[private] the fatal flaw that makes you magnificently cursed

[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]