Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
There are many crescent moons reflected in the monster’s glittering sides, and the repeating image makes Gale’s head ache. He jerks away from, his mouth burning with acidic blood, and roars his fury.
The bellow of a utahraptor becomes draconic as Mazikeen shifts, and Gale transitions without even realizing it happens. Not until he tastes the fire at the back of his throat that isn’t boiling blood, but rather the flaming breath of a dragon. His bright scales are mostly bright daisy-heart yellow, the petal white feathers of his wings a perfect contrast to Mazikeen’s obsidian scales.
Mazikeen flares her deep blue wings to taunt the creature, and Gale takes to the sky, soaring over Ripley just to dive back down, his clawed feet extended and the fire lurking behind bared teeth. It lunges at Mazikeen and Gale alters his path, and focuses not on the dizzyingly armored monster but instead the idea of crushing it, having experienced how claws slipped off it before.
Something happens.
He isn’t entirely sure what it is. The monster was there beneath him, lunging toward the black dragon, and then somehow the ground grew larger and he landed faster than he could account for, and with a pounding migraine. He forces his eyes open, ignoring Mazikeen and focusing instead on finding the thing they’d been hunting.
There is a sharp pain in his left foot, and he looks down to find a knife-like tail blade embedded in his reptilian toe. It is a very small knife, befitting the very small monster that is half crushed beneath his left foot, its snapping head(s) trapped between the pointed claws.
No longer an animal of comparable size to the horse it had just hunted down, the monster is now no larger than a housecat. It’s still dangerous, and he can feel where it bleeds acid through the bottom of his feet. Gale snarls in pain and clenches his feet, casting out with Wishbone’s magic for whatever the thing has that are like bones, and uses it to hold it still.
He steps away only when he is sure that he knows its not-bones well enough to toss it away if it attacked. The magic had felt like eons and had taken no small amount of Power, but has taken only the blink of an eye.
.
How long he can hold the little monster he is not sure, but at least now he is free to focus on Mazikeen. This isn’t an unfamiliar interaction for the pair of them, meeting eyes over a dead meal, or one so incapacitated it might as well be. This is when she turns her attention to him instead, to punish him for taking her kill by pinning him to the ground with her body weight, and he manages to earn her mercy.
Yet as his blue eyes meet hers there is something in them that is not familiar. It’s something that been missing for some time, since before the Curse that inhabits Gale had begun to the feel the alterations to its own soul.
It is anger, so hot it blazes white in her orange eyes.
He becomes very still, very quickly. The only movement is the night wind, cold and dusty as it whips through the wasteland, riffling through his feathers.
He thinks perhaps even the monster has grown still, but perhaps it is just that his world has narrowed to Mazikeen alone. They ache in his head causes dark ribbons to flicker at the edges of his vision, writhing like the shadows within him. The same shadows that pulse with Power at the intensity of the emotion she's feeling, and that move behind his wary blue eyes as he waits to see what is coming next.
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