[private] what if we're all that we thought; Mazikeen

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you She answers him for the bear to hear, her words loud in the winter air. Gale grins, exhaling a floating cloud of mist as the shadows around the other shifter’s legs wind up and become grasping black tentacles. They reach for particular bones, using his Vision and familiarity with Wishbone’s magic to find the long and short pasterns of the prey’s front legs and crush them to dust. The grey stallion stumbles forward, catching himself for just a moment and splitting the night air with a piercing scream. Gale rips the end of it from his throat with a beak that cauterizes, having shifted to a phoenix the moment that Mazikeen had. The terror and fear that seeps out of the stallion returns to him in the way the blood of his neck clots and the skin of his neck draws closed over muscle and tendon that mend just enough to slow his inevitable death. And then realizes what he’s doing, what he’d made far too much of a habit of doing lately, and rips away the layers of magic that kept the stallion’s body together. Gale snarls, and when he leaps forward it is not as something with a shape. He’s a mass of shadows and teeth and claws, biting and tearing and ripping and shredding at an impossible speed. Only when the horse has been rent down to nothing but bits of flesh and bone along the river’s edge does the mass of darkness slow. The movements grow more natural, and the darkness becomes a single shape, one that matches Mazikeen. “Couldn’t help it” says the casual shrug of his dark shoulders as he strides closer. Mazikeen had already been furious - about what he’s still not sure - and he’s wondering if she’ll turn phoenix again to better express the flame of her rage.

@Mazikeen