Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
He can see her gaze on him, the burning orange gaze that settles on his face, a pointed reminder that she knows he’s avoiding her. Gale blinks, and finds the darkness behind his eyes is pleasant after the brilliant midnight.
He can feel her gaze on him, bright even though his closed eyes. He hears her move closer but his eyes remain closed. Someone who had known a younger Mazikeen might have been concerned to hear her speak so. Anyone with a well-developed conscience certainly would.
Gale is soothed, thinking of the many wonderful things that had made her purr. When she reaches out to kiss him, he turns his head, returning the gesture just before she pulls away, opening his eyes to meet hers.
What she says does make sense.
She has been evolving, due in no small part to his interference, and Gale is rather proud. He has wondered, now and then, if she understands how he has changed as well. From something that would peel her apart out of boredom to whatever it is he has become. Something with a heart, and the troubles that come with it.
He has no desire to be without her anymore.
This time he is the one who steps closer, near enough so that he can touch the edge of the scar across her chest. The one he’d given her. He has used telepathy before, and tries to remember the way it had felt. He manages only to allow her back into his mind, to let her know what eons of self preservation will never let him say aloud, that when she is ready to kill him, he will let her do it quickly.
If they are caught, she can claim he bewitched her. The thought of her surviving him, of raising Malik and chaos of her own free will, is a remarkably comforting thought. Perhaps she’ll finally give in and start hunting the angels
The thought of hunting makes him think of food, and the fact that his young rock-sheep meal had been eaten many hours earlier. She might notice that he no longer considers her a meal, and instead turns his head toward the meadow where the nearest herd of deer bed down for the night. Mazikeen had already hunted them once tonight, and they are sure to be skittish.
A better challenge than usual, he thinks with a slow smile.
@Mazikeen
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current appearance: iridescent mostly navy blue stallion with glowing cremello brindle
stripes/markings and blue lightnings, white spinal mane and tail
there's fire in your blood
Though tempted to close her eyes to savour the feeling of him tracing the scar on her chest that he gave her, she enjoys watching him touch her more - the intensity of her red-orange eyes lessening for just a moment until she feels his thoughts again. She finds that his acceptance of her killing him makes her less interested in doing it, pushes that hazy date off further and further into the future.
And then when Mazikeen catches Gale’s thoughts about her surviving him, the glowing markings return to her skin. She does not feel fear the same way she once did but she feels panic rising at the mere idea of losing him so soon. Whatever hazy thoughts she might have about killing him were far off future things, surely at least decades away. She ignores the thoughts about hunger and deer for now and presses closer to him, chest to chest, so she can embrace him as tightly as possible in this equine form - inhaling the dark scent of his skin. “Stop that. If you’re going to leave me to raise a child it will not be our first.” Seventh or eighteenth maybe. Though there is no real desire in her to continue having children, she does not plan to go an entire season without him so they are inevitable - and she is curious to see what they might make together now.
He has bewitched her, but it is not a bad thing and she cannot stomach the idea of even pretending otherwise just to save her own hide. She tugs roughly on the short strands of his spinal mane, finding the promise she makes now comes so easily. “If anyone takes you from me, I will burn everything.”
Mazikeen does not know how this new bond works but she tries to shove her thoughts outward to him, tries to let him know that she will kill anyone who tries to harm him. She tries to show him glimpses of a future where he is taken from her anyway and she hunts one from every family she can find in payment before letting the survivors burn together.
And how if there is a day when he dies, she has expected for a long time now that she will die with him. Not quite since when she made her first promise to another Gale but once she finally knew the name for the feeling he inspired in her.
And this inspires her now to take back her earlier distaste at the idea of hiding. Because while it will bother her, she would still be with him. “If you think we should run, I will go with you.” She still hopes that if they are driven into hiding it’s for something more than just stealing one boy but his thoughts brought them to this conversation and Mazikeen doesn’t doubt that it’s important for Gale to understand where her thoughts are. About him, about everything.
She discovers now that her restlessness is rooted in a desire to do more with Gale, not more than him. His shadows are woven through her and they have fed her dreams of blood and chaos that do not end here.
art by nikkayla
@ Gale
Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Never as articulate as his host had been, the Curse smiles at the way Mazikeen replies to something he hasn’t even said. He is thinking of the marvelous advantage it will give them on hunts and in battle, the ability to communicate without words. He’s distracted from further plans in that vein when she mentions eighteen children.
At that he laughs aloud.
“Eighteen?” He says, “That’s practically an army. ”
A rather large army, and he is thinking of that as she tugs firmly at his mane.
She shows him a future without him, and it is even better than the one he’d imagined. She hunts and kills and burns, and Gale smiles as he presses kisses along her spine. Kisses that grow hotter, until they match the heat in his voice as he promises:
“We’ve so much to do before we run.”
They might not ever have to run, he thinks. Working with others - well, with Mazikeen - has not been something he’d considered long prior to this life. Raising eighteen children to adulthood would be a rather long process, surely there is some sort of shortcut in the building of an army.
@Mazikeen
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current appearance: iridescent mostly navy blue stallion with glowing cremello brindle
stripes/markings and blue lightnings, white spinal mane and tail
there's fire in your blood
His laugh sends something pleasant through her and she is grinning as well, thinking of those eighteen children and the army that they’d create. Maybe eighteen was a bit of an exaggeration but at the very least they would enjoy the making of those eighteen.
And then maybe adopt and steal as a shortcut to get there.
Her fury bleeds back out of her, curling back into the pit of her stomach where it will wait, as he presses kisses along her spine, as heat grows in those touches and the words he tells her. The tension caused by thoughts of a future without him eases out of her and she feels excitement and anticipation return to her, the fire and shadows inside of her responding with delight to the promise of more. “Good.” She presses this single word back into him, filled with a heat of her own.
But she eases away from him instead of pressing for more just yet - her red-orange eyes dancing in the moonlight. There is no point in asking him if he has particular plans because she does not truly care or need to know, not right now.
Mazikeen will be there beside him through it all. Her tethers to the others in her life are fraying, and compared to what she feels for Gale? They are insubstantial as ghosts.
She doesn't doubt that those heated kisses could have led to more charred earth here but she thinks back to his thoughts of the deer she had already harassed once this evening, the challenge they'd give them. She shifts into a dark lioness, keeping the horns so she is all black and vivid orange in the night.
“Now, I believe you were thinking of a hunt?”
art by nikkayla
@ Gale
Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Mazikeen becomes a lioness, and his hooves become blue paws with claws that flex in the rocky soil beneath them. Shifting with her has become a reflex, and the mention of a hunt to his now-predatory shape brings a sharp-toothed smile to the navy lion.
There have been many hunts in the two years since he’d come to Hyaline, and they’d increased in number since Mazikeen had joined him. The herds of deer have been thinned out as she’d teased, with only the swiftest daring to graze in the mountain meadows. Those nearby will be on edge, and imagining the fear in their eyes when they realize the hunters have returned elicits a purr from his throat.
“Let’s go,” he says, his thoughts of running and armies and danger replaced by the pumping adrenaline that comes before a hunt.
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