i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do
---------- i hope you dream of me
She does not go down easily. Gale can feel a sharp ache in his hip where she kicks him, and his side where she slams her shoulder. His healing has not yet recovered; he considers it unnecessary in the moment. There are more important magics to strengthen.
Foremost is the one it takes to shove a shadow of Power down her throat so he might more easily set fire to her lungs. He has never seen a body burn from the inside out before, and the ghost of the recently killed Gale lingers close enough to make him curious.
Just before he sets her ablaze though, the shadow within Eyas’ chest begins to writhe. She falls to the sand, her weight sliding against his side, the hard edge of her wing pressing on the bruises left by her earlier struggling.
‘Power’, she breathes against his ear, and fills his eyes with Images while his shadows caress a heart with the ability he had found in the angel.
“Oh.” The word is soft, barely more than an exhalation of breath. It is not Gale who says it, but the thing that wears him, the voice crisp and cool as he draws a crescent of blood along her shoulder rather than peel the flesh from it.
“That is something quite impressive. Something new?”
She has sent images of two children, golden and blue. They’d look like the pet that Malik had mentioned - Myrna - and as he looks down at his dying sister, Gale wonders if that palomino filly might be a more distant relation as well.
He does not have enough strength to pull it from her mind. Should he let it go, he wonders, abandon the opportunity to find more victims in favor of this one?
Yes, Gale decides, brushing Eyas’ forelock away from where it covers her face.
He cannot risk losing the ability again, not when it had slipped through his grasp once before. The moment he’d torn it from the dead angel’s chest, the power had died as well. There are some magics he cannot understand, but one thing he knows for sure is that he needs Eyas alive to use this one.
But she is dying, he thinks, looking down at her body. Perhaps she is even already dead. Are her lungs rising and falling or has he set her ablaze while distracted, and the flames are already burning within her chest?
Gale isn’t quite sure, but he does know that she is in excruciating pain. It feels incredible, and the smile on his navy face as he straightens out more of her dark hair is so wide he can feel his own pain at the edges.
He is not focused on anything but the sensation, and without focus the magic that he accrues flows in a way that the Curse had not quite anticipated, but that he does not alter. This is a new host, for all that it feels the same. This Gale has just died, and bits of him still linger at the edges of his mind, still exist in the twists and crannies of the body wearing a brindle stallion’s shape. Better to not fight all the instincts, to save his strength for the more important battles of exorising his host.
Perhaps that is what tips his decision, that and the fact that he might lose augmented Power for the second time.
He chooses to heal her rather than let her die. He does so from the inside, invisible, leaving the plethora of superficial wounds that litter her buckskin body, the sharp cuts and aches and burn of wings broken in such a way that only power might set them right again.
“Give it to me.” He says gently, soft against her ear. “And I will keep you alive.” His magics are weaker than her own right now, and he is not certain if he can force her to comply. Perhaps fear might, he thinks, and he presses one of the sharp points of his glowing horns to her throat.
GALE |
