[private] the fatal flaw that makes you magnificently cursed

[Nashua]

(your mother never loved you)

It is dark. It is dark everywhere. Shadow oozes from every corner and there is nowhere in Beqanna that has been spared. Nashua - who has roamed almost every mile of this land - only sees darkness as it sprawls and envelops everything. There is nothing but obscurity.

But he is wrong.

He is so wrong.

When he lands near Taiga, he is fighting the sound within his head. It shakes from one side to another - trying to alleviate static buzzing that exists between his ears - and nothing alleviates it. When he collides with the ground, it shows nothing of his experience or nothing of the colt who had spent years perfecting his precision and skill in the air. There is nothing of his lessons from Celina or Popinjay. There is only the snow that layers the frozen earth as his skin prickles against the frigid cold of it. There is only the sound of the crunch as his muscled body tries to right itself.

Not even as a newborn had he struggled so much to find his hooves.

Nashua groans but eventually he stands. Every inch of him is aching from the fall. But what hurts - what feels like white-hot fire - is his head. The static grows and grows and yet the louder it becomes, a voice emerges. It is an odd (eerie) child-like mesh of Wolfbane and Lilliana, of Aletta and Leilan, of Yanhua.

(how could she? you killed her)

On and on, the young voice trills along. It skips like a young foal might over meadow grass. It sings even, like the birds in spring.

The striped pegasus keeps moving, keeps going towards Taiga because that is where his family is. It is where he last left Noel and where his daughters sleep. He uses them as a gauge to keep moving forward because his mind is spinning towards the past. It keeps going back and back, to a place and time that does not belong to Nashua.

(There are flashes of the Beach, bleaching bones, and starlight.)

(He smells blood. The copper perfume taints the air. He can feel viscous liquid, imagines he can see the way it stains his silver legs.)

There is nothing in these visions of Nashua's life.

And yet for each one that comes, the clearer the voice resonates within his mind. On and on the voice speaks: 'You called me mother-killer. You called me ill-omen instead of giving me a name.'

That is the statement that causes his ears to pin violently into the flaxen silk of his mane. His memories war within because Nashua's mother lives. She had named him, had named Yanhua. They hadn't been born in the dark but the light. They had always been loved and wanted, had never known a moment where their existence had been anything but her making.

Flaring his wings, he means to fly again. Nashua's thoughts are incoherent (and had his mind been sharper, he would know it was fool-hardy to attempt the midnight sky). He grapples with the voice, insisting over and over again that the memories in his head are not his. The chestnut keeps thinking that he needs his mother, needs his brother, and their clarity to chase this ghost from his mind.

He almost makes it to Taigan border before he falls again, the river singing somewhere behind him. Whatever exists within him is delighted. It pushes past his mind and surges through his blood, flowing free and wild through every inch of him. The pain is blinding and everywhere. It becomes a vice and employs the leverage it has with a command: 'Name me.'

Nash groans again. He complies, names it.
"Demon." He growls and rasps, banishing the thing by giving it a word.

What happens next is drowned out by the winter rapids of the River nearby. It murmurs and hides the sound of breaking bones. Of the laughing thing that burst from beneath his skin. The crunch of a wing bent in an unnatural angle. It does not cover the bright scent of the blood that pours open from the young stallion, of the way that the surrounding air smells like death.

@[The Monsters] have at his lunar protection

@[jenger] tagging this for you now <3