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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "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


    [private]  i was looking for a way out
    #11
    Gale
    this is going to break me clean in two --
    this is going to bring me close to you



    With his altered eyes, Gale can see the fury as it radiates outward from Mazikeen, can watch the rage and violence flare from the glowing cracks along her skin, can scrutinize the way those inimical emotions are drawn toward his own body, where they dance among the lightnings before disappearing beneath his indigo hide.

    He can feel the brutality of her single-minded focus, and in the moment just before she lunges for him, he uses it the Power it gives him in a novel way.

    The world grows still. Mazikeen is poised impossibly in the air, half-suspended in her leap toward him. He feels suddenly very cold, and very unsure.

    Gale ducks beneath her outstretched jaws, blinking slowly as he contemplates this strange happening. He had never noticed how many sounds there had been until they were suddenly silenced all at once.

    The wind is gone, and so is its soft shush upon the sandy stone, and its whispering along the canyons. Gale frowns, uncertain, and turns at the sound of a wet drip, one of Mazikeen’s many wounds turns the Pangean soil redder still.

    Without thinking about it, he reaches toward it, healing the long gash from the monster’s tail with a pass of his muzzle, one that ends in a kiss of her nearly-eye-level elbow.

    There had been no desire to rip the flesh from her body, Gale realizes. He’d only wanted to mend it. So much has changed. His frown deepens. There’s an old scar just behind the new one, and it catches his flickering eye. A second kiss heals that one as well, leaving the skin entirely unmarked. He heals the blood-acid burns, and the cuts and aches as well.

    - when I want to kill you, it will not be a surprise. I will not be subtle.

    This certainly doesn’t feel subtle, so this can’t be what Mazikeen had meant. He’d been the one to stop time, after all, even if he’s not quite sure how he’d done it. (The Temporal Manipulation he’d gotten from the brown-eyed mare has not been the easiest to learn.)

    Time continues to not-pass, and Gale continues to think. Would she really kill him? She’s not felt furious like this before. It feels marvelous, and Gale himself begins to glow, the bright yellow of his dragon form going bright, gleaming blue and pale gold like the host the Curse inhabits. There are some parts of the middle triplet that never would quite go away.

    Gale steps back in front of Mazikeen, back to where he’d been just before time had stilled. His head is aching from the shrinking of the monster, the bending of not-quite-bones, and the warping of time, and his eyes are narrowed to slits as he meets her eyes. His heartbeat pounds erratically in his chest, but his Power had swelled so rapidly while feeding on Mazikeen’s fury that he hardly feels it.

    The understanding of how to return time to its normal pace floats to him out of the open sky, borne on a bit of light. That is a new one, he thinks, and shudders as it slips beneath his skin.

    Dark tendrils creep across the edges of his vision, wisps of pain and a dry ache, as though sand rubs across his open eyes. He feels his consciousness slipping, and directs it inward, deep into the core of the brindle stallion. He wraps magic to protect it, shadows and rage and blackness and the soft flicker of palest blue lightning. A protective shell, glittering opalescent and buried within his chest.

    And then, with both Gale and the Curse relinquishing control of the now-navy brindle stallion, time returns to its normal pace, and Mazikeen pins him down and rips a bite from the throat of the white-winged stallion. There is no cry of pain, and no reaction on the blazed face. It remains still and slightly furrowed in a frown, even as the blood slowly drains from the open wound.

    It doesn’t throb out like a living thing should, expelled by a beating heart. Will she notice before the second bite?



    @Mazikeen




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