Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
He closes his eyes in a yawn, and is pleased to find that Mazikeen is still there when he reopens them. She’s still smiling too, and it feels almost like the last year hadn’t really happened at all.
She says his name, and it sounds wonderful, and then a great many things happen at once. His wide-pupils shrink in the growing light, Mazikeen grows wings and puts herself between him and the sky, and his field of vision shrinks to a flat screen of feathers. They brush against his long whiskers, soft and solid all at once, and he almost forgets about the return of the light until she says something.
“Looks like feathers to me,” He replies, knowing that his voice will be muffled. Then he pulls away, just enough so that he can use the edge of his jaw to nudge her flared wing out of the way so he can look at the sky unobstructed.
“The moon is still up there,” he says, “Just past the edge of the sun.” Something else had happened too, he thinks, and he looks up to see the dark familiar shape of Erne against the sky. It is so bright that he frowns, but he wants to know more, so he leaps out of the tree.
He’s an osprey long before he hits the ground, and Gale rides the warm summer breezes higher and higher over the glittering lake. The world seems to be glowing brighter and brighter, and Gale’s blue eyes narrow. When he feels the air begin to grow cold, he knows he is nearing his physical limit, and slows with an irritable osprey’s shrill.
“What was that?” He says aloud, mostly to himself and to Mazikeen if she’s followed his reckless flight. The phenomena was surely magical. But whose magic? And why? The questions are enormous, and the sunlight seems to have burned away the shadows around his thoughts, leaving him insatiably curious.
He feels something oddly warm, and he shivers, losing a few feet in altitude as he does. The sensation is not painful, but it is foreign and unexpected. It fades as quickly as it had come, and he does not notice the way his cremello markings and scars have begun to glow with the light emitted by the sun.
@[Mazikeen]
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