Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
They arrive in the mountains, and Gale snorts irritably at the heavy snow that has already fallen since his departure. Malik remains unconscious, half-buried in a drift where Gale had dropped him. his body begins to shiver as the magician contemplates what he will soon be working.
It will require some sort of Temporal Manipulation, he knows, taking back the time that has passed since the boy was stolen away from him. But how to carve the Gale out of him? How to remove the weaknesses that his host has imparted on the child and make it his instead?
In the end, he does something similar to what he’d done to Mazikeen. He reaches deep into the boy, and draws out the light. Malik becomes a vacuum then, his empty soul eager to swallow down whatever is nearby to fill the sudden void, and Gale makes sure that it is darkness and hatred and fury.
Giving away the fuel to his magic is a calculated risk. It will weaken him. But it will be worth it, the Curse thinks, and it smiles down at the immobile child. He touches the boy’s cold skin, and a shift radiates from that point of contact. Malik’s prone body becomes that of a dark leopard.
His head is aching, but the end is in sight. Gale reaches for cords that keep their world tethered to the passage of time, glowing silver things not unlike the far northern lights. One tethers Malik to the present and Gale cuts it, knotting him instead to a younger thread, one that he pulls into the present (its past).
When he looks down again, the adolescent leopard has become a young cub. Small, mewling, helpless. He nearly wastes his time, feeling the instinctive urge to swallow the small thing, but then it blinks up at him with hardly opened eyes. One of the eyes is Mazikeen’s.
So he does not try to hurt the thing as he carries it through the snow, and he places it in the den where Mazikeen rests during the storm rather than flinging it at her from the mouth of the cave where he stands.
He smiles, a proud and satisfied expression, and slowly sits to curl his own golden leopard tail around his feet and wait for her reaction.
@Mazikeen
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current appearance:glowing perlino leopard with lightning and iridescent navy blue scarring
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