i've never fallen from quite this high | savage pony

[Gale]

Gale run away with me-- lost souls and reverie running wild and running free If Gale still had the memory of falling off his very first cliff, he would rank this fall just below it, at least in terms of damage left after waking up. If he were not already blue, the bruises would color him brightly, the last remnants of his body healing itself from the inside out. A few hours of sleep have done the healing and intense rehabilitation it would take another horse years to accomplish. His rest has been taken by the healing, and Gale is near exhaustion even as he blinks bleary eyes down at the world below him. It takes him a moment to realize that he is not seeing his shadow on the earth below, but rather a black horse. He blinks again, seeing two of her, then four. His stomach churns uncomfortably, and he closes his eyes with a quiet groan. There’s a voice from below, one that he knows to be the black horse. They’re the only one near enough (though he cannot be entirely sure of this, his vision having betrayed him in a myriad of ways). “How long ago did Loess burn with dragonfire?” He asks. Or at least, he tries to ask, with the last words devolving into a hacking cough. His throat burns and he expels a mouthful of ash. He can heal, but his body cannot make foreign matter disappear entirely, it seems. The strangeness of his requests occurs to him only afterward, and he wonders what the stranger must think of him. A horse in a tree, streaked with soot that’s been washed away as the ice of high altitudes melted and dripped away and onto the leaves around him. “I’m Gale, by the way.” @[basilica]