everything looks worse at night, i think i'm overthinking

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you The desire to shrink away, to become something small and incapable of judgment. He feels that, the compulsion to prioritize himself, and once he is able to name it, he finds that it is easier to do away with it. Gale meant what he had said to Casimira: he wants to make things right. Perhaps this is his first chance to do so, though he had not expected it to come so quickly. He is wondering how to begin when Malik accuses him of convenient amnesia, and Gale’s eyes widen in surprise. Well, not a ridiculous assumption, he realizes; it does sound like something a monster might have done. His son - Malik - is right to be wary. What else has Gale done to make him so? The guilt sits uncomfortably in his chest, but he knows better than to linger too long on the question, lest he summon the lightning and the memories. Instead, he focuses on doing his best to answer Malik’s question, telling him what he does remember. Mazikeen was pregnant with twins, the magician had told them, and they were due in late spring. He’d been in the forest, and then Tephra, and there had been a kelpie in Hyaline’s lake. The order of the memories is scrambled, but he details them all save one. Some things are not for children, even children that are fully grown. “You were supposed to go to my brothers,” he finishes, and though he knows there is little hope that the man in front of him had a happy childhood raised in the brotherly Isle or bustling Taiga. Surely no child raised by Yanhua or Nashua would have such jagged edges to their eyes.