Wolves that eddy out the corner of his eyes || Nashua

[Nashua]

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

Maybe there is too much of Nashua's mother in him for the striped pegasus to seal off his heart. Maybe he doesn't know-how. Maybe Nash isn't so different from his Nerinian half-sibling and is just obstinate; he just won't.

Maybe it is because that Nashua resulted out of something so wrong that the young stallion was determined to right everything he could.

(He fights the fires of his anger with Wherewolf because he agrees with the colt. It is not his fault that he is this way. It is not his fault that he is so angry or indifferent. He's felt it before. Has known it before when a colt trying the Isle on for size had felt like picking on Nashua for being younger, fine-boned, and missing his mother and twin. They had sparred as young studs were apt to do and when Nash had clamped down on a piece of tender flesh, the brawling youth had called him a 'bastard'. So he had bitten down harder, fought fiercer so he didn't have to wonder what the other adolescent might have been implying.)

His ears pin into his cornsilk mane, a warning to Wherewolf. The flaxen-haired pegasus thinks he understands his half-brother but that doesn't mean Nash won't hesitate to remind the younger one of his personal space. Pressing his mouth into a tense life, the copper stallion bites back baring his teeth in return. Nashua lifts his head higher, the muscles in his thick neck stiffening.

The golden-dappled colt turns around, leaving Nashua to snort in the empty space that he left behind. He stands there for a time, watching the form of Wherewolf grow smaller as he tried to find a way

Nashua flares his wide wings and within a few beats and a canter stride, he is in the air. He takes to it naturally, confidently as he always believed that the wide-open sky is there waiting for him. Nash has never known the winds or his wings to fail him. The praise (and lessons) he received as a youth from Celina and Popinjay taught him to never question them. What he does question is why a pegasus - even a plummeting one - wouldn't attempt an easier way back up the bluffs and cliffs of Nerine.

Hovering for a few more flight strokes, he reminded himself that Wherewolf proclaimed he didn't need a savior (and some part of him thinks that maybe he deserved a few hours wandering the cold beach, looking for a trail that Nash could probably find in half the time). He grunts before tilting a wing down and hovering above the silver buckskin. "You're better off swimming down the coast!" he bellows over the crashing waves. Fighting the winter drafts blowing up from the ocean, he flaps his wings powerfully.

"Wait for low tide," he shouts again over the saltwater. "There's a cove around those crags." Huffing again from the exertion, he adds: "there's an easier way back up than that death trap." Nashua assumes his half-brother isn't thickheaded enough to attempt climbing the sheer cliff face his head is angled towards, but then today has been full of surprises. Maybe Wherewolf intended to spend the rest of it clamoring up it for a suicidal descent that did nothing to knock any more sense into him than the first fall.

Nash doesn't intend to stay and watch. He gives the boy another long stare and then rounds back to the Isle, up into the sky that never has never failed him.

NASHUA

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