"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Gale’s eyes are closed, but his vision does not wander. He focuses instead on his other senses, on the sound of the surf and Eyas’ sobs, of the feel of the wind in his white mane and the way his sister’s body shudders against him. She is at Denial, he thinks to himself, remembering what Pteron had once told him about the stages of grief. She needs time to reach Acceptance, where Gale has settled.
Her sarcasm startles him out of his contemplation of the floral scent of spring in the air, and the brindle stallion pulls away to contemplate her with brilliantly blue eyes. He’s sure his plan will work - he simply needs to ensure that no bit of him (physical or magical) will survive . He’s found an Ancestor that will take care of that for him, and he’s sure he’s considered every other alternative. That certainty causes him to narrow his eyes slightly at Eyas’ claim of a solution, but he listens with rapt attention nonetheless.
Having accepted his fate doesn’t mean he’s lost his desire to live, after all. He’s just acknowledged its inevitability.
Another host?
His narrowed eyes morph into a full scowl, but it’s not at Eyas, but rather at a point just over her shoulder as he contemplates the idea. Another host, someone that wasn’t Gale.
He could live, he realizes, he could live forever.
But only if someone else takes the Fate meant for Gale. Gale feels suddenly trapped, awash with conflicting emotions - hope, joy, despair. That last comes in a wave heavier than any of those in the sea beside him, made double by the way he feels it for the sister beside him as well.
And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love
“Can’t?” Eyas lipped, and then much quieter, “Or won’t?”
She knew the answer. Gale was … not like her. Tiercel was not like her. The dream of having the past in all its rosy perfection was impossible; the little pegasus mare felt it slipping through her grasp like so many grains of sand on her brother’s beach.
Then it was settled. Eyas shivered uncontrollably and let the ache settle alongside the others in her heart, where it could blacken like the rest of her, and that very moment Gale died for the second time. Perhaps it was for the best; so much had already been ruined by their line, and in a stupid, outdated fashion her brother was choosing the right thing when that choice meant losing everything in return. He was a hero, and Eyas…
Eyas was a mother now. She had children of her own, one who’d been wronged by her and deserved every right to give it back to her as she expected he would, sooner rather than later. The other two were the crowning joy of her life, and with the last vestiges of that she would cling onto living for them, but not one moment after. If Gale was intent to die then she was also, and this time she intended to make sure of it. No starvation, no half-assed fights with dragons. A real and true reunion with the horses she couldn’t live without.
If Gale could have his heroic deed, then she could have this secret promise to herself. Eyas tucked the plans away and lifted her nose, mouth pursed to offer her blue boy a farewell kiss. “I can’t stay here and pretend to be on board with this.” She told him sadly, “I hope the fey grant your wish, and that you have five years instead of two.”
Ready to end the conversation she lifted her hooves and walked a few strides, but a second later she paused as if remembering something. “And Gale?” Eyas turned to address him, blinking in the dark, “If ‘it’ happens before you have enough sense to go to the mountain and stop it, just know that I’ll be watching.”
Not a threat. A sibling's promise.
Grey clouds roll over the hills, bringing darkness from above
@[Gale]
@[The Monsters] mess up her Possession, please.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Gale’s memories of their childhood are patchy and incomplete, but he has continued to regain them. The rate at which they come is slower now, perhaps once or twice a year rather than every hour, but still frequent enough that he recognizes the familiar swooping sensation in his belly.
Their mother had been teaching him about something (the sound of her words are missing but he knows that particular stance and expression on the navy-winged mare), but he’d promised to meet Tiercel on the edge of the cliff to play a prank on Eyas. What the prank had been escapes him, but he Sees the fear and then the laughter as they flash across her face, and can almost feel the way they’d tussled to the ground afterward and Tiercel had to break up the scuffle so they could avoid being spotted by their father or Pteron on patrol.
When the memory fades, he blinks his bright eyes as if to refocus, and settles on Eyas just as she speaks again. She’s leaving. She’s leaving?
He’d been alright with solitude when he’d chosen it, but when faced with this feels suddenly rather alone. It’s not a comfortable sensation, but there is no arguing with the firm set of his sister’s mouth, no taking back what he’d said and done and chosen.
He’d thought it through, he reasons with himself, he knows this is the right choice even if in the moment it might feel otherwise. He has always trusted reasoning over feeling, and making a change feels unfathomable at this point in his life.
Five years, she says, and that sounds like a remarkably short time. Before, he’d had forever, the endless eternity of the immortal. He frowns, but doesn’t speak, not even when she turns to go.
This time, her words make him smile. Her promise is reassuring for reasons he can’t quite name, so instead he just nods in acknowledgement of her words. Talkative Gale says a single word: “Good”, and resigns himself to his fate.
The Monsters come when he is alone again, and though he fights them off, it comes at a cost. He knows better than to take their Sight, knows the splitting headache that always results, rendering him nearly helpless for days afterward. But there are too many of them and no other options, and in the end he is alone on the black sand of the beach and he is alive.
But the thing that was inside him, the thing that the Dark God had cursed him with, that has come alive as well. It is not quite the Curse of his father, nor the Curse that afflicts so many in the woods, making corpses of them in the moonlight. It is something else, something born of fear and worry and magic and the Monsters of the Darkness, and of Gale witnessing things behind their eyes that he was never meant to See.
