"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
Sickle is disgruntled that no one is answering her question - it’s an important one. Her unease is returning, heightened by the way the mare fixes her bright orange eyes on her - by the way she looks like she is cracking all over her body when Gale whispers something in her ear and that brightness magnifies. Whatever he had said, Sickle knows it can’t have been good. Her body begins to flicker between shapes and colours in her nervousness and she takes a cautious step backwards.
--
Mazikeen should have probably known not to tease him. She’d felt comfortable enough to, because of their bargain - because she thought the other night had… well, she thought it had meant something. Was he angry she hadn't used the easing of her obedience to seek him out? Once again the pale mare feels unprepared for the game she is caught up in. No matter what she does, it feels like the wrong answer and the wrong choice.
But surely now - to the whispered command - there is only one possible response she can give him.
She wants to please him, wants to uphold her part, but this? This is too much to ask. Part of her considers going to Sickle and nipping her lightly, but she cannot believe that would be enough for the Curse who eats hearts. He knows what she is capable of, though he is more navy than golden tonight, and she doesn’t believe a light anything will satisfy him.
Mazikeen could ask how, she could delay and play her part a little longer, but the instinct to protect her daughter hasn't yet died enough that she can pretend it away.
Her body is entirely illuminated with glowing markings when she takes a step forward, heart aching at seeing Sickle take a step back and away from her, but Mazikeen turns her body and attention. She positions herself between Gale and the filly, her head turned to him and she replies with a fierce “No.” that does not betray the fear building inside of her.
And with that fear, the part of her that is learning to be detached from her emotions and connections is curious. She hasn’t defied him so blatantly since he had killed her, and this little rotten piece of her heart wonders what will happen now - even though common sense tells her she’ll regret wondering soon enough.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Gale pictures some of the ways Mazikeen might hurt their daughter, and the images bring elation to his navy face. He hopes for something bloody, remembering how the Alpha had looked with crimson streaked across her face. His excitement grows as her pale skin begins to fissure, and Mazikeen moves closer to the girl. Sickle’s step back - cautious - makes him laugh.
Good. She should be afraid.
Her mother is a fearsome thing, and the Cursed creature licks its lips in anticipation.
Will she shift? Or attack her as a horse?
He can feel his heart beating quickly, adrenaline rising.
She does neither.
Turning instead, she faces him. She defies him.
He lunges at her without thinking, shifting to something large and clawed. Midleap, he sees Sickle just behind Mazikeen, her face terrified. He makes the split second decision jump over her Mazikeen entirely, and brings his hind feet up to dig into her shoulder and give him the boost he needs to reach Sickle on her other side.
His daughter’s body is young and weak, and the navy blue cat uses its saber-like teeth to slash and rip at any part of her iridescent body he can reach.
If Mazikeen is not going to keep her promises, he’s not going to do so either.
That Weakness he’d felt, that pain in his chest, it grows dimmer as his mouth becomes ever more red.
This feels good.
This feels marvelous, he should have done this the moment he saw Sickle in Tephra.
He raises his blue eyes to find Mazikeen’s, hoping she will be bathed in the glow of her anger.
She will attack him, he thinks, and he will get another taste of the blood that has so empowered him the first time. He will devour them both and when Mazikeen wakes, he’ll make her cry out in both pleasure and pain.
But when his blue eyes find her orange ones, what he finds is not what he expects, and that sharp Wrong ache returns at her expression. The sound of Sickle’s wet gasps are an uncomfortable backdrop, and the Curse feels a rising, bitter nausea.
Gale shifts and lunges, and Mazikeen is ready for a fight. She would relish one, her burning eyes seem to say, and too late she sees how his attention looks behind her. She’s confused at first as he leaps over her, using her body to spring.
Sickle tries to scream as the feline launches itself at her but Gale’s teeth tear her throat out before the sound can become anything tangible. Her body is flashing rapidly between shapes as she is held down and torn into. And by the time Mazikeen has shifted into something with claws, as fast as she is at doing so and spinning around at the same time, it is too late. Gale raises his blue eyes to her but her attention is only on Sickle and her anger cannot defeat the horror and grief that rises up like burning acid at what she sees.
Everything that glows on her body except for her horns winks out all at once and Mazikeen crumbles at the sound of Sickle’s gasps. She can’t look away from the girl with wide, white-rimmed eyes that match her own. How that orange eye seems to focus on her, on Maze, as the filly struggles for breath enough to cry.
She doesn’t even look at Gale as grief brings her crashing to the ground, reverting back into her natural self as she does and kneeling in Sickle’s blood as Sabal had knelt in hers.
Her muzzle reaches out tentatively for iridescent skin that is not torn, and there is a cheek still intact. The first time she’s touched her daughter since she was born and the fissure this moment creates in Mazikeen’s heart goes deeper than all the rest she’s endured.
Gale had torn her open but this is Mazikeen’s fault.
Her fault she hadn’t known she’d get pregnant, her fault she hadn’t done a good enough job hiding the twins away, her fault she had defied the Curse, her fault she wasn’t fast enough to protect the girl.
“Sickle, oh Sickle.” Mazikeen’s voice is barely above a whisper as she sinks so far into grief she cannot cry. There will be anger, the promise of a fury she has never felt before is simmering in those depths as well. But it will not rise while there is enough of the filly clinging to consciousness that Mazikeen can try to offer comfort to, not while those eyes - one for Maze, one for her father - fill with tears as Sickle bleeds out. “My sweet girl. I’m so sorry.”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Gale recalls with pristine clarity the way that Mazikeen had tasted, the way each of her powers lent flavor to the heart he had consumed. He had felt full, powerful in a way that he’d achieved in no other lifetime.
But the fullness had not lasted for long, and the bottomless chasm of greed and fury that drive the thing wearing Gale had not quieted for long. Sickle’s blood had satisfied it, sweet and young, and there is still the heart to eat, if only Mazikeen would move away so he might reach it.
He still stands over the filly’s body, with Mazikeen between them now, and the light has gone out of her skin. She refuses to meet his gaze, focusing instead on Sickle, and jealously rises hot in his chest.
He pulls her head up with Wishbone’s magic, forcing her to look at him.
“This is your fault.” He tells her, his blue eyes searching hers for some spark of understanding. She knows this is her fault, doesn’t she? That if she’d just done as he’d said, as she’d promised, that Sickle would not be dying? He had known that the girl was slow, but Mazikeen has never disappointed with her cleverness.
“Try again.” He says, and the world goes dark.
---
They arrive in the past, just as Sickle asks if she is going back to Tephra. Gale has never done such a thing before, and so he still retains the blood across his face, but he remembers the future they’d lived and he meets Mazikeen’s gaze with a cold fury.
He wants the woman broken so he can put her back together in a way that makes him happy. He had forgotten this for a while, been focused too much on how she felt about him (a side effect of his sister’s empathy, perhaps?).
Time to use that empathy in a way that benefits him, Gale decides.
This too, is a new ability, and so the emotion that he sends to Mazikeen is weak. The Curse has little knowledge of emotion, and so nor is the emotion the Love that he’d intended to project.
“I want to see you hurt her,” He says again, and kisses the mark on her cheek that he'd drawn with their daughter's blood in a future that will only repeat if she refuses again to do as she is told.
Her head moves against her will, a familiar feeling - one he had used to bind her before. Some anger flickers across her gaze when it meets his but his words sink her back down into sadness as they echo the same thoughts she had been having. And those tears finally spill over, finally fall onto the struggling and dying girl.
Her fault.
She doesn’t understand his next words, and there’s a brief moment of fear as the world - and Sickle - disappear into darkness.
And then she’s standing where she had been before, her knees still stained with the blood of the filly who is whole and speaking. Sickle steps back again, this time out of confusion - seeing the adults wearing blood when they had not been a moment before.
Mazikeen can only stare at her in a mixture of horror and joy, but the joy is short-lived as Gale draws her attention again. Again he makes his command, and this time hatred floods Mazikeen’s system. It had just been a small push from him but it ignites what had already been simmering. Had her gaze been on the girl at the time, maybe it would have focused on Sickle, but now Mazikeen’s fury is reserved for only one of her companions.
Again she is alive with burning markings and this time, it is Sickle she ignores. Whatever lesson he had intended for her to learn with this exercise - it has not yet been made. There's no space in her mind to call herself back from this even if she wanted to, not this time. Not while the sound of Sickle's gurgling breaths still ring in her ears.
“Go fuck yourself.” She tells him as fury makes her voice tremble. Before the words have even finished, she shifts into a large direwolf and twists to grasp at his flesh with her teeth.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
He cannot See the tears in this timeline (even his Sight has limits, it seems), but he remembers the way they’d welled in her eyes, diffusing the orange glow. She’d understood, those tears had said, she’d learned her lesson.
They return to the past and there is hope in his chest, and when he whispers the command he’d been absolutely sure she would comply.
And yet she does not.
Gale has reversed time itself for her, and Mazikeen still has the audacity to refuse to follow his commands.
Why will she not break?
The attack is welcome, something simple to focus on. Her teeth tear at his neck, his and his feline claws rip into her shoulders, and the pair of them roll in the grass that in another future had been soaked with Sickle’s blood.
Gale has forgotten the child entirely, and remembers her only as he tumbles into her, knocked aside by a heavy blow from Mazikeen. He nearly rips into her again, but Mazikeen suddenly has her teeth around his back leg, and he spins about lest she sever it and he need to regrow a new one.
He’d felt the magic of time drain him, and the powers are connected. His healing will be the first to go, and the desire for self-preservation is stronger even than rage, so rather than leap at Mazikeen for another attack, he stays low to the ground, crouching and looking between the pair of them.
This is all going terribly Wrong. He’d wanted something simple - to watch Mazikeen hurt a child - and yet the child is unharmed and he is tired and the Alpha won’t do as she is told. For the thousandth time, he curses the brindle stallion and his choice in partner.
He closes his eyes, and a moment later Sickle drops to the ground. She is not dead, merely unconscious from a precise pinching of the nerves in her neck by the manipulation of her bones, but the sound of falling limbs is still pleasant.
He opens his eyes again, his breathing heavy, and fixes them on Mazikeen. When he speaks, his voice is low and cold and there is nothing but rage behind his eyes.
Mazikeen does not notice how her skin fuses back together after his claws tear it open, her mind is only on one thing - killing Gale. Tearing him into so many pieces there is nothing to be healed. She’s filled with so much anger and hatred that there's room for nothing else. She's forgotten Sickle is there too, until the girl accidentally stops their wrestling. Mazikeen latches on to Gale's leg so he cannot get to their daughter, snarling as she does - nothing but a wild animal.
She lets go out of surprise when the filly drops even though no one has touched her. She can see the girl still breathing though and her confusion doesn't last long, not when her fiery gaze meets his and she can see whatever patience he has is gone. Something shifts inside of Mazikeen, facing his rage. Her own still burns but sense is returning to her. Memories of what he is capable of leech in, this stallion that can now change time itself. What else could he do if she kept provoking him? How powerful has he become without her even being aware of it?
“No.” She says again but the word wobbles and it is more of a question than a statement. And when Gale moves towards Sickle it comes out more forcefully, this time with another meaning. “No.”
Mazikeen moves forwards, feeling disconnected from her own body as it approaches the filly. She will do it, so he won’t. She cannot watch that again. He will enjoy it, prolong it and she does not know how long the filly will stay unconscious.
It's a kindness, she thinks distractedly, avoiding that other future, but the decision itself has already broken her. The act itself just a bonus.
This time, she doesn’t apologize to the sweet girl who is just caught up in something so much bigger than her. Just as Mazikeen is. The alpha cannot form any words at all. This time, she lets the grief drag her so far down she cannot feel anything as she tears Sickle’s jugular with a single, clean stroke. And when she looks to Gale immediately afterwards, as her daughter’s blood pools around her paws, her orange eyes are empty of all emotion.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
The rage does not leave her eyes, but he watches as something else joins it. It is not the submission he’d hoped her, not the brimming of tears in her eye, or desperate pleading.
He does like the pleading, but instead she refuses him a third time.
Perhaps Sickle had inherited her stupidity from her mother, Gale thinks, rising from his crouch as she whispers No a second time.
Before he can move closer, she heads toward where Sickle lies, and Gale replaces the one raised paw on the ground to observe. Mazikeen is quick and efficient, and the blood sprays for only a few heartbeats.
Long enough for him to close the distance between them, long enough for him to shove her to ground with sheathed claws and pin her to the earth with the weight of his body.
He’s forgotten about the empathy he’d been using a moment before, and the conduits of magic remain open, sharing with her the immense pleasure of her obedience, the heady joy of taking a life.
“Good girl,” he croons, sharing with her the burning lust that makes the ache in his chest disappear, kissing her with lips that do not always protect from the sharp teeth behind him. He praises her with rough caresses, and will find equal pleasure in being shoved away or drawn in, even if he knows better than to expect the latter from a grieving mother.
He remains hopeful - perhaps she will be in a hurry to make a replacement.
She doesn’t struggle as he knocks her over, her vacant eyes staring up at him.
And then the hollow emptiness is filled with something else. She had pushed every other thought and feeling away so there is nothing to resist what Gale floods her with (though she does not know this is the source). Life stirs in her expression again, first pleasure and joy and then as he croons his praise, lust roars into her.
She is glad to have pleased him, and though her eyes do not spark with the same burning intensity as they usually do - there is a faint light in them. A deep, rumbling purr emanates from her at his rough caresses and kisses - rejoicing in the small peaks of pain in a way she would not normally. But because he enjoys it, she does too. Mazikeen responds in kind as heavy desperation sinks in. Enough that it is not long before she pushes him enough so she can turn over onto her belly, thinking only of getting him to satisfy this need that drowns out everything else as quickly as possible.
Except she turns and sees Sickle there. She turns and her face is so close to her dead daughter that Mazikeen immediately wretches. And then everything she had clamped down on comes rushing up with the contents of her stomach. She burns, not just her markings but her fire aura blooming to life around her as Mazikeen crash-lands back into reality. Anger and grief and hate for herself spilling over as she considers both what she had done and what she was just about to do.
She is burning, burning so brightly she cannot see anything, and her voice is a pained cry - begging, pleading - because she doesn’t know what else to do except seek the help of the only one who is there.
“Make it stop.”
She doesn’t care how he does it, how he interprets it, she just knows she wants this to end and she will give him anything he desires in payment for it.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
In between kisses, Gale glances at the lifeless child. Mazikeen had killed her, had slit her throat, and now Mazikeen is pressing up against him with a lustful hunger that matches his own. She’d killed a child - her child - for him, and minutes later she is writhing wantonly beneath him.
What a marvel.
What a wondrous, glorious thing.
If she has done this, she will do anything.
The possibilities are endless, and he smiles as he returns his attention to caresses, to parting the soft fur of her throat where her new heart beats her blood so rapidly. Mazikeen’s neck and throat are red with Sickle’s blood by the time she turns over for him, and he has her by the hips before he realizes that she’s wretching.
He springs away, startled and disgusted. Her grief is stronger now, traveling back through the conduit between them, and as she catches fire it flares up in him too, sensations that the black shadow creature should never feel. Wrong.
Make it stop, she begs, but the Curse is too busy solving the awful emotion that she’s given him.
He is sad about the girl being dead, and so he knits her throat back together and starts her heart, though she remains still and unconscious. It takes the last of his strength, but he doesn’t realize until it is done, until the last vestiges of his magical reserve run dry and he is panting and empty.
“Take it to Tephra,” he snarls, reeling from both emotion and exhaustion, but staying on his feet lest she suspect. “And come back immediately. I am not done with you tonight.”
And then he’s turning, running into the woods as fast as his feet can take him.
