inclined to chase him, which had been his hope, so he replaces his paw on the branch, and settles back onto his haunches to look up at her as she speaks.
“Become too much?” Gale asks, then shrugs in answer, as though not knowing is of little importance.
“I guess that’s up to you.” Watching her, he twitches the soft whiskers of his nose, enjoying the sensation of the air against them, breathing in the scents of mid-summer.
“My mother started planning my father’s death seven winters after he started shifting.” While Gale has told Mazikeen that it runs in his family, he hadn’t previously shared the details of how well and thoroughly it trampled them as it ran. Saying it aloud feels remarkably reckless, a bold choice that Gale wouldn't have imagined himself capable of until the words came out. Equally reckless is the sharp edge on his smile, a smile that is no less charming in this shape, a smile he wears as he continues: “So I suppose we have until you can’t stand me anymore.”
When he says it’s up to her, Mazikeen cannot help the eye roll that is her immediate response as she mutters “Great. No pressure.” There’s only dark humour in the words, though, and no smile to soften it. Maybe she should’ve expected a response like that - she’s not sure why she thought he’d be the one to tell her when it was time.
But she is also so relieved that it doesn't have to be today.
And when Gale mentions his parents, she feels sadness creep through her and an ache in her heart. What must that have been like? She’d known it had been in his family but hadn’t really thought about how close it was. Did he have to watch his father succumb to the same thing he was dealing with? She doesn’t ask. Just as she doesn’t ask if she could ask his mother for tips on how to deal with someone with the curse. It’s probably in poor taste.
She shifts then into a margay, a smaller version of the ocelot shape he is wearing and (with a bit of concentration) makes her colouring completely black except for her eyes. It’s a small joke, appearing like an animal from his home while he is dressed in the colours of hers. She nimbly climbs down to a lower branch of her pine so she’s closer to eye-level with him. As much as she enjoyed being taller and larger, she doesn’t think much of being smaller now. It is a false sense of innocence, much like the expression he had given her.
“Until I can’t stand you? That’ll either be 30 seconds from now or 30 years.” It’s the closest she’ll get to admitting she wants a long life with Gale in it and saying it as a joke that can be shrugged off is the only way she’ll let herself speak it. Her head tilts and for a moment, a smile spreads - shining in her orange eyes before she catches herself. Before she reminds herself that she shouldn’t get too comfortable in this conversation because the ground is likely to fall out from under her at any moment. What she wants doesn't really matter, anyway. That's been made clear enough.
So the smile fades away, leaving her feeling cold in its absence and she shifts a little on her branch. “What’s the plan now, then? I just keep spying on you and keeping my distance until it - you - become too much?” Despite her best attempts to keep her tone neutral still, there’s a note of bitterness. She'd absolutely still do it but she hated sneaking around, even though it had been her idea. It had been the only compromise she could think of when he didn't want to see her and she wasn't about to pretend he didn't exist.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
He recognizes an eyeroll when he sees it, even when Mazikeen’s bright orange eyes are avian rather than equine. She sounds almost amused, but it is just different enough that Gale doubts his interpretation. He tries to determine what exactly is off as she falls quiet, taking in the bit of his history that he has shared with her.
Gale understands eagles about as well as he understands Mazikeen, which is to say that he is surprised when she descends from her perch. Surprised and delighted as well, with a smile to match as he takes in both her rapid shift and the sleek feline shape she has donned. Perhaps she is something from the future, Gale thinks, perhaps animals will continue the trend of growing smaller that Mazikeen has revealed to him.
Her eyes distract him from following those thoughts too far, and then she smiles at her own joke, and he is thrilled to discover that her smile is as lovely in this form as any other. He takes a breath to tell her this, but then her smile fades before his very eyes, and he wonders what he has inadvertently done to cause it.
That uncertainty draws back the tendrils of darkness, and Gale tussles with them in the time between two heartbeats, settling for the truth in exchange for the ability to choose his words.
“No,” he says with a shake of his head, “No. I have a new plan.” He sounds quite sure of this, far more certain than he really is. “I think more observation is better. Then you’ll know right away rather than your next arrival.” The timing of her visits hasn’t been entirely predictable, but he’s all too aware of the sorts of trouble one might get into between her check-ins. The Curse smiles at the thought of such trouble, and so Gale smiles.
“So. I suppose that’s up to you as well. Is there a place for me here with you, or will I have to steal you away back to my island?” His spotted head tilts curiously, blinking his large blue eyes as if this is a normal question for one to ask the Alpha, and not one that makes the cautious Gale weak-kneed at the daring with which he speaks.
Mazikeen is expecting the new plan to be that they just never see each other again. Some other variation of everything Gale has been telling her since he last showed up here in Hyaline - some excuse of why she needs to give up on her promise. It seems, however, that she’s not done being shocked by what he has to say today. When his new plan is more observation she cannot help the stunned, whisper-soft “What?” that escapes her. It's a common theme now, this reaction from her.
Her heart is racing so wildly and that storm of emotions has begun to spin so violently in her mind she has to really focus to hear his words.
She’s far too distracted by how direct Gale is being to appropriately scowl at the idea of him stealing her away. Far too distracted by how his words are feeding the hope she’s tried so desperately to kill and making it swell in her chest like the sun itself is living there. It makes sense, she thinks, to really be able to keep an eye on him. She’s not particularly worried about what trouble he might be able to cause here - partially due to her lack of understanding about the curse and partially due to her faith in the inhabitants here. And that ever-present stubborn belief she’ll be enough to stop him when the time comes.
Mazikeen speaks before she has her thoughts together, her voice distracted and faint at first. “I would have stayed in Islandres the last time I was there if you had asked but now… I can’t leave Hyaline…” She shakes her feline head, frightened by the emotions this idea is stirring up. By the weight of the truth that she would have left her home to stay with him. She forces herself to focus, be rational. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’ll be harder for her to pretend she doesn’t care about him the way she does if he’s around all the time but surely that’s a weight she can carry.
When she speaks again, her voice is stronger and she doesn’t bother to try to hide the pain and confusion that cracks through it. “You have barely been able to even look at me the last few times we’ve seen each other and now you want to move in?” Her eyes do not break from their intent focus on him - maybe she's watching for signs this is just some joke. Mazikeen likes how direct Gale is being now, how sure he sounds, but it’s so at odds with their last encounters she’s not sure what to make of it. This sounds more like the Gale who had asked her questions after their fight, who had shown her around his home and made her laugh. Who'd worked his way so effortlessly into her heart.
