Gale
this is going to break me clean in two --
this is going to bring me close to you
Her wariness recedes, disappearing like the scales and the glittering protection they’d offered. Gale blinks his pale blue eyes, taking in the subtle changes of her shift but stilling when he finds the red mark across her leg.
Cursed? Who cursed you?
Who indeed.
Gale blinks, and finds that he is still staring at the insignia of the alliance that decorates Casimira’s right leg. The Alliance that had ended in darkness, and monsters, and a newfound ability to shapeshift. Gale had thought the shifting a symptom of the magic driven madness that had destroyed his father, and had isolated himself on Islandres. Then he’d dreamt of Carnage, and killed a Monster, and then slowly - ever so slowly - he’d begun to lose his mind.
It began with his evenings, when he’d wake somewhere far from where he’d fallen asleep. He’d be inexplicably tired, or sore, and a time or two had even been streaked in dried sweat as if from a fight or long run. When had he finally lost control entirely, he wonders?
Everything is a blur, hazy images of high mountains and black sand, of a different white mare and shadows that move as if they are alive.
Casimira’s apology shakes him from the spiral of his thoughts, and he looks up. His dark-lashed eyes meet hers, and though he does not smile, his tone is clement as he haltingly admits: “I don’t - I’m not even sure if I know how to talk about it. I’ve not tried.”
He’s avoided trying, avoided thinking about it at all as he dwells here on Islandres.
“It runs in the family but I think…I think mine was different.” His father had become a ravenous beast, devouring whatever he could find and delighting in trickery and manipulation. The Curse had changed him.
Gale, though, hadn’t been changed. He has no memory at all of the time he’d been controlled by the shadows, and feels that perhaps only days have passed since the sun returned to the sky after the darkness of the Eclipse. But Casimira says it has been years.
The navy blue stallion has gone glassy eyed again, lost in his thoughts, but he returns to find her still there, and behind her there is sun breaking through the still-dripping sky.
“I did terrible things.” He says, unaware that one of them had been killing her mother. “I don’t remember them but I…” He’s been avoiding a great many things, not the least of them making reparations. He should, that he is sure of. Gale has no memory of the words his parents had used to teach him, but fairness and restitution are as deeply ingrained in him than the lightning. “I want to make things right.”
Gale had not expected to find himself here today, standing in the rain and confessing this to a stranger, but stranger things have happened.
@Casimira
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