[open] living like we're renegades

[Nashua]

stars when you shine, you know how i feel
oh freedom is mine

I went to the Mountain, Gale says and Nashua listens.

He has been to the Mountain as well (though the list of places that Nash hasn’t been to grows shorter and shorter). Nashua thinks about the Heart of Beqanna and it makes the young chestnut curious about what Gale made of it. It makes him curious about what the Mountain asked in exchange for his horns and his Erne.

It had asked him to steal a secret and Nashua isn’t entirely sure that is something he can do. (But he had been warned about Magic, hadn't he?)

The sound the raptor emits makes him laugh. He’s never seen a bond like this before and there is something about it that lightens his spirit. Nash is glad that though this island doesn’t seem particularly crowded (like the Isle), he has Erne here with him. The laugh broadens into a smile, lifting the conversation away from darker topics and back to where it should be; the present, between them, brothers.

"Blue,” he repeats and then grins. If he could completely shake the sadness in his gut, he might have offered a joke. How did you choose that name? He would have asked his iridescent brother. Instead, the winged adolescent smiles and says, "It suits you.”

Thunder rolls again in the distance and as the pair move away from the beach, they take shelter between palm trees and Nashua listens as Gale tells him a story. A story about how a name is lost and then found again. And more stories follow about simpler things - like hide-and-seek and the places @[Gale] liked to frequent in Loess as a colt. Nashua, in turn, tells him about the Three Guards (three large granite boulders) that keep watch on the Taigan and Nerinian border, about how he and Yan had played around the base of them as colts.

Nash tells (shows) him about how the fog makes the Northern forest seem like a forgotten fairytale. If he has seen glimpses of Celina there, he doesn’t need to elaborate the sheer size of the Redwoods but he still tries to explain the grounding effect that they can have on a soul. That for all the times Nash felt like floating away, it was the Sequoias who kept him grounded.

"You should see them for yourself someday,” he tells Gale as the storm finally starts to relent.

NASHUA

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