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]
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