i hear the wicked get no rest, but when you do
---------- i hope you dream of me
I’m here now, she says, and Gale wets his lips, a brief flicker of uncertainty even though he continues to smile. His teeth are just a little too sharp, fed by the way his caution writhes black in his chest.
It’s been some time since he’d had to use his own strength, and it feels unfamiliar, the stretching of rested muscles. Too long rested, perhaps. Tephra has given him a nearly unlimited source of Power. Disposing of his positive emotions hadn’t been a simple task, but he’d been successful. He’d been more powerful than he could have ever dreamed.
And yet he’d still lost them everything when he’d died thrice at high altitude. He’d had to quash his resurrected host, the stallion’s conscious mind resurrected when his body is. It is some quirk of Magic, a weakness that he does not intend to repeat. It keeps him cautious, keeps him from asking who Ehko was.
The resurrected host had not known Ehko - being sure that he was eight months old and living in Loess. And the first Gale had taken his knowledge of her to his metaphorical grave rather than feed his infestation’s insatiable hunger with the details of yet another innocent relation.
Did you go to the Mountain?
Had his host intended to ask the Fairies to get rid of the Curse? Lepis had tried that before, but the Curse had not known the details. Gale hadn’t either - or if he did, he’s managed to destroy them.
His blue eyes narrow, and he truly takes in the buckskin mare for the first time. She is thickly furred and in wild disarray, her feathered wings disheveled and her hair long and wind tangled. She looks moody, which might mean almost anything, and he probes within her chest the moment he’s near enough to do so. A long tendril of shadow (the same that lingers always beneath and beside him) reaches out toward the dark eyed mare.
“He did not.” Says the thing that wears her brother’s body, and reaches into her chest. There’s something there. Something that he hasn’t felt before. Something he doesn’t recognize. He wants it.
He doesn’t have enough magic to rip her open with magic, as has become his preferred method. The smile on Gale’s blazed face falls away, and he licks his lips once more. This time the ivory teeth are pointed and more numerous.
Of all his family, Gale had protected Eyas the longest. There is little that the thing inside him knows of the woman in front of him now. Will she break at the realization that her sibling is dead? Or does she already know?
Gale takes a step closer, near enough for his own shadow to cross hers, his eyes narrowed and his lips drawing thin as he looks down at the much smaller mare.
“He tried to save you the longest,” He continues, still in Gale’s concerned voice rather than his own. He sounds like the Gale from Loess, he who had been the Chief of Islandres. That iteration of his host had died a dozen lives ago, but the cursed thing is careful to keep him the very same, to use all he knows of his sister against her.
She is likely to be a threat, he thinks. His host had been a formidable warrior long before the shadowy thing had taken his heart, and he’d been aware that Eyas was talented. But exactly how, the Curse is not certain. Best to put her off-balance, he decides, to keep her busy with emotions.
“That sort of fury is usually reserved for other types of relations,” he continues, and his once-thin mouth has pulled up into a smirk. He’s taunting her, and the cruelty it inspires sends little flickers of lightning down his sides. “Not the brotherly kind.”
There is a dark look in his eyes, followed by a ferocious hunger as he closes the space between them to more quickly reach the source of what he is sure will feed his black magic. His teeth reach for the dark shadow where her dappled foreleg joins her chest, closing around the tender flesh and ripping it away. The shadows reach for her as well, but unlike the one that still winds tight around her heart, feel less substantial than the electric current across the skin that comes as his lightning reaches out toward Eyas.
Gale pulls the pain from it directly, feeling it slither into his veins. Parched, he keeps his mouth against her bleeding skin for a long moment, drinking in the blood and agony. He’ll rip the leg away in a moment, he thinks, but first he swallows every drop of the pain that Eyas might feel like a dying man.
Then he pulls back, and his bright eyes are - just for a moment - dim and glutted.
GALE |
