[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

[Random Event]

@[Nashua] your lunar protection has mutated down into moon halo (just a lil moon orbiting his head). You're welcome.

[illuminae]

Since the falling of the strange, perpetual dark, Illuminae has taken to staying close to the safety of home. That safety is of course as relative as anything else these days, but it feels better than nothing. Her family has a long history with the dark, with shadows and the night, and almost as long a history with the ancient forests of Taiga. It has been home to them for as long as it has existed, and there is something in the sameness and perpetuity that makes her feel like maybe she belongs here too.

It is why she never tried to follow Ryatah away to her home and her family, it is why she never fell into drifting like her sister did. Whatever it is that binds her father to these forests and ancient trees, the creeping half-dark that is now a full dark beneath the dense branches, it binds her here too.

And she finds, though she would never admit it, that she likes how it feels to be tethered to something.

Still, the dark is a lure in her blood as much as it is to anyone in her family, and it is hard not to explore beyond the safety of home. Somehow the dark outside the boundaries feels deeper, and she wonders if it is because so much of it is untouched by the abilities of her bloodline. It is dark without barriers, intangible and yet somehow made carnivorous by the beasts that roam inside it, by the ragged screams that fill the silence like fading static.

There is no getting used to it though, and when something crashes down through the sky, falling like a bleak, winged comet, she spins to face the sound of it with a scowl on her face. Dark flows up over her skin, concealing her in the night as effortlessly as if she made of it until only the single gold ring of her iris is visible. The monsters can of course still smell her, she is sure, but the cloak still makes her feel safer.

Demon.

The voice is male and made of gravel, nearly choked out by the sounds of a word in the perpetual eerie cacophony of night. But she clings to it, frowning, and moves without ever deciding what it is she plans to do towards the sound of that voice. The sounds that come next actually stop her in place though, sound of prey ripped apart and the burble of a stream oblivious to the war of the broken world it flows within. It's so wrong and unnatural that she very nearly leaves him, very nearly pretends she never heard anything at all.

But she is not yet entirely like her father.
So she stays.

She picks her way quietly towards the mass in the dark, the silhouette of bent wings and the stink of hot iron she knows to be spilled blood. Bile rises in her, her pounding pulse flushing too much heat beneath her skin and a roaring in her ears that nearly deafens her. She cannot tell what it is until she is close enough to touch him, until suddenly beneath her is a chestnut man with glowing gold markings and hair as pale as cornsilk.

He is so broken.
His wings, his bones, his perfect skin.

It breaks her, too.

She screams her fury, this sudden pain in her chest and the ache that might actually succeed in breaking her apart, the wrongness of this new world and how stumbling across something like this is no longer unusual. It’s so unfair. Darkness fractures across her body, her shadow cloak exploding outwards in shards of death the color of this eternal night. She cannot see where his beast went, but she hopes that will be enough to make it wary, to keep it from returning again until she can fix this. And she CAN fix this, she has to fix this.

Her delicate ears swivel as she reaches down to touch those dark lips to the almost copper shade of his shoulder. Truly she cannot tell whether there is still even any life inside him, but it doesn’t seem important as she pushes the healing magic into his skin. It leaves her in tendrils of shadow, ribbons of black night that settle over his skin and disappear, and she imagines they’ve gone somewhere beyond where her mismatched eyes can see to knit these broken pieces of him back together. It’s hard because fear distracts her, because every sound in the forest feels like it belongs to something that absolutely wants to kill her, and his dying body makes it all the more easy to understand what death would feel like.

But she stays, draining herself into him until something happens. Until he moves or breathes or speaks, until he stops bleeding, stops laying there like he’s already gone. Then she remembers his wing, the broken one with bone folded in on itself, unnaturally crooked. It will never heal well like that. So she takes the wing between her teeth, buries a silent apology deep inside a chest now beating itself ragged, and pulls it out straight again with all her might. She drops it, and then touches her nose to those bones too, imagining the fractures between them shrinking.

She is exhausted by this, and for a moment she stops, turning to his face to brush those dark lips over the smooth skin of his jaw. It is the kind of thing she would never do if his eyes were open, the kind of gentleness she reserves for absolutely no one. But it is easy to like someone she’s poured her whole heart into - easy because he doesn’t know she has, because if he wakes again it will be to hard eyes and a scowl, and a chest full of secrets he will never be privy to.

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

@[Nashua]

[Nashua]

There had been days that Taiga felt like a prison.

To a boy born with wings, where was the sky? Where was the wide, unparalleled blue? Even the wind wasn't given freedom in the Northern forest; the Sequoias barricaded against it and a birthright from both sides of his blood were denied to the striped stallion. Nashua would long for the day that he could spread his wings and soar, when the day would come when the only thing striping Nash's sky would be the gold stripes gleaming along his legs and hindquarters.

But now, it's all he wants.

He wants the familiar shadows of the trees to wrap around him like an embrace. He wants the mist to swirl around him and whisper things from forgotten times, to hear the past in the way that his brother or mother might. He wants the comfort of what he had known from his earliest days when all Nashua had wanted was the sky. When he thought there was so much more to the world than his mother's embrace and his brother's endless well of patience. He wants to be home, with Noel and their girls, with the ones who had been with him in the beginning because Nashua knows he is dying.

He is dying, he thinks. There is too much blood, so much of it that even the corners of his vision have turned red despite the dark. He is undone by something he has carried, a monster in his chest and the next breath he takes is straggling. He struggles for air and one green eye looks up, towards the night sky that holds no stars. Nashua looks for just one - just one he thinks - a small beacon of light that he can follow while the dark would swallow him whole.

(you are a mother killer, it trills)
(No, thinks the chestnut.)

(you are dead, hums the monster)
(No.)

(you are nothing, forgotten. like me.)

Something in him screams and it wakes him.

His proud head lifts momentarily, blazed and blood-stained, while the world comes jolting back to him.

(No.)

The forest has eyes and Nashua knows it is still out there, watching, waiting.

His stripes start to glow as the life flows back into him - given from her to him an unselfish act that will later leave him humbled - and his legs start to move as the ground were underneath him again. As if he were in the sky instead of lying on his side, waiting for Death to greet him. Her healing sparks something inside him and the magic that had knit him back together after the Alliance finds strength in what she gives and all Nash can do is look up into a pair of mismatched eyes, trying to understand why she would brave the dark and attempt to save the life of a stranger.

Nashua is glancing up and though it is hard to see, though his recent struggle has left his sight blurred, he thinks he can see a scowl and a pair of sharp eyes watching him. Something pointed despite the soft presence that he had perhaps imagined. His green eyes strain to give her a more definite shape as he attempts to lift his head. Something about her is familiar and it makes his expression look sterner than the confusion he feels.

One of his wings is splayed out while the other is crumpled beneath him, those beautiful feathers painted in blood.

He groans.

"You shouldn't have come so close," Nashua warns her with a hoarse voice. The thing in the dark - the thing out there that was nothing but a shadowy mass that giggles and laughs - was because of him. "This was my fault."

---

@[illuminae]

[illuminae]

He has been so still for so long that when he finally, suddenly, lifts his bright chestnut head, she nearly shies backwards and away from him. It is as though in his stillness she had forgotten he had ever lived, that this fleeting warmth beneath his skin meant something more. But his gaze does not immediately find her, and she makes no effort to alert him to her presence. She doesn’t know him, doesn’t even know if she wants to know him.

Doesn’t she, though?
Would she not have left him there in his graveless death if she did not care.

It is good that he has not found her face, because it is a tapestry of emotion she prefers to keep hidden away somewhere deep inside herself. She would not have wanted him to see the way those mismatched eyes softened from their hard worry in those first few moments of consciousness. Nor would she have wanted him to see the way the glowing markings on his legs drew all of her attention until that faded golden shine was reflected back at him in windows of blinking gold and dark for every second she could not turn away.

He is beautiful in a way that she will never be, alive and shining like he has stardust buried in the vivid patterns across his legs. Or maybe it is sunshine, and that is why the beast was so eager to ruin him. She is glad to have been here, glad to have seen him, glad to have this gift to share with him. He is too beautiful for death.

She takes a step back from him, drawing shadows in tight around her with a magic that lives inside every bone and every vein, every valve of a heart created broken. It is easy to be invisible, and she is so ready to slip away until his legs start to struggle and she cannot help but to pause again and wonder if there is more she can do, more she can give. Her shadows dissipate, falling away from her skin like black fog, falling towards him to carry more of her healing magic. More of this broken love she will not acknowledge that lives and grows inside her chest, reaches for strangers who never even notice her. Never notice that their wounds are suddenly gone, or the aches in their bones have somehow eased.

Never notice the girl with the mismatched eyes, all cloaked in shadow and hiding everything but this gift that exists to be given and not kept.

But then his head turns and his eyes lift, and she knows immediately that he has found her in the dark because there are suddenly thoughts swimming like fish in the green of his eyes. She freezes, unmoving and unblinking, watching him squint and search as though perhaps she is like a ghost in the dark with this haze of shadow remnant clinging to her skin. She frowns, and it is hard and defensive, stripping all of the gentle warmth from her delicate face of half black and half white-gold until there is nothing but a scowl to greet him.

It is unsteady though, like an echo cast off by the wild of her heart.
She softens, she frowns deeper, she blinks and her mouth goes slack.
She doesn’t smile, and her eyes are still wary, but the longer she stares at that face of bright white and warm chestnut, the harder it is to be anything but gentle.

Maybe just this once it won’t matter. She’ll leave from here and never see him again, and he will soon forget her face and this gentleness and the way her eyes are like night and day - one pitch black, the other bright gold. One time of letting her walls down won’t kill her, and then she can go back to being a ghost again, living at a distance to protect this fragile thing inside her chest.

He groans and the sound claws at something in her belly until her eyes flash with pain. “If you sit up I can fix that too.” She says quietly, stepping closer again so she can keep her voice at a whisper. Her eyes are on his broken wing, the one pinned beneath him. She doesn’t warn him that she will have to move it first so the bones are aligned as close to where they should be before she heals him. He likely wouldn’t want the warning anyway, better not to know.

Then he speaks, and the scowl that slips across her delicate face is definitely one of her best. “I’m pretty sure you meant to say thank you, so you’re welcome. And I’m also pretty sure you didn’t ask that thing to kill you, so,” wait, had he wanted to die? That silences her for a beat, and her gaze changes and searches his face as though she would be able to discern such a thing just by looking at him. Then, more slowly and a little wary, with pain sinking into her bones like a tangible beast, “What do you mean this was your fault.. did you want to die?”

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

@[Nashua]

[Nashua]

His green eyes lift, rising to meet her mismatched ones like their lost sun used to do each morning. The air is burning in his aching lungs; each breath is a struggle but Nashua fights for each one. His story does not end with him bleeding out, alone in the dark. His story does not leave him fallen here.

She found him instead of Death.

Her mismatched eyes are what he forces himself to focus on, recounting the stark contrast between each one. (The edges of his vision are still hazy; his world is still blurred at the seams and his gaze clings to hers like she is the single life thread keeping him tethered to this world.) The striped pegasus is prostrate before her and when she has already done him one kindness, she offers him another. The injured wing that has wrapped underneath his chestnut barrel is limp and Nashua, who can no more fathom life without his wings than a heartbeat, groans as he attempts to stand.

One striped foreleg reaches out followed by the second and there is a faint glow coming from his shimmering stripes. It illuminates the dark briefly before a sharp pain dulls the light. His hind legs follow suit of their predecessors and after a few moments of graceless stumbling, Nash finds his hooves. He stands and moves the speckled appendage towards her, glancing down at the ground because he has never been this vulnerable before a stranger before.

It is easier to look at the ground than at her.

"Please," he murmurs gravely.

Nash's curved ears pin into the flaxen cornsilk of his mane when she reprimands him. When she reminds him that the appropriate response to this whole chaotic interaction should have been thank you. His pale lips purse together in a thin line and the pegasus does his best not to scowl. He stands there silently, letting the quiet wrap all around them while Nashua feels the desire to wrap his wings around himself and fly so high that he might find the sun.

But this is their world now. It is dark and full of monsters.

The striped stallion glances back towards the dark mare again, "thank you." He says, an attempt at an apology. "But it could have hurt you," Nashua tries to explain. "It-," and the back of his throat goes dry, a bitter taste in the back of it like dried blood. "It came from me," he admits as the memory comes back to him in awful flashes. He groans again and tries to center his thoughts on anything but the... the thing that nearly ripped him apart. The thing that had left a jagged scar across his broad chest and towards his left-wing.

"I thought it was a dream," he says. "I thought it was a nightmare." Maybe it is the onset of a fever that makes him talk so much but Nashua reveals more to this stranger than he has anyone, even his brother, Yanhua. "It was so real," the striped stallion murmurs, his deep voice trailing off. Nash closes his eyes before opening them, turning to watch the scowling mare again. He thinks of that night by the River and the silver mare he dreamt of (who had a familiarity that tugged at the back of his mind; Aletta, he realizes now. She had looked like his grandmother).

"Forgive me," he says, realizing that to this stranger, he probably sounds like raving. That he sounds like a mad man.

@[illuminae]

[illuminae]

His eyes are so green it feels like gazing back at a summer day. It is a shade brighter than any meadow or flower, and she swears she can almost smell the fresh sweetness of grass the longer she holds his gaze. It’s like a teasing hint of freedom from this new normal of perpetual dark and bone-aching cold. For a while it seems like neither one is willing to look away, like there is some kind of secret strength they each find in the other's eyes.

She doesn’t realize she can drown in the green just as easily as she could in the blue of any ocean, doesn’t realize she’s at the risk of falling into them forever. She is too busy standing at the edge, too busy peering in and wondering how far away the bottom is.

Then he shifts, and she realizes he must be trying to rise and all she’s doing is staring at him like some dumb idiot, memorizing a green she knows she would never in a million years forget. She takes a step back to give him space, and when he struggles she wants to reach out with shadow to help lift him. But she doesn’t know him well enough to know if that would hurt his pride, if he would feel helpless instead of helped. If it would make him feel small. So she lets him win this battle on his own, and the only hint that she would’ve liked to do more is the rippling tension running beneath the skin along her jaw and shoulders. But surely he’s not looking close enough to notice.

His gaze drops and his ears fall back, and she knows she must have stung him with the sharpness of her words. Stupid words, why had she even said them? She wants to apologize, but there is a weight in her chest and a binding over her tongue that keeps her quiet now for fear of saying the wrong thing yet again. She hadn’t meant to be rude, she just hadn’t thought it through.

Her mismatched eyes avert from his as she moves close again to examine the broken wing hanging at his side. It’s so pulverized that it is no wonder it cannot move, and when she reaches out to it the only thing he’ll feel is the warmth of her breath between the feathers. It would be easier to touch him, but she doesn’t want to hurt him. For a moment her eyes close, and it takes a lot more effort than earlier to call on the healing magic that lives beneath her skin. She knows it must be nearly exhausted by now, but the way he had murmured please repeats in the quiet of her thoughts. With sweat dampening her neck, she wrestles the last dregs of power into some kind of order, pushing it like smoke in amongst the broken bones until at last they start to knit back together.

It would have been only half as hard if she’d just pulled the wing straight first, but the way she can imagine his voice sounding when it is tinged with pain leaves her feeling queasy.

She sways when she is finished, feeling exhausted from the effort of keeping him here, keeping him alive. Her cheek brushes his neck, but the unexpected contact has her stepping back again, frowning as she blinks away the spots of pale light flickering in her periphery. “It could’ve tried.” She says in answer, grateful when her eyes find his again and seem to steady there. “I’m meaner than I look.” The smile that flashes across her mouth is so fast, so fleeting, it’s likely he missed it entirely. But then she softens because for some reason she cannot help herself around him, and steps close enough to duck her head beside his and feel the heat of his skin reaching for the heat of hers.

She thinks back on the wounds she had first healed, the open chasm where it was very plausible something had ruptured from him. The idea disgusts her, but instead of recoiling she moves to his chest to very slowly, very gently, lay her cheek against his skin and listen to the sounds inside him. “I don’t hear anything else in there.” She says after a moment, pulling back to find his handsome face again. “Just the sound of your heart.” Still beating, of course, and that thought makes her smile again in a soft, subtle way. But his worries unravel from him and she realizes she is the very worst person he could be trying to find comfort in. She is cold and distant and more awkward than he could possibly know, but she reaches out to touch her nose to his neck.

“There’s nothing to forgive, I promise.” But she isn’t sure how to help him, isn’t sure of anything except the fact that she wants to help him. That she isn’t done trying to keep him safe. “It sounds worse than any nightmare I’ve had.” She says, and she doesn’t feel bad for telling a lie when he’ll never know the truth anyway. “This looks pretty real.” She says, reaching out absently to touch the long gash across his chest, the point of rupture. Then, as though looking at it is enough to force her to relive the horror of finding him flayed and bleeding out, “Where do you live? We shouldn’t be out here. You smell like death and now I smell like you. We’re irresistible.” Her tone is an odd mix of worry and humor, of pain and disgust. “Come on, I’ll go with you. We can watch each other's backs. I think it’ll be a long walk.”

Or a death march, she thinks. They are both beyond exhausted now.

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

@[Nashua]

[Nashua]

Nashua rises because it has never been in him to stay still. He'd see the inviting blue of the sky, feel the gentle stirrings of a breeze, the drift of the clouds as they floated by and away he would go - it has never occurred to him to stay in one place for long. His thoughts would fly to whatever present he was chasing and those speckled wings would flare. Exploration flows in his veins, trickled down through the generations of horses who have lived in the highest peaks to the deepest valleys.

He groans and pushes himself past the pain.
Nashua has never been idle and he certainly won't start now, not while there is a demon in his childhood home.

(The pegasus is still haunted by it in his mind. Even if it has fled or dissolved into shadow, he still hears it: 'Name me.' 'Mother-killer.' 'Ill-omen.' Chanting over and over again, fueling his urgent desire to stand. To get up and get away from this spot. Back to Taiga where he can at least put the accusations into action, where he can do something about them.)

He presents his injured wing like an offering. Nash can't bring himself to look at her - not while his mind is clouded with such dark thoughts.

The striped pegasus wonders briefly if she knows how much of a vulnerability this is for him; Nash has always been a confident stallion and about many things. His gift of flight has always been the thing he has been most proud of. It was his sister, Celina, who gave Nashua his first words of praise for his ability and it is her voice that he sometimes hears when he finds the skies. For one bitter second, he wonders that if he can't fly, what can he do? What use will be to the North, to his family? For one resentful moment, he measures his worth by wings and wonders what his life would be without them?

(The black-and-gold woman can't know that by healing his wing, she is saving a part of the striped horse.  She is saving him from discovering the darkest parts of himself that he might have found if he had been stuck on the ground.)

The chimera comes closer, nearer to his ruined wing and his aching chest. Nashua stiffens - though not because of her. Only at the memory of what he had erupted from him. His mind is still flashing red and hearing the splitting of bones and he doesn't want to stain her with that. He is fragmented and broken and yet here she is, whole. Nashua is still trying to piece himself back together and he worries that while he is reaching for them, he will grab something else by mistake. But those green eyes watch her come closer and tell him - reassure him - that the only thing she hears is his pounding heart. It slams so loud that he almost doesn't hear her murmur the words.

"Taiga," he says. A half-truth. "I'm from the Taiga." There a thousand memories there, with at least a hundred of them wishing himself away from the suffocating forest. Now, all he wants is to get back. Back to Noel and their girls. The last strands of her magic are weaving his broken bones back together and Nash thinks that enough of himself is back together that they might get there.

She's right, he thinks. They'll be safer together. He'll never make it to the Taiga on his own. And she's right again, that it will be a long journey when she is depleted of her gift and Nash is exhausted beyond healing. Even though he almost died, his humor hasn't dimmed. The ghost of it emerges now.

An edge of a smile curls against his pale lips. "Should I call out 'back'?" he teases before grimacing when a flash of pain strikes him. Forcing a breath, he says: "I'm Nashua."

@[illuminae]

[illuminae]

She is caught off guard by the place he names as home, and those mismatched gold and black eyes leap wordlessly to his face even as she struggles to conceal her surprise. How can it be that his home is the only place she would consider calling hers, that those ancient trees and the damp, rolling fog were things he knew as intimately as she did. She feels unsteady at this revelation, and even though she forces her eyes to be soft and quiet, forces this shock from a face that tries so hard to be stiff and stone, it is several long moments before she can tear her gaze from his face.

“Ah, yes.” She says finally, and the words are suddenly as stiff as her shoulders beneath those black and gold wings. “I know how to get there.” She does not tell him that she was born in the Taiga, that those ageless trees saw more of her growth than either of her parents had. He is only supposed to be for now, not forever, that was the promise she had made with herself when he opened his eyes and she had chosen to stay. Chosen, for just this once, not to be a ghost. And now they would return to a place that was home to both of them, a place so vast that somehow, she had never seen him.

She is sure of that, sure she would know him in a heartbeat if she’d seen him before.
He is brighter than any sun and warmer than any summer. He has spring storms in those quiet green eyes, a liveliness that even now, even broken and exhausted, she cannot help but feel taken in by.

But it isn’t until he smiles, just the shadow of movement across lips she hadn’t meant to be staring at so closely, that she realizes how much her choice was going to change things. “You should definitely be quiet and save your strength.” She says, but there is a gentle kind of light in the mismatched colors of her eyes as she glances over at him sideways with a barely suppressed smile unfurling at the corners of her delicate black mouth. She is glad he has no way of knowing how rare her smiles are, or how unfairly easy it was for him to coax one out of her.

He winces though, and the smile vanishes from her lips, warmth traded for worry in her eyes as she examines him more closely from beneath the deepened furrows of a pale brow. She almost interrupts him with a question at his pain level, but the gift of his name silences her at once.

Nashua.

There is some small part of her that clings to his name, learns the weight of it on her tongue, marvels at the shape of it on her lips. But there is too much of her fathers dark living inside her chest, and that dark thrashes wildly at the way she wants to know him, to know more than his name, more than the wild green of those summer eyes, more than that single smile that had claimed her gaze so effortlessly. She knows he is Nashua, but now she wants to know who Nashua is because right now he is a broken impossibility making something inside her chest ache in a way she has no experience with.

So she pauses. It is long enough for that uncertain gaze to wander across his face again, long enough that she forgets to hold the shadows against her skin, long enough that he will see her flashes of deep gold wing feathers and the ugly patchwork of black and shining gold-soaked white where they meet in jagged lines across her delicate body, odd fractions of two wholes somehow unwilling to come together in her even while her sister, her own twin, was the perfect melding of darkness and light.

She feels naked like this, feels bare down to her thoughts and her heart and this pain inside her chest that never goes away. He can see the fractures in her skin, the shining gold-white and the chasms of black - but will he understand how deep those fractures run? That these chasms are as vast inside her as they are upon her skin? She pulls the shadows back in at once, but they are slow and sluggish, and they rebel against her growing exhaustion even as she holds them desperately close against her chest. But it is like holding onto water, and the shadows spill from her and into the evernight almost as soon as she pulls them against her skin, leaving her bare once more.

She has nothing left to pretend with, nothing because she gave it all to him. To Nashua. There is a flare of fury and it burns like storms in her eyes, flaring dark for one single beat of her heart until her eyes settle against his and she knows this anger is entirely misplaced. That she would give it all to him again if time were to unwind.

Death would never take him, she would never allow it.

Though she’s never been so boldly vulnerable - and it feels so much like sliding a blade into her own chest that she almost stumbles over the words when she lifts her chin and turns to him, saying, “I know it’s very odd.” She means, of course, these fractures that run so much deeper beyond the contrast of colors he can see, these eyes that seem as though they should belong to two horses instead of one. “It’s why I keep the shadows close. But I’m too tired now.” Her eyes leave his face again, her jaw clenching. But then something sparks in the gold, alights in the black, and there is a flicker of movement at the corner of her delicate mouth where secret amusement pulls at her lips. “You can stare if you want, but I might get the wrong idea.”

ILLUMINAE

we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break

@[Nashua]

[Nashua]

"You're a Godsend," Nash murmurs distantly, somewhere between the haze of pain and the odd recollection of memories running through his mind at this moment. "I don't think I could manage to even walk straight." It's not as if color is abundant in their current climate but Nashua has always been able to discern the shadows and remember the things they used to be: a mass of brambles that once used to a bush that grew his sister's favorite flowers, a tangling of branches that once used belong to a Taigan sapling.

Everything has turned into a shade of what it once was; Nash with his still-healing wound and the tang of blood soaked into his pelt thinks that he is no different. He is no longer whole.

"As you wish," he tells his guide and the striped stallion easily falls into silence (if Illuminae knew him better, she might realize what a troubling sign that was for the usually conversational pegasus). The mismatched mare leads the way back to Taiga and every time that her gold catches on the dim light of his glowing markings, Nashua keeps being reminded of someone. The color was common enough in Beqanna, even more common in Taiga now, thanks to his mother's bloodline.

(If their conversation had gone that way - if he had some ability to know her mind - he might have shared that he knows that feeling, to think yourself a fracturing of two souls. Or rather for Nash, he considers himself a fracturing of many. He is a living reminder of something awful, something terrible. His father's stripes glow around his legs and his mother's coloring shines from his copper coat. By looks alone, he could belong to both families. It makes him remember the ache behind his half-sibling's eyes when they see him, a physical testament to the Curse that claimed their father, and the pain that he grew up seeing flashing behind his mother's. So Nash knows what its like to grow up in the middle, not quite there or here, and grapple with the ground beneath your hooves as you try to find it.)

While he studies the gilded coloring that adorns her dark shape, fragments of another color start to emerge.

There is a moment of silence - too long, he knows - before Nash speaks, quietly and firmly: "It's not." He tells because the conversation does go that way and despite the blood that he has lost, there is enough left in him to still boil. She is dark and light and that is a battle that has been brewing in Nashua's chest since the day that he learned that he was the son of the thing that caused so much pain and suffering.

That he understood that he was an extension of it.

@[illuminae] - who had been looking anywhere but at Nash - turns to glance at him and he lifts his blazed head towards the sabino woman. His pale lips twitch in a smile and then he decides to show her something. It's safer with her because she doesn't know his history. When his coat bleeds from chestnut to white, when he copies her coloring and takes on an ebony pelt, something behind his eyes is burning. This is something that he hasn't revealed to anyone yet - not Yan, not Noel - and perhaps he feels safer with her because she won't understand what he is revealing to her.

"See?" he says and his voice becomes graveled, the sound of pebbles being churned on a rocky beach, when he finally becomes mismatched as she is. "Not odd at all."