"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
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
Nashua had done his best to explain to her about the Curse, had done his best to make her understand something he couldn’t fully understand himself. That it’s only intention seemed to be pain and suffering, that it was unlikely that any traces of the Gale they had known remained. There had been times when she had wondered if the Curse had purposely left something dark in her, if that’s why she felt such an oily substance in those few times she had tried to connect to the magic he had touched. Perhaps he had unintentionally left a little of himself behind, if all that anger which tinges the stars around her from white to crimson came from one source in particular. Or maybe she had always had this inside her and he had simply coaxed it out.
An anger that intensifies as he refuses to answer her, to give her what she seeks.
An anger that explodes when she lunges at him, when all she can see is red and all she can feel is that empty death beckoning to her beyond the void.
She had expected him to retaliate and tear her apart as he had done that night he had ripped her open. He could easily do so even with the addition of her new wings and maybe part of her wants him to. Wants to feel something beside all this rage that burns her insides and whispers sweet promises of destruction. He makes his move but she is faster this time, her hooves driving him back only to have him reappear beside her, close enough for her to reach out and touch the marks that are already healing along his shoulder.
He smiles and she steams, snarling at him with her teeth bared as he steps towards her, both with wild feral looks in their eyes. All she can think about is tearing him apart, leaving her blood-stained and satisfied to see him strewn about her in a million body parts. To let him wake up like he had done to her and figure out how to piece his stupid cursed self back together. She knows she can’t succeed but it doesn’t stop her from wanting it, that blood-lust. Until the image of a white winged mare flashes into her mind and her own wings lower as her vision clears and her temper momentarily cools.
“And you’ve gotten awfully boring.” She snaps back, her curved ears flattening against her forehead until they become hidden against the thick black tresses of her mane. “You’ve eaten the stars and yet you resort to stealing children, those that are barely a threat to you.” She laughs coldly, taking her own step towards him as her silver eyes meet his and her muzzle is mere inches from his own. “What a big bad monster you are.” She sneers, making it clear that she’s not impressed by him. Nor is she scared of him. Not anymore.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
The feral rage in Ciri’s eyes draws Gale closer; the fury that she feels is an irresistible lure. She snarls and he moves to touch her, to pull in the tumultuous negativity more directly. But before he can, her flared and threatening wings suddenly droop, and Gale draws up short at the sudden absence of constantly growing Power.
Focused as the brindle stallion is on assessing his abilities, he doesn’t hear her first words. He must rewind time a moment to hear them, and the ease with which he does so brings a bright smile that doesn’t fade even when he’s understood what the star mare says.
Her ears pin back in anger, but her words and laughter are cold and hardly satisfying after the piquant fury of a moment ago. He wants her dark again. Wants her feeling black emotions: fury, sadness, pain.
Anticipation of the full course meal makes his movements match her own, drawing closer until he can feel the warmth of her breath against him when she mocks his monstrosity.
Her fear is gone, but he imagines he can almost hear it, singing there beneath her skin. He is sure he feels it when he grabs hold of her bones, when he forces her perfectly still. Will she struggle, he wonders?
His lips hover above her shoulder, and time grows still. Gale has grown fond of this ability - being able to pause time and consider his actions. Now, he remembers the way Mazikeen’s voice had gone very soft as she’d spoken, the way her mouth had curled around the threat: ‘Touch anyone else and you’ll never get to have me again’.
She’d meant a very specific type of touch, he decides, not the kind that happens when times begins again and one thick black tentacle wraps itself around Ciri's neck. It tightens, not to choke her but to lift her into the air and slam her back to the earth where she’d been standing.
It hurts her - he can feel that buzzing toward him, and Gale smiles delightedly.
“Bolder isn’t a threat to me at all.” He says, bending down to whisper into her ear as a second tentacle twines around the bones of her feathered wing. “Nothing is,” he says as he snaps the ulna and radius of her starlit wings with a single twist, simultaneously releasing her from Wishbone’s stolen magic.
Gale takes a step away. Will she use the room to rise to her feet, he wonders? Will she grit her teeth through the pain and taunt him again? Having killed her once, Gale is neither fearful nor cautious. Ciri is not a threat to him, and the interest with which he regards her is very like that that of a cat intent on toying with its prey. His blue eyes regard her with intense curiosity, so very like his host’s had once done, and he waits.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
There is more she might have said if his magic hadn’t weaved between her skeleton before seeping deep within them. She suddenly finds she cannot move, she is held still beneath the powerful grasp of magic that holds her bones in a vice grip. There is a ribbon of fear that threads between his magic, the common sense in her scolding and brutal. You knew better. You knew not to provoke him. You knew. Time seems to slow around them (more magic or just a restriction of air and blood flow?) as his muzzle hovers at her shoulder. The dark mare attempts a snarl but her jaw is locked tight and only some feral noise rumbles in her throat, unable to escape through pursed lips. The thread is lost beneath the storm of anger that rises (at her own foolishness, at him, at the world) as her starlit eyes spin until her pupils seem to vanish and her sockets are a wash of silver burning holes into his face beneath the darkening red of her glowing stars.
They only intensify as time speeds up and pain blossoms from the way she collides to the ground, unable to fight against the sticky tentacle suctioned around her neck. If looks could kill, Gale would be dead before that second tentacle wrapped around her wings but alas… He has all the magic that she lacks and instead she gives another feral noise, this one ringing in the air, as he releases her from his grip while snapping her wings at the same time. Her new feathery appendages droop at odd angles around her and even without looking back at them she knows that they slightly resemble the way her broken legs had been splayed before her.
There is no cooling her temper this time.
She doesn’t try to stand, not yet. Instead she simply turns her head up to him, that wrath swirling dark amongst the mercury. And grins, the adrenaline of the situation momentarily holding the pain from her broken bones and bruised side at bay. “Bolder isn’t a threat to me.” She had wanted to retort to that (of course he wasn’t, he was just a child at that was the point) but it’s his last words that she focuses on. “Is that what you think?” She laughs, an almost hysterical sound despite the cutting edge of it. He has stepped away and finally she rises off the ground, her broken wings still unfurled and dragging along the earth as she takes a shaky step towards him. Had something changed? He was clearly still quite powerful and yet she can't help but wonder when he hadn't held himself back last time. Maybe something had happened. Was he weaker away from the entities? Surely even his magic had a limit? She takes that glimmer of hope from her wild hazy thoughts and runs with it.
“I know you’ve died before. Twice.” She smiles at him even as the pain begins to intensify and throb from the places where her bones had yet again broken. “And I’m more than just my stars.” She throws his words back at him as she takes another shaky step towards him. Between the bloody hue of her stars, her oddly bent wings and heavily scarred body, and the eeriness of her shining wrathful eyes… She looks like a creature that had crawled out of hell itself. A dark broken angel of death. It is grasping at straws, this attempt of intimidation, but she has nothing left and she refuses to just let him win. Refuses to just lay down and willingly return to the empty void. “Third times the charm.” She whispers softly, solely focused on him and ignorant to everything and anyone else around them as she extends her muzzle as if to brush it lightly against his cheek like a tired over-worked mother trying to calm her petulant and naughty child.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
Her eyes become silver stars, glittering in the dim red glow from overhead. Soft red, from her stars, and deeper red from the blood moon that rises between the bare-branched limbs. Her pain and anger spiral toward him, dark and exhilarating, and he swallows them down.
Something is going on behind her smile, but Gale is not sure what it might be. At her near-hysterical laughter though, he frowns. He’d been hoping she’d cry.
Had she broken already, he wonders? Has her sanity fled? She struggles to her feet and Gale watches, his smile having turned down into a scowl despite the renewed flood of pain that radiates toward him. His Power grows along with his discomfort; the manic expression in Ciri’s eyes is disconcerting.
She’s threatening him, Gale realizes.
It takes him a rather long time to realize this, long enough that she’s stepping closer before it has truly sunk in.
He hadn’t considered her a threat at all, and is so taken aback by this sudden development that he is struck mute. Before he can respond, an unfamiliar voice cuts through the seductive allure of her fury and single-minded rage, and something strikes at his shadows with lancets of sunlight.
“Get away from her!” It shouts again. Gale turns away from Ciri to find the source of the voice. It’s a lilac colored mare, her mane and tail formed of patches of shimmering starlit sky rather than hair, and a pair of elegantly branching silver antlers.
She shoots another beam of sunlight toward him, and Gale hisses. Accustomed to the safety of Hyaline, he’d forgotten that the entire world isn’t cowed. No one in Hyaline would have dared interrupt him, and it infuriates him.
Having been well fed by Ciri’s black emotions, Gale has no difficulty holding the Thane by her bones while simultaneously wrapping the purple mare with more shadows than she can destroy with her powers. Her gasps and pleas are less sweet than Ciri’s had been, Gale thinks, but he supposes that she is a stranger.
Tangible darkness rips open her chest while her bones lock in an upright position even as she loses consciousness. The lilac mare stands before them, it is not the red glow of the moon or Ciri’s stars that turn the grass below to crimson. Gale’s shadows plunge into her open chest, and disappear into her still-beating heart. They emerge grasping her Power, and as they leave her heartbeat begins to slow.
Gale’s own white mane and tail transform, becoming cloudlike and nearly insubstantial. His black horns become silver and branching. Her Powers had been nothing impressive, but it still takes a moment to master them. A moment in which he watches the way she collapses, barely breathing, to the bloody earth.
That over, his blue gaze returns to Ciri.
“Where were we?” He asks, remarkably casual with the strange mare dying off to his left. He remembers - she was threatening him. So full of darkness and magic, Gale feels nearly intumescent, and seizes on an excuse to use some of it.
“Oh right. My death.” Ciri walks closer to him, each movement controlled by the gift he’d taken from the Tephran Queen. Gale crushes a few of her smaller tail bones to measure his precision, and is pleased at his progress since first attaining this ability.
A soft gurgle from the lilac mare comes as blood begins to drip from her mouth and nose. She’ll be dead soon, but not quite yet. Gale continues to move Ciri like a puppeteer, until she too is standing over the dying mare.
“Have you ever watched someone die?” He asks conversationally.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
The scowl on his lips brings a dark wave of pleasure and she thinks maybe… just maybe… she might win this. She’s not sure she can read whatever emotion is lurking behind his electric eyes but she is so close to finding out. Just a little further, she thinks. Just a little more and maybe she can walk away with her dignity intact even if it means dragging her broken wings behind her.
Then a voice cuts through her hard earned advantage as sunlight pierces through his shadows and the sound that erupts from her is a roar of fury as well as a warning. It’s too late, she barely gets a chance to turn her head to see the lilac mare and her silvery antlers before her bones are no longer her own again and the mare is swiftly consumed by shadows. She hadn’t struggled beneath his grip before but she does this time, trying to find a break in his magic, trying to find any part of her that can move as the other mare begins to cry out in pain and fear.
It is brutal to see her chest rip open with less decorum then she had remembered during her own death by his hands. She struggles harder, groaning against the pressure that holds her in place, as Gale begins to change and the stranger’s breathing becomes more ragged. The scent of blood and death swirls around them and she almost chokes on it as she catches splashes of crimson against the grass, as she remembers what that pain had felt like.
The mare drops and Gale looks back at her, no longer scowling.
“Where were we.” He asks so nonchalantly and she could howl with the rage that makes her stars flicker despite the vice grip wrapped around her bones. She had been so close, so close, and then this foolish creature had ruined it and gotten herself killed as well. For a moment she hates the stranger almost as much as she hates the Curse. He moves her like a marionette, forcing her to move closer to the dying mare while at the same time cracking a few of her tailbones. She is gasping by the time her body comes to a halt but the pain has cleared some of her anger, enough to realize that this black fury needs to be directed at the Curse and only the Curse.
Had she watched someone die before? Her blinding silver eyes stare at the blood bubbles gathering at the corner of the lilac mare’s mouth and she can feel dread settling just beneath her unstoppable fury. “Yes.” She responds truthfully because she had killed creatures before like the siren in the lake, because there were times when she hadn’t always been able to save the ones she had sworn to protect. Like Thistle, the mare she had cared for in another world far from this one.
She was no stranger to death even before she had experienced her own. Yet as she hears the gurgling noises in the back of the mare’s throat (as her gaze sweeps over the familiar sparkles of stars and light that call to her in a silent plea for help) she knows that she doesn’t want to watch this one die too.
Not this one who, despite charging in so recklessly, had done so to help her.
Perhaps his grip had loosened enough or maybe she had finally found a small hole in his magic but she manages to slowly turn her head so that her brilliant gaze is on him instead of the mare. “Will you bring her back like you did to me?” She asks him as if they were still the two friends that had climbed the rocky hills of Hyaline looking at rock sheep together. She thinks she already knows the answer. Thinks she knows what she needs to do but that inferno of hatred balks at doing so willingly. “What would it take to spare her life?”
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
He watches curiously as Ciri looks down at the dying mare. In the red light of the moon and her stars, Gale can see the reflection of the lilac creature, and he watches the blood bubble from her nose and mouth until Ciri answers in the affirmative.
She has watched someone die before, she says, and Gale rifles through the memories that come to her as conformation. A shame; he is sure she’d have had a more delicious reaction if this were the first death she’d witnessed. Still, she is soft-hearted and when he feels her struggling again against his magic he releases her just to see what that might make her do.
He is hoping for another attack, and is disappointed.
Will you bring her back, Ciri asks, and Gale looks back down at the dying mare. Extending a foreleg, he kicks at her side, but there is not enough strength in her body even to wince, and he looks up - unamused.
“I hadn’t planned on it,” he replies with a shrug. The magic required to do so isn’t a simple working, though he’s no intention of letting Ciri know as much. He’d had to recover from her resurrection much as she had done, far up in the caves of Hyaline where no light or sound could reach him.
She asks what it will take to do so, and Gale frowns again - had Ciri known the purple mare? And what does she think she has to offer? Gale asks, sounding skeptical but feeling inexplicably curious:
“What could you possibly offer in exchange that I couldn’t just take if I wanted?”
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
She winces when his hoof makes contact with the dying mare’s side, noticing how she doesn’t even flinch. There isn’t much time left for her as her slow and agonizing death begins to creep through her lilac body and squeeze around her fluttering heart. Gale speaks beside her and she nods with exhaustion, pain thrumming through her own body. Perhaps it is better for the stranger to die. Perhaps that is the only way to protect her now, by letting her go to that endless void. But then she thinks of that empty blackness, that hollow part in her soul that she’s carried with her ever since she came back.
There is no peace in that purgatory.
He asks her what she can offer and she is quiet as her bright eyes gaze down at the slowing movements of the strangers side before looking back at the Curse. Into those familiar electric eyes. “Nothing.” She says with a whisper of a painful smile, the blinding silver of her eyes sharp on him. “I’m just curious if you can even do it again. Or are you not as powerful as I thought?” Another gamble but that’s all she has when it comes to him. The luck of the dice, that one chance that she lands on the right cards.
From what she’s seen so far, the Curse has a massive ego. He thinks himself unstoppable and perhaps he was. Perhaps he would kill her again before this night was over, perhaps he wouldn’t bring her back this time. Still, as she hears the last gurgles in the dying woman’s throat, her angry fiery heart constricts and she knows it’s worth it if she can spare anyone from what waits beyond.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
He sees Ciri nod at the edge of his vision, but most of his attention is focused on the way a bead of blood is travelling down the inside corner of the dying mare’s cheek. It glitters in the myriad of light sources on this dark evening - the round moon, Ciri’s red stars, Gale’s golden glow and flickering blue lightning. The brindle creature takes a step closer to smear it away, and to pull in the very last conscious thought that lilac mare had.
She’d loved someone and had wished to tell them one last time.
Gale makes a mental note to find this lover later, to feed on the horror and misery of their loss. He smiles at the thought, having forgotten Ciri entirely until he feels her shift beside him. When he meets her gaze, the molten silver has gone hard. But she’s trying to smile, so Gale suspects she is not cowed only a moment before she goads him more sharply.
Emotions are necessary sustenance, but there is nothing that feeds his Power like death. It’s why he’s the ability to ressurect the creatures he kills, after all, and tonight he’s no intentions to let go of the magic he feels running hot in his blood. He pulls away the dead mare’s starry mane and tail, and what he’s looted from her corpse he adds to his own body, and the magician’s spine-length mane and tail becomes instead a line of storm clouds.
They move with him as he steps closer to Ciri, because while the cursed creature is possessed of a large ego, he has an even larger reservoir of patience, and enough caution to know better than to taunt Nashua directly by slaying his Thane. He’ll leave the taunting to Aela and Mazikeen.
He’s asked what she had to trade for the mare’s life. As he meets her gaze, Gale rememebers that there is something specific he wants. He’s just not considered Ciri a possible means to achieve it until now, as he frowns down at her.
He wants to be rid of what he feels for Mazikeen. That hadn’t seemed possible before, but as he feels the rising black swell of Death and Power singing in his bones, he thinks that perhaps he could finally do something about it. He frowns, because it is always risky to do a new magic. But, he reasons, Ciri isn’t strong enough to kill him and the lilac mare was the only other horse around. He’s safe here.
So he rips open Ciri’s chest. Metaphorically, though it’s likely she’ll feel in nonetheless. Into it he presses a bit of brightness, the happiness that he feels in the presence of an orange-eyed queen. And then he adds his shadows, so that he’ll know if it is meddled with, and some of his lightning so that Ciri might feel the shocking reminder of who it is she’s made a deal with.
Then, with magic that is far easier to manage than a true resurrection, Gale returns the look of life to the lilac mare’s eyes. He pulls on her bones until she stands, stumbling in a perfect replica of a living body. She staggers back when her open eyes land on Ciri and Gale, then turns starry-looking tail and runs. The magician sends her bones off toward Tephra, and perhaps she’ll make it to the waterfall before her soul has travelled too far from her body to be called back.
When she has disappeared into the trees, Gale turns back to Ciri. Her chest is still open, and the pain she feels seeps beneath his skin and feeds his ability to tug and pull and twist until she’s patched back together again. The ache in his head that would usually accompany such magic is nothing more than a feather touch.
Gale smiles, feeling incredibly pleased with himself. He arches a single eyebrow in query at his red-starred companion, as though wondering if she still has doubts about his power.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
The mare dies and she feels a sense of suffocating loss that tastes familiar, oh yes, she’s tasted it before. Failure. He loots the lilac mare’s body of her magic and she can only stand there despite the fact that he had released her bones and she is free to use her body again. As his mane and tail begin to match the clouds in the sky, she can only stare at the lifeless dull eyes that stare unseeing into the forest where she had originally appeared, alive and well. Was she in that dark place now where she had once been? That endless emptiness of hollow death?
She is not ready for him when he steps close to her. She is not ready for the excruciating pain that rips through her chest, invisible to the naked eye but something she can feel sharp and hot as he inserts his shadows into a magical gaping wound that leads to the fiber of her very being. There lays the anger that he had produced with her death and he pushes that brightness wrapped in the smoky covering of his darkness and the electrical current of his power (Lightning Boy. She had once called him Lighting Boy.) deep within her until it settles right in the eye of the swirling inferno of her rage.
She moans low as her vision blurs and she arches her neck, gritting against the thing he places inside of her. With it comes a memory, at first she thinks the glimpse of white she catches is the mare who had followed her to the Isle but no… It’s a different white mare. One she had forgotten about. Mazikeen who also looked very different from when she had first met her on the shores of the lake. And despite the shock that strikes at her insides, she briefly feels a flicker of what that brightness is before it disappears into the tornado of her ire. Happiness.
When she finally opens her eyes again and the pain momentarily subsides, she catches the lilac mare fleeing. Fleeing. Alive. She is still ravaged and open before him as her trembling limbs brace against the fresh wave of pain but her gaze never wavers from his as he reaches back into her and mends those magical wounds. Stitches her up. Again. He raises a brow at her and smiles.
She hopes he is disturbed by the wild smile she gives back, something wolfish and knowing as her starlit eyes glimmer back into his electric ones. For not only had he at least given the lilac mare a second chance just to prove her wrong, he had placed hope in her chest. Unintentional, she was sure, but the taste of happiness still lingers faintly around the rapidly fading vision and the unbending storm of her wrath and she thinks she has a spark of an idea of what might be the key to unlocking Gale’s misfortune. How could she have been so blind before, it had always been there. Right in front of them. “Thank you.” She breathes to him, her eyes sparkling with mostly pain and a small hint of triumph.
Gale this is going to break me clean in two -- this is going to bring me close to you
The triumph in her eyes bothers Gale because he cannot fathom the source. With an irritable snarl, a single thick tendril of shadow whips out from the earth near him, slamming into the black mare and knocking her to the ground.
When she wakes - if she does - he will be long gone.
With his weakness purged and the death strength of the lilac mare in his veins, all he has to do is picture the distance mountains of Hyaline in his mind's eyes, and the next moment he is there.
