Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
The explanation of her aquatic heritage is met with an intrigued nod of Gale’s head. Nereid and kelpie, a combination he had not considered. While Gale knows there are a great many equid species living in Beqanna, he’s not made the effort to learn much about any of them. Perhaps Sabal and her kind are not bound to salt water at all. He wants to ask, having looked admiringly at her finned tail, but her answer regarding Breach dashes the last good-natured curiosity from his expression.
Kinda dead? For a while?
Had the Afterlife closed with her on the other side, he wonders, or had something happened to her in the darkness? Sabal looks nervous, and so Gale begins to feel nervous. Nervous and frustrated by the inability to remember the name of the orange-eyed mare.
Sabal knows who she is though. And knows him, too?
Gale begins to shake his head slowly, his blue eyes narrowed. The brindle is wondering who exactly Sabal might be - a friend to the white mare, or the one responsible for his inability to remember? He doesn’t know a lot about nereids, but are they capable of enchantment? He knows kelpies can control through touch sometimes, so he takes a step away from the water just as Sabal announces: Mazikeen.
Mazikeen. Leader of Hyaline. Sabal’s best friend and someone important to him.
Important how? Were they friends as well, he and Mazikeen? No, he thinks, or else Sabal would have simply said it. So it seems they are more than friends then, even though Gale had accepted a decade ago that he had no interest in love. He frowns, because this does not make very much sense at all.
He closes his eyes, and takes a long quiet breath. He tries to remember anything at all from before he’d woken up. There is only darkness, and a building ache in his head, and then one thought that does not make much sense at all, but he says it aloud anyway.
“I brought her a...” He trails off, trying to pinpoint the face of the black and white stallion, or the name of the starry purple mare. “I brought her a present. Presents?” The last is a question, because even though he suspects there are three, he cannot say for sure why, or even what they are.
When he tells the story of the entities in the future, Gale will leave out the way he’d lept - startled - nearly out of his skin at the sound of something moving at his feet. (He’d grown up with snakes of the outback, he’d argue, a rational reaction).
A tree begins to grow, so rapidly that magic must be involved, yet Gale is sure that neither he nor Sabal are responsible. The tree grows larger - a pine - and then flames sprout where needles should be, and Gale stares in wonder even as he steps back to get a better look at the pine and its reflection in the lake.
While he was looking at the flames, a statue has appeared, and a ring of glowing light now shines at the edges of the border.
“She said she’d like an entity,” Gale says, but the words are slow as he attempts to puzzle out their origin. “What did you say her name was? Mazikeen?” He glances back toward Sabal, and frowns.
“She must definitely be someone important to me.” If he’s brought her three of them, says the raise of his brow at the sight of the three magics. Protection for the borders and the children, the ability to see danger in the future, and the opportunity for even the weak to arm themselves.
Gale knows even less about romance than he does about nereids, but he is fairly sure this is an impressive gesture, so he looks very closely at Sabal after he speaks. So closely that he is really just staring without blinking, as he often does.
@[Sabal]
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