Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Young Gale is very bad at interpreting facial expressions. It’s one of his mother’s greatest disappointments (she wants them all to be worldly diplomats), but even Gale can read the shock on the mare’s white face.
She’d been concerned before, fitting given his answer, but something about his introduction had startled her.
He knows, too, that she is not someone easily startled. That much seems clear, and becomes even more so when she answers him with a furious ‘No’.
Not stolen then, so he still has two puzzles ahead of him. The first is what he’s doing here, and the second is who this mare might be. Gale meets her gaze, finding the orange color a rather pleasing contrast to the paleness of her skin. She is searching for something in his eyes, he can tell.
He returns the favor, and Looks for something in her eyes as well.
Gale finds himself there, wearing the same older face that he’d seen reflected in the water, as well as progressively younger (though not quite so young as he feels). She most definitely knows him, and Gale’s breath catches at what she’s seen of him. Battle, friendship, love, death, murder.
Gale doesn’t recognise himself in those memories any more than he recognizes Mazikeen, and the step he takes away is unconscious. He realizes the moment he does it though, feels that there is something that hovers in the air between them. This body wants to be near her, but Gale does not.
He shivers, just as she tells him that he is here of his own accord. Can that be, he wonders? The simplest explanation for both puzzles is that time has passed. Time that he cannot remember. Time during which his future has turned out very different than he’d planned. By the time he was this old, Gale should have been living in the Pampas or Sylva, married off to a child of the former leader, and doing his part to expand the family’s empire.
Instead, it seems he’s become a killer and a thief, and this white mare has seen it all. Had they deserved to die, he wonders? That brown stallion and the purple-haired mare? They must have; surely he can’t have grown up only to lose his own soul.
At that thought, something within him stirs.
Gale looks down toward his chest, where the sensation rises. It feels like there is sand falling inside him, like something is opening, like...
“That was unpleasant.” It is the voice of the Curse, shaking Gale’s white mane out like it might clear away some of the young stallion from his own head. “I couldn’t tell he’d come back.” The crystalline shield had become a prison, blocking the awareness of passing time from the shadowy thing inside it until Gale’s worry about his soul had passed into the thing that had taken it.
How long had he been gone?
Long enough to worry Mazikeen. Long enough that Gale has been able to (mostly) recover from what the Curse has done to him over the years. Will it take as long to drive him out again, the Curse wonders? Or will this adolescent with fragmented memories be easier to quash than the grown man?
He scowls at some distant point on the lake, his brow furrowed in thought. His head is beginning to pound. When he shifts, his color changes as well, from iridescent blue to shadow. He is not quite black, but rather holds the shape of a horse while the shifting shadows flow like black smoke trapped beneath glass. And then his shape is not a horse at all, but a kelpie, one that leaps into the water with a splash.
His first victim is a bluegill, then a bass, and then he loses track, lost in the bloodlust. He kills but does not consume, leaving the waters behind him red with blood as he lashes out. The ache in his head does not subside, but he does feel somewhat better.
Turning to Mazikeen in the murky depths, his blue eyes fix on hers.
He does not want to kill her, and that more than anything is proof he has changed. Had it been the magic, he wonders? Have there been other alterations he is not aware of? He begins to frown again, but he is tired of thinking.
The aquatic slaughter had stopped it for a while, but now it is time to try something else. Sex is usually the next attempt, but as he moves nearer, he finds he has no desire for that either. Not in this moment, anyway, regardless of the way his body responds as he drifts across her back. Later.
“I need to sleep,” he says against her ear. “I’ll have to kill Gale in the morning, and I am tired.” She’d wanted to save Gale once, but he doesn’t think of that as he says it. He thinks instead of the glittering monster, which feels like mere moments ago, and of the strength it had taken to crystallize himself twice.
He yawns.
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