Mazikeen’s rage is not enough to drown out the flash of hurt in her orange eyes when it uses Gale’s sweetest voice to speak to her. Nor is the rage enough to completely stop a small part of her heart from whispering quietly into her mind an answer to that threat:
I know
She hates that response, hates that even a small piece of her is weak enough that it has already accepted that outcome. The rest of her sure hasn’t.
She can feel the white-noise fury begin to seep in the corners of her mind but she fights it off for now. She does not want to get so lost in this battle that if someone were to come across them she would be incapable of warning them away. Not-Gale shifts into a blue leopard. Two of them. Confusion is chased quickly by realization as she feels the familiar sensation of her vision being altered.
Later, she’ll be angry with Gale for not using all of his tricks with her. She had not thought to demand it so that she could be better prepared for this inevitable fight. This is a more creative use of the vision magic than she expected.
She’s even a little impressed.
Given time, Mazikeen would be able to determine which leopard is which but she does not have that time. She guesses poorly and while she turns to snap her teeth at the leopard on the right, the other makes impact and she can feel teeth trying to get through the thick fur on her neck as claws grab for purchase. A frustrated snarl escapes her and she jerks her head viciously to try to knock at the leopard with her horns and get her throat free. She quickly changes again, first into a small thin snake that can slip through the leopard’s jaw before they close (if it had not been knocked away) and then as she stretches onto blue fur this slender form thickens into a boa.
Mazikeen curls herself around Gale’s throat - constricting as each coil joins the one before, blood from where the leopard’s teeth had scraped her throat smearing along her white, glowing scales. All while she’s screaming apologies in her head and repeating this isn’t him, this isn’t him and he’ll heal, he’ll heal.
@[Gale]