Gale
started under neon lights, then it all got dark
i only know how to go too far
Gale’s memory of his first death had been burnt alongside his body, lost alongside any part of his childhood that he’d neither Seen nor seen. Those visual memories had returned slowly, trickling in slowly, and Gale had been content to let them come in their own time.
Each time that Gale has died, the web of his memories becomes a little more difficult to unravel. These last years he has lost track of his deaths, and when he wakes this autumn morning below the fiery boughs of the Forest, this time at seems no different.
He remembers a white mare and a storm held at bay. Quick flashes, like the lightning that runs down the length of his white mane, and flickers down his white stockinged legs as the iridescent blue stallion does his best to shake off the leaf litter. Who had she been? Had she been the same mare he can remember fighting so often? Was she an enemy? Is he dead now because she is not, or had the Curse killed her too?
His head begins to spin, and his legs wobble unsteadily beneath him. He has just enough time to close his eyes before he topples face-first through the forest floor.
- - -
When he wakes again, the sand he rests on is red instead of black, and the sea is all around him. This had been the shoreline of Loess once, he knows without knowing how. The cliffs behind him had once soared high into the open blue sky. They are sunk beneath the water now, and Gale presses his eyes closed.
- - -
The sun is sinking toward the western horizon, and Gale’s blue eyes narrow to avoid the double brightness of the sun and glittering water it illuminates. The sound of a puffkeet and the black sand at his hooves tells him this is Islandres. Something moves in the greenery behind him and he turns, half expecting to find Ruinam standing there.
But who is Ruinam? His mind’s eye finds the image of a bright eyed fox but no - Gale frowns - that is not quite right. What emerges is a black boar, which eyes the horse with wary interest before continuing toward the shore. It searches for remnants from the storm, Gale surmises, looking at the debris that litters the shoreline. There had been a great storm, early in the season and incredibly destructive.
The navy horse walks down half-familiar paths for the better part of the evening and well into the night. He adjusts his vision as he must, flickers of lightning flashing across his already electric blue gaze whenever he does. Though he no longer possesses that particular method of manipulating vision, it is a gift he had been born with and one of the firsts he had perfected with the lightning magic.
By the time he emerges on the northernmost point of the black sand island, the full moon is high and heavy in the night sky. It appears especially large tonight, some trick of the atmosphere or perhaps some wayward magics playing a trick with his eyes. He squints, attempting to draw it into better focus, but the effort results only in a quickening of the rhythmic pounding in his skull.
Gale flinches, waiting for the Curse.
It doesn’t come.
The sound of the waves keeps coming. And with them comes the smell of freshly broken wood, of seaweed and aquatic things both dead and dying. Gale takes in a long breath, and opens his eyes.
There are no shadows at the edges of his vision. Not even when he looks for them, turning his head quickly side to side, and then down to his feet. Shadows no longer curl at his feet and trail in his wake as he begins to move south again, back toward the lake at the heart of the island. As he walks, he begins to search for the Curse. Probing first at his edges, Gale Looks through each bit of himself and by the time he stands in the freshwater lake he is very sure of one thing.
The Curse is gone.
He is only himself, Gale. The holes in his memory are not unfamiliar. Unlike his first death, he knows who he is this time. The details are hidden still, some far deeper than others, but he recalls enough.
Enough to feel an aching hollowness in his gut when he thinks of the mainland and the destruction he’d wrought there. The things that he does remember are horrific enough. What else had happened in those black spaces he cannot remember?
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