He soars over the waters of the North. Nashua makes the same journey he has time and time again. He crosses the ocean towards Nerine, coasting over the granite and proud stony countenance of his brother’s land. He continues to fly, and tilts his auburn-colored wings up towards the sun. Nashua considers for a moment what it might be like to soar above the clouds, to fly so high that he loses track of where the sky begins and the earth ends. 

Will it make any difference when he lands? 

For what he is about to tell Noel? 

What will his world look like after he has told her that he has intentionally turned it upside down? 

Nashua continues to fly, heading towards the familiar horizon of Taiga. The trees below him stand as proud as they ever had, and even a few of the silvergreen that had been the result of Yanhua and Amarine break through through the deep emerald tree canopy. So much has changed over the years, and yet there are still traces of the past reaching towards the clouds. The thought of them makes his stomach lurch, because it makes him think of Noel and in his mind, Nash replays his most treasured moments of the life they have shared over the years. Daring the wild wind blowing off the ocean from Nerine. The moment he had found in her in Nerine with Elegance and Luminesce resting in the heather behind her. The triplets - Saffron, Bolder, Bravely - and the way that she had surprised him with their existence. 

The way that she had stood beside him in Hyaline, when he had been ready to risk the entirety of the North to bring their (then) youngest son home. 

His throat tightens when he finally lands in Taiga, not far from the border of Nerine, and Nashua calls out for Noel as he always has.

@Noel

He was selfish and Nashua was never more acutely aware of it as he was now. All it took was a call, and there she was, emerging through the deep fog like a welcome dream. Nash knew he should have said it then; he should have told her right then and there about what had transpired between him and Illuminae.

And yet, at the sight of Noel, he can only bring himself to walk forward. Each step feels heavy, as if the weight of what he is about to say would stop him. But Nashua keeps walking, keeps moving towards her because Noel has been his home and haven, and he (selfishly) wants to be beside her, where he has weathered every storm of his adult life.

She comes to him and he draws nearer to her, turning his blazed face into the delicate curve of her neck. Something that he has done a thousand times, and something that he will never do again. Noel deserved better. She deserved someone who would have given up their kingdom, that wouldn’t have allowed an ocean to remain between them. She deserved someone who would have stayed with her, who would have been there for each step their children took and would have remained when the last fledged.

She didn’t deserve someone who had gone to chase out the darkness in another and then crossed a line in the process.

”I - ,” Nashua begins to softly say, wanting to tell her that he has missed her too. Wanting to so easily fall back into the way that they had always been, but that would be a trap. It would be a lie, and while he was capable of doing so many things wrong, he wouldn’t intentionally lie to the woman who had been at his side for nearly a decade. ”I have to tell you something,” he tells her, forcing himself to step away from her and then clips out: ”Noel, we have to talk.”

@Noel

Nashua is a flawed creature.

He has known it since he was young. He can still remember standing in this very forest, looking over to his mother, and despite noticing Yanhua’s distance from him, pleading with Lilliana, asking her why their father couldn’t remain in Taiga. He remembers the envy that came from realizing his brother shared their mother’s gift - as well as the blue of her eyes - and that his stripes and wings marked him as different from them. He remembers chasing light from land to land, driven by an almost incessant need to find the good, never realizing how close the darkness was waiting to swallow him whole.

Perhaps Reave had been right. Perhaps he did only see the world in two contrasting shades. But hadn’t it been the gray that had blurred everything? It had been the gray where he lost sight of Bolder, unable to forgive his son for continuing a legacy that should have been buried. It had been the gray where Nashua dwelled in the loss of his twin brother, blinding him to the comfort he might have found in his others. It had been the gray where he had lingered with Illuminae, and despite trying to bring out the light in her, he had brought out the darkness in himself instead.

He had brought it here, in his self-righteous pride, to them.

Noel’s trust is a radiant thing. It comes shining up at him from the luminosity of her dark gaze and it twists Nash to the very core of his soul. No, you won’t. He thinks and the revelation quells whatever light might have remained behind his summer-green gaze. He looks down at her and realizes that despite how badly he wants to reach for her, to graze his pale muzzle against the curve of her delicate cheek, the only thing he should do now is give her his honesty (which he should have always done). This is how the gray began, how it crept into his life like the fog that came drifting through the Taiga, by thinking he was protecting her by sparing her harmful truths.

”Something has… happened.”

The words sound far too opaque to his ears, and so Nashua forces himself to elaborate.

He forces himself to elaborate everything. The damage has already been done. Now it needs to be brought to light, out of the murk and the gray. So he tells her about the angel that lingers in these woods; he explains the massive scar on his chest and though Noel might know that he gained it from a monster during the Eclipse, he explains that it was her healing that saved his life, not his. He explains that the something that has happened is her, and then he stops explaining. He stops saying anything at all, and the only thing to be heard is the distant sound of waves crashing against the Northern shore.

@Noel