[private] I might go interstellar

[Nashua]

Nashua has to close his eyes against an all-consuming rage; it brews within him just as it fuels Ciri and her scorching words. The chestnut pegasus doesn't begrudge her that anger. He understands it, he realizes - Nash understands the emotion for what it is, because it had been the same one that had left the Thane half-healed and emotionally struggling on the Isle while he had made a frantic journey to Taiga. It had been anger that fueled him to the misty Northern Forest and it had been that fury that had nearly spear-headed he and Noel into Hyaline afterward. The remnants of a deep wound that Nashua has suffered since his foalhood.

And it could have gotten them killed.

That same fury could cause the Freyr to make another mistake, or a misstep that could harm more of his family and those under his care. "He has my son," Nash says, revealing another reason that he was unable to directly go after the Curse. Not while it had his youngest boy.

"Ciri," he tries again, quietly, almost desperately. "Listen to me." He tells her in a voice that isn't a King giving a command but a friend urging hard-won wisdom. "It's been killed before, in Loess. And if what my mother told me is true, before that, it died in Tephra." Turning his blazed face from the green-and-blue sky, he peers at the Northern Thane. She wants to kill it, she says. She wants to be the one that ends it but Nashua doesn't think she understands. "It keeps coming back."

His jaw tightens until Nash can restrain the rising anger and the winged horse adds, "Even if there was a way to kill Gale," Nashua says, "what happens then?" She had known his brother and knew that before the Curse claimed him as it had done the others, Gale had the promise of a happy life. Living in Hyaline with Mazikeen, raising their children together and all of that was gone now. Like the ashes of their shared ancestors. "Kill him and your condemning somebody else." Another one of his brothers or sisters, or possibly their children.

He wouldn't rule out murdering his sibling, if that was the only way to keep the others safe. But as Nash saw it, that was, at best, simply buying them time.

"I plan on going to Loess," he tells her. "The North has been overdue a meeting with the South. If Gale has stolen a child from the Taiga and attempted to take one from Tephra, Loess should be on guard." Nash knows this wasn't what Ciri wanted; she wanted revenge and vengeance. He can feel her burning with it - like her shield of stars - and it takes everything in him to not allow them both to become a pyre. Silenty, Nash vowed that he would do everything in his power to give it to her. There had to be a way to the end the Curse but it wouldn't be something as simple as Death.

"Come with me," he asks her and then, "On the way back, we'll stop in Nerine. There is somebody there who might have some answers."

@Ciri