Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Gale's skin burns, orange flame on blue skin, and the Curse rips its sharp-toothed grip from Mazikeen’s throat just as she shifts from hippogriff to eagle, unable to bear the pain any longer.
Recovering quickly from the short fall, the brindle leopard turns back to Mazikeen.
The whole of its underside glows a soft pale cream, and the Curse smiles with Gale’s handsome mouth. There’s an uncomfortable ache in its belly for just a moment, and then Gale’s healing rends the venom-turned-poison completely harmless. The rest of her blood drips down Gale’s golden mouth and stains his glowing neck and chest.
It licks its lips.
When it had hunted the deer and wolves of Hyaline, The Curse had most enjoyed feeling the heartbeat stop while it held down its victim’s throat.
Gale tries to yawn, but finds when he attempts to so that he has no body. Nor does he have eyes to open, so instead the brindle opens his Eyes and finds only black. He smells nothing but what most resembles the back of a dry cave he once ventured into as a mole. What is happening to him?
The sensation of not being inside but not in control of his own body is not an unfamiliar one for Gale, but it is. He begins to look for an escape, and it is with a renewed vigor that the Curse had not anticipated.
Mazikeen has been on the defensive for most of their battle, but now she attacks with a savagery it had not anticipated. She pushes him back, and by the time it takes to the air as an osprey there is significantly less navy hair on Gale’s hide.
While the Curse had focused on fighting Mazikeen, Gale has slipped nearer, Seeing his way nearer to where he belonged. But now the Curse can See him too, and chooses to share the vision on the ground below them.
Mazikeen, poisoned and bleeding out from the great rend in her throat, is engulfed in orange flame on the mountainside below. Gale screams with his own mouth, shrill and furious and terrified. The sound is brief, cut off before it can summon anyone else to witness the death of the Alpha.
Only Gale and the Curse will see this, circling overhead in the shape of an osprey and waiting for her to die as it digs through the slowly blackening edges of her visual memory to find where she had left the twins.
@[Mazikeen]
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Gale
