Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
What Gale knows of kelpies is limited. He’s seen them beneath the clear water of the eastern sea, and knows the stories. Kelpies they are the violent ones, the dangerous ones, the naiads with teeth.
He’d told himself to be cautious, and then he’d still volunteered to show her something that would remind her of the Underneath. His attempts at being a good friend are going very poorly indeed.
“Sabal isn’t dangerous,” Gale reassures her, and then apologizes for being less than thoughtful with his offer.
“Rock sheep it is!” Gale gestures west, and then leads the way through the mountains. The path is narrow, more easily climbed by the feet of goats, but by the time the sun begins to sink toward the horizon ahead of them, they have found the rock sheep.
A flock of fifteen or so, mostly gray and black like the cliffs, with a few paler like the streaks of marble that run through the heart of the mountains. Half of them are lambs, spry and light-footed little things that make Gale feel like a lumbering oaf.
Gale tells Ciri what he knows of them, and laments that they’d not found the cloud sheep he’d been looking for. He gets distracted, talking, and doesn’t notice he’s begun to slip away before it’s too late.
He is looking away from her, toward the sheep, and he cannot move his body. He can talk though, Gale thinks. At least a little. “Ciri there’s something I have to -” He manages to get out and then he is gone.
Distracted by its brief tussle with Gale, the Curse does not realize that he’d been saying something just before it had pushed him aside. It blinks, and shakes Gale’s head as if he is puzzled, and says as Gale often does when he gets distracted by his own thoughts: “Was I saying something?”
@[Ciri]
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