[mature] as out of my control as anything has ever been

[Gale]

Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you The cold wind tugs at his mane, and Gale narrows his ice-lashed eyes to peer down the slope of the mountain ahead of him. The way to the lake is a long one even in the heart of summer, when the snow was but an occasional dusting of powder. It is not nearly so easy now, when he must shove his way through the snow with his knees and chest. It is hard, cold, miserable going, but it gives him something to focus on that is not the spiral of his thoughts. He becomes single-minded on his purpose, so intent that he does not think to look overhead for impossibly golden birds. Instead, he realizes Mazikeen is coming only when her shadow passes over him, and Gale turns his electric blue gaze up. Mazikeen is shifting into a white dragon, black-spiked and glowing against the afternoon sky. He stops his downhill trek where he stands on a windswept stone ledge beside an impressive drop. As Mazikeen begins to dive, Gale’s mind begins to wander. Should he let her kill him, as she seems intent upon? The magic spent to return him to life would surely be enough to restore all memories of his time cursed, but what are the alternatives? Expend just enough to keep himself alive and risk what memories might come with the magic? Gale runs out of time just as this thought occurs to him, and is forced into action. A pair of wings, white, feathered, one slashed in red, erupt from his sides just as the mountain quakes with her bellow. He leaps, and if he’d been quicker he might have avoided the talons digging into his hindquarters. But better that than be buffeted back against the cliff by the force of her wing, he thinks, catching the wind beneath his own wings. He’d almost let himself forget how it felt to have wings, to fly. He feels both free and solaced, a strange pair of emotions that he has no time to enjoy because just as the lightning dances along his white pinfeathers, so do the shadows. Gale remembers Mazikeen as a white dragon, her eyes gone rage-blank as she devours him. The parched earth and dry canyons around them suggest Pangea, and there is an acrid smell in the air stronger even than the blood and dust. He opens his eyes to find himself tumbling forward, wings half-folded as he falls through the open sky. Attempting to aim for a place where the snow has piled thick, the brindle pegasus slows himself as best he can before crashing into the mountainside. Pain lances through him, but as soon as he moves he begins to heal. The physical pain disappears, only to have its place taken by the black dread of consequence. When the memories have faded - he’d left Wishbone for dead and torn out Mazikeen’s eyes - he does not move, or even open his own eyes. Perhaps she will swoop down again. This time he won’t run. While he is dead, he thinks, at least he will not have these memories. @Mazikeen