after the storm blows through

[Nashua]

Nashua had been almost impervious to the dust. It drifted through Taiga one morning with the fog and it had been his pretty Aunt Elaina who had remarked about it. 'We’d call that a stirring,’ she had said with a knowing smile that Nash couldn’t quite disassemble. Like she knew that the way the wind rippled through Taiga that day was different from any other; that she knew something was unusual about that fog.

The dust, the wind and the fog had blown through the Redwoods without Nashua being any the wiser. Nothing about him had changed. His world remained unmoved. It still centered (grounded) around Yanhua, on learning everything he could from Elio and Celina (when she could be found), listening to his Aunt Elaina and Aunt Brazen like his mother would have wanted.

His duty is to his family, says the blood running in his veins. His duty is to Taiga. (Why does that make his soul feel so much heavier? Why does it feel like it binds him to ground instead of bonding him to the sky?)

He has to lift his head higher to fully appreciate the size of the mammoth stallion. There is strength in his bones, the boy thinks to himself (nothing like Nash who is all fine lines and a proud Spanish neck). There is sturdiness in his stance and he remembers what his mother had once said of the black stallion as she tried to explain the newcomer to the Northern woods to her boys, trying to ease Yanhua’s developing nerves of strangers and satisfy Nashua’s growing curiosity of them: 'Maybe Giants dream bigger than we do.’ The red mare had smiled gently, trying to encourage their humor as well as an empathy for others. ’If that were true, I doubt there would be space for the fog between Taiga’s trees.’

It had been explained who the stallion was - as all the residents had been told to the twins. 'There are no strangers in Taiga,’ she had told them. (There had been one but such was her determination to shield them from that, he never realized it.)

When he settles his weight, the yearling does wince at the sharp pain that emanates from his left shoulder. "Nashua,” the chestnut pegasus offers as he (somewhat gingerly) presses the wing on that side closer to his back. "I live on the other side of the woods with my brother, Yanhua.” He adds because he knows that their scents are similar enough; it wouldn’t be the first time that a horse has mistaken one twin for the other (despite one having stripes and the other having horns, one having green eyes where the other has brilliant Legacy blue).

His eyes are lingering on the gray stripes before they flick up to the sharpness of @[Skeleton Ghoul]'s teeth. They are the ivories of a predator and yet Nashua doesn't smell blood on him (a reprieve?). Curious and with the impertinence of his youth, the copper adolescent asks, "What are you doing out here?" Not hunting, so what then?