"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
02-26-2022, 12:19 PM (This post was last modified: 03-15-2022, 07:26 AM by kahzie.)
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Thunder peals overhead, accompanying the staccato patter of rain that pours down from full iron clouds. Water has been falling the better part of the day, drenching the colorful flora of the island and turning the turquoise sea to dull gray green. Where Gale stands beneath the heavy boughs of a violet tree, he is protected from most of the rain, and the chill in the autumn air is held at bay by his thick navy hide. He appears less iridescent than in the summer months, and the near-white brindle marks along his neck and sides are so grown out he appears more roan than striped.
He’s staring out into nothingness, a habit he has had since childhood: lost in thought.
Sheltered in the bole of a nearby mango tree, a black osprey keeps watch for the both of them. Erne’s eyes have become yellow once more, losing the matching shade of electric blue he’d had while Gale had been afflicted with the Curse. With them, he peers through the colorful undergrowth, searching for any sign of movement. Soon he will leave to feed himself, and when he does he will call his companion back to himself. For now though, he allows the stallion his time to think.
He can feel the lightning where it flits across his skin, feel the warmth as it darts through his tangled hair and then sinks back beneath the surface of his body. It calls to him, almost as loudly as the lightning in the clouds does, a call so strong that he feels it in his bones. He remembers the first time he’d answered it, and how everything in the world had become so bright and simple.
The world had felt right again, felt like a place he might belong, just for a moment. And then…
Then he had begun to remember.
They were not his own memories. Gale has his own memories, patchy and incomplete as they are. No, these were the memories of someone else - something else. Memories so terrible he does not want to remember them, but when the lightning comes they inevitably strike, like the death and destruction that follows in the wake of a glorious storm.
Yet still the lightning beckons him, tugging at him like the wind pulls at his long white mane. Gale had hoped that his desire to answer it would grow weaker with time. But autumn is a season full of storms, and the navy blue magician feels the lightning no less with each squall, and nearly as strongly between them.
Gale’s usual method of distraction is to wander the island, staying always on the move. The place has changed some in the five years since he had lived here, but he has no desire to see it in the rain, and so has instead been trapped (but dry) with his thoughts for the better part of the morning.
The harsh scree of an osprey pulls him from his melancholy, and Gale turns his head to see Erne taking flight, circling Gale once, and then heading toward the freshwater lake at the center of island where he preferred to find his meals.
Though neither stallion nor osprey have seen anyone in the months since their return, the pair remain wary. With Erne gone, Gale takes up the position of watcher, doing his best to keep his mind from wandering. When it does, he steps out into the rain despite the chill. The steady beat of his hooves as he moves along the black sand fills his thoughts, and he thinks of nothing as he runs beside the sea.
She has been queen of Tephra for some time now, and she had yet to pay a visit to the outlying islands.
Most of it is because she does not know what to say to anyone that might be living on them. She has never quite been able to shake the idea that to visit them would be interrupting them—that they want to live their lives in quiet and peace, and for the kingdom to leave them alone unless protection is needed. She knows that Beyza is leader of one of them, her half-sister that she admittedly did not know very well, though she had seen her occasionally visiting their mother from a distance.
But the other island was rumored to be inhabited by Gale, and it ashamed her to say that she avoided the place for that very reason.
If she did not see him, she did not have to pretend he existed.
She did not have to remember living beneath his rule in Hyaline and watching him spiral.
She did not have to remember visiting Savior in Tephra only to discover he had taken the throne there and was terrorizing the residents that refused to leave with nightmares.
But mostly, she did not have to remember that he had murdered her mother.
She is not sure what comes over her today, but she spreads her dragon wings and leaves Tephra, and instead of heading toward the common grounds or to Hyaline, she steers herself to Islandres.
Perhaps the storm should have deterred her, but instead of seeing it as a warning sign she thrusts herself further into it, armoring herself with white dragon scales instead of her usual coat. She lets the strong winds billow beneath her wings, adding her own occasional effort, as if she could somehow outfly the lightning that kept flashing around her. When she lands on the shore water streams down every curve of her, her pale mane plastered against a slender neck. Almost immediately her ice-blue eyes lock onto the running form of an iridescent stallion, having not realized she had landed nearly directly in his path, so focused on the positioning of the lightning she had been.
She recognizes him immediately but is sure he won’t recognize her. Casimira had been a quiet resident in Hyaline, even though the Alliance marking on her leg was on behalf of the mountain kingdom, and she had not lived in Tephra with Gale, although Savior and Rare had.
She knows almost nothing that has transpired in his personal life, or why he behaved the way that he did. She knows only what he has done and the turmoil it had wreaked on her own life.
She does not shift into her full dragon form but her teeth grow sharp, her soft eyes narrowing into their draconic shape as she sends a warning curl of smoke from her mouth in his direction, the promise of fire close behind.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
The rain takes some time to soak his thick blue hide, but he hardly feels it when it does. The dark sand is firm beneath his feet, and he focuses on nothing but the beat of his heart and the way the air tastes of salt and metal as it passes through his half-open mouth.
His muscles begin to ache, and the lighting begins to flicker along his mane once more. Gale feels it the very same instant the white horse appears in the sky overhead, and he draws to a skidding halt long before there’s a chance he might spray them with black sand.
With his pale blue eyes narrowed beneath navy lashes, Gale attempts to identify the creature that has landed on what he’s begun to think of as his island. A white mare, but not Mazikeen, not the nameless mare from Ischia, not the dead angel from the thing’s memories. Someone new, and yet enough like them all that Gale cannot doubt at some blood relation, a train of thought that might have occupied him for some time.
But he does not have some time, for she is still standing there in front of him, with rain glancing off her glittering scaled sides. The narrowing of her eyes and the curling smoke he recognizes for what they are, and though he continues to walk toward her, he pauses just as far as he can without having to raise his voice to be heard.
“If we’ve met before, I don’t recall it, but I’d very much like to not be scorched.” What he’d really not like is the healing that would follow, and the way the lightning would come with the healing, and alongside the lightning: the memories. The same lightning would accompany any efforts he made to magically shield himself, and he does his best to keep secret the internal struggle to resist the siren call of the electricity.
The effort results in the faintest of frowns, a narrowing of his dark brow that increases the intensity of his blue gaze where it rests on the dragon mare.
Where some might have been made for this dragon’s blood, Casimira had always felt as though she was cursed with it. As a child she had been prone to mischief and adventure, but she had never been aggressive or cruel—nor did she boast much of the arrogance that other dragon’s seemed to possess. She would have been content to never discover this shifting. Would have preferred it had lay dormant for the rest of her life, so that she might have continued to live and only wonder at what it might be like to wield something stronger than serial immortality.
It has taken her years—all her lifetimes, really—to learn to control the heated flares of anger when they decide to strike. She was not born knowing how to bridle that draconic rage, how to only release it in small doses.
It is to Gale’s benefit though (to an extent—she does not know how strong his own magic is, after all) that she has grown stronger. That though her first instinct upon seeing him was to incinerate him where he stands she is not so deafened by the roaring in her ears that she does not hear him, that she does not decipher the truth of his words from what he says. The scales do not retreat, but she does, her face still a darkened scowl as she takes two steps back.
“We’ve never met. At least, not formally,” she tells him, and her voice is surprisingly quiet, even mild, in comparison to the greeting she had given him. She studies him with a piercing blue gaze, as if she is trying to peel back the truth that might be hiding beneath his skin. “My name is Casimira. I lived in Hyaline, and now Tephra.” Here, her eyes narrow again, with a pointed tilt of her delicate head. “Do you remember being king of either of those places?”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
They’ve never met, the scaled woman tells him. Some part of him is relieved at this, but it is a small and quiet part. The rest of him remains wary; the navy stallion can think of a myriad of ways he might have hurt someone he’d never met. She retreats but her voice is soft when she speaks, the combination doing little to settle his nerves.
Gale can feel the lightning as it dances across his fetlocks, but does his best to ignore it as she introduces herself.
The white mare of Ischia had called him the tormentor of Tephra, but he has no memory of being its king. His only memory of the volcanic kingdom are a few brief moments of standing in a shallow pool of water, and feeling the sunlight dappling his blue hide as he met the smiling silver eyes of a beautiful woman he’d not seen in a decade.
And King of Hyaline? How could he have ruled there, with Mazikeen knowing what he was? She wouldn’t have allowed it, he realizes, and a chill far deeper than the rain sinks into his bones. Perhaps he hadn’t directly hurt the draconic mare in front of him, but he’d most definitely done something terrible in Hyaline.
Gale has allowed his mind to wander away from the conversation, his own blue gaze a matte counterpoint to Casimira’s glittering dragon eyes. He returns to it with a shake of his head.
“I do not.” He admits, and tries not to think of the odds that she will believe him. “There is very little I can remember since…” Gale pauses, uncertain how much time has passed. “How long has it been since the Eclipse?”
There had been a time when she thought that she did. When it had become clear that he was the reason her mother was gone, when no one could summon an explanation for why he found the need to kill her. It had been there even once her mother returned, when Casimira first saw the scar that marked her chest from where Gale had reached through and ripped out her heart—an eternal reminder of what had been done. She is sure her mother finds some kind of twisted romance in the idea that her and Atrox now share matching scars across their chests, but that is something Casimira fails to see the bright side in.
She had hated the fact that anyone had done that to her to begin with, she had hated that someone had forced her to endure the turbulence of grieving her mother and watching anyone that loved her do the same, and she had been so certain that if she had ever found Gale that she would not hesitate to end him.
She had hated Gale, until he was a living thing standing before her.
Where once she had thought she wanted nothing more than to seek revenge against him, the slow-burning fury that had been living in her chest loses its ferocity at the sight of him. Her eyes, once narrowed into draconic slits, return to their equine shape—still a striking ice blue, but rounder and giving the appearance of softening. She has no way of knowing that he is telling the truth, but she has always been one to follow her instincts, and something in his mannerisms tells her he is not lying.
How many times had she done something in her dragon form and not remembered?
How many times had she awoken with blood in her mouth and no recollection of how it had gotten there, with the taste of fire still on her tongue and the fear of not knowing why she had used it?
She inwardly wrestles with these ideas in her head—with the notion that to hate him, or not believe him, would go against everything she had ever begged anyone to accept of her.
And the idea that perhaps she is just as bad as he is, that she is the villain in someone else’s story.
This realization causes her anger to deflate almost entirely, and she is left with an emptiness so great she is afraid she will sink inside of it. She looks at him, at the lightning that flickers around his legs, at the confusion in his electric blue eyes, and the emotion that tries to take up the empty space—sorrow and empathy, along with her own shame—are so overwhelming she wants to run, but something keeps her rooted where she stands. Knowing that perhaps this might be her only chance to gain any kind of insight on the man that had wreaked havoc on so many lives.
“It has been a long time since the Eclipse,” she answers him quietly, her scales now retreating and being replaced by a soft, white coat. “Years, actually.” She studies him silently for a few moments, her mind teeming with questions that she doesn’t quite know how to ask, so instead she prods gently, “Is that the last thing you remember? The Eclipse?”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Gale tries not to think, but in the silence that falls between them it is difficult for him to do anything else. His memory is like a line of clouds along a distant horizon, and as Casimira wonders if she is as much a villain as he, Gale’s blue eyes skim the tops of those clouds. They are dense until Hyaline, as thick as thunderclouds. A wind (no, the Curse, he thinks) had pulled them thin, leaving the clouds nothing more than wisps of vapor. He can tell when he came back to himself, when the clouds that are his memories once more hold a substantial shape against the horizon. But everything between is gone.
Almost everything. There are shadows between, shadows that the lightning threatens to illuminate.
Gale closes his eyes, and when he reopens them, Casimira is telling him that the shadows had lasted for years.
Gale smiles, but the expression is as bitter as it is faint, and accompanied by a shake of his head. The action sends a cascade of water down his already soaked skin, adding a physical layer of cold to the chill that feels permanently set in his bones.
“Years.” He repeats. How much damage could he have wrought in that time? Enough to merit the reaction that Casimira had greeted him with. She has lost her scales, Gales realizes belatedly; does she seem him as less of a threat now?
“I remember some things since then,” he tells her, because he does have those few memories of Tephra, and of Islandres, and of watching the sun return to the sky in Hyaline. But since then? “I am, no I was Cursed.” Magic is not an excuse for his behavior, but it had been the catalyst. “I have not been…myself these past years.”
With her anger having dissolved she allows herself to look at him with clearer eyes. She has never seen him except through a wary veil—when his mouth was always stained with blood in Hyaline, when his nightmares drove most out of Tephra, and later as the monster that had killed her mother—in quick, stolen glances. He is not really what she had expected, mostly because he is in fact rather handsome. It isn’t that she had assumed he wasn’t, but more that she had expected him to be a different brand of handsome; the kind meant to lure you in before it peeled back to show you its teeth.
And maybe that is how he used to be, but it isn’t what she sees now.
He seems…lost.
Perhaps not subdued, but still quieter than she had expected.
When he explains that he had been cursed she can feel the pieces sliding into place. She does not realize yet that he means cursed in the literal sense, because she had often thought her dragon shifting to be a curse. Though she was not the ruthless, untethered creature she had been as a youth, the memories are still alive and well in the back of her mind. It is a constant effort to ensure that she never loses control again. A daily routine of shifting far away from anyone that she might harm, testing the control that she had gained over the years lest she ever be put into the position of needing to use her dragon form as a weapon again.
She had never thought herself to be similar to her mother, but, in this moment when the ice in her eyes and chest dislodges and slides away, and she finds herself leaning towards forgiveness and empathy rather than bitterness and clinging to animosity, she is more like her than she realizes. “Cursed?” she questions him, not because she doubts or doesn’t believe him, but because she is trying to understand the scope of it. “Who cursed you?” Her mind jumps to Carnage instantly, a reflex that she is sure most raised in Beqanna have developed, though hers might be sharper considering how often her mother found herself with him. She had, after all, initially blamed him for her mother’s disappearance before the truth had finally been uncovered.
As if suddenly remembering herself, she blinks and shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly, the apology not only on her tongue but also clouding her usually clear blue eyes. “I didn’t mean to pry. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Her wariness recedes, disappearing like the scales and the glittering protection they’d offered. Gale blinks his pale blue eyes, taking in the subtle changes of her shift but stilling when he finds the red mark across her leg.
Cursed? Who cursed you?
Who indeed.
Gale blinks, and finds that he is still staring at the insignia of the alliance that decorates Casimira’s right leg. The Alliance that had ended in darkness, and monsters, and a newfound ability to shapeshift. Gale had thought the shifting a symptom of the magic driven madness that had destroyed his father, and had isolated himself on Islandres. Then he’d dreamt of Carnage, and killed a Monster, and then slowly - ever so slowly - he’d begun to lose his mind.
It began with his evenings, when he’d wake somewhere far from where he’d fallen asleep. He’d be inexplicably tired, or sore, and a time or two had even been streaked in dried sweat as if from a fight or long run. When had he finally lost control entirely, he wonders?
Everything is a blur, hazy images of high mountains and black sand, of a different white mare and shadows that move as if they are alive.
Casimira’s apology shakes him from the spiral of his thoughts, and he looks up. His dark-lashed eyes meet hers, and though he does not smile, his tone is clement as he haltingly admits: “I don’t - I’m not even sure if I know how to talk about it. I’ve not tried.”
He’s avoided trying, avoided thinking about it at all as he dwells here on Islandres.
“It runs in the family but I think…I think mine was different.” His father had become a ravenous beast, devouring whatever he could find and delighting in trickery and manipulation. The Curse had changed him.
Gale, though, hadn’t been changed. He has no memory at all of the time he’d been controlled by the shadows, and feels that perhaps only days have passed since the sun returned to the sky after the darkness of the Eclipse. But Casimira says it has been years.
The navy blue stallion has gone glassy eyed again, lost in his thoughts, but he returns to find her still there, and behind her there is sun breaking through the still-dripping sky.
“I did terrible things.” He says, unaware that one of them had been killing her mother. “I don’t remember them but I…” He’s been avoiding a great many things, not the least of them making reparations. He should, that he is sure of. Gale has no memory of the words his parents had used to teach him, but fairness and restitution are as deeply ingrained in him than the lightning. “I want to make things right.”
Gale had not expected to find himself here today, standing in the rain and confessing this to a stranger, but stranger things have happened.
He is staring at the red ‘V’ marking on her foreleg, the one that had appeared after her participation in the Alliance. She had not seen him there, because while she had won her first battle, she had chosen not to continue. While she had done well to keep her more feral dragon form in check, she could feel that it was flimsy, still lacking the stronger foundation that would come with more experience—but experience that she was not interested in gaining in the tournament-style situation.
She nods her head silently in response to what he says, understanding, to an extent. There were many other dragon shifters, and most of them did not seem to struggle the way that she did. Perhaps they were simply born stronger than her—perhaps they were simply born to be dragons, period. Ryatah had always seemed a little perplexed that Casimira had been gifted with such a thing, remarking on how she is not sure where it had come from since it was not from her, and not from Ashhal.
Perhaps it had been an accident, a power meant for someone else, and by some twist of fate it had found her.
Her silence becomes weighted when he comments that he had done terrible things. She had refrained from saying anything earlier, had intended on walking away without saying anything, but instead she finds herself telling him, “You killed my mother.” There is, oddly enough, no malice to her tone. It is said in a matter of fact kind of way, a statement of truth, but an echo of the old pain fights through the pale blue of her eyes at the memory of losing her. “Ryatah. She is one of the angels that lives in Hyaline.”
And then, surprising even herself, she says quietly around the knot in her chest, her eyes closed, “I forgive you. When I first saw you on this beach I didn’t think that I would, but I do. And I know she would forgive you, too, if she were to ever see you again.” With a rueful laugh and a shake of her head she lifts her eyes back to his face, a hesitant smile on her lips. “You’re not the first to hurt her, and she always forgives. But I cannot speak for everyone.”
