Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
He waits for her to answer, watching curiously as she sends the children off. She hadn’t introduced them, but Gale decides he will find them again. He is not the most adept with children, having rarely interacted with them, but there is something curious about their bright eyes, and Gale is always curious. He is thinking of that, and almost smiles, at least until he meets Eyas’ gaze again.
Despite the fact that she’d sent the children away and could speak freely, it somehow feels as though she is not. She asks a question that seems so obvious that Gale only frowns in reply. Wolfbane had changed from their loving father to a violent animal; surely there had been some observable descent? For the briefest moment it occurs to him to blame his family, for not watching everything as carefully as Gale would have, but that moment is subsumed by the dread that her answer confirms.
He had known it was progressive, but never the pace of it. That Eyas, living with their parents, would have seen its progression had seemed obvious to him, and he realizes his mistake only now. The brindle stallion follows his sister’s gaze out to sea, lost in the dark miasma of his thoughts. He’s pulled out by her interjection, and at the addition to the story she’d told him. Wolfbabe had eaten Wyrm’s heart? Surely that was an important part of the tale. Eyas' silence suggests her thoughts are drifting, and given the topic Gale is less hesitant to borrow what she is seeing without explicit permission.
Heartfire is there, looking just as she had when he’d first met her, and Gale watches his father consume his great-grandfather’s heart in the reflection of her blue eyes. She’d been the killer? Yet Bane had eaten the heart and with it accepted the Curse. Gale is quite sure he had not eaten a heart, and yet his brow furrows.
He had flown through the heavy smoke over Loess, thick and well-feuled by the flora and fauna that burned below. His parents had burned, he thinks, and they’d been part of the smoke. The thought of inhaling his parents makes him nauseous, so Gale ventures down an alternate avenue of explanation.
“You’ve not noticed anything…different since their deaths, have you? About yourself, I mean. Any new…abilities?” Eyas had flown beside him out of their burning childhood home. She’d cleared the same smoke before they parted ways somewhere over Sylva, him toward the Meadow, her toward….somewhere. She should be experiencing the same thing, the shifting, but she does not seem suspicious as they discuss the curse, as he is sure she would if she were hiding something from him. For all their separation and the distance that has grown between them, Gale is still sure he can read his little sister’s face.
@[Eyas]
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