[private] until the night turns

[Nashua]

This is Nashua's family.

This is his older brother staring him down, as his eyes flash a wide array of colors. Each change from the silver-blue of lightning to viridian green makes the striped stallion grow angrier and angrier, because this gathering should have brought him joy. His son spending time with his paternal uncle and his mate could have been the thing to mend the rift in a bloodline gone so severely wrong.

But Gale taunts Nashua, flashing the unspoken message in a gaze that the Northern king doesn't look away from. He locks it there, unwilling to pull it away until his mate steps in between them. The striped pegasus says nothing, only watches (safeguards) as Noel approaches their son who has taken a shape that he wasn't born with. His green eyes sweep over the boy, moving over him in the same manner that his mother had, relieved that Bolder was alright. "Ma," he hears the adolescent greet excitedly. Her smile must be enough to reassure him (or he is too much his mother's son and wants to reassure Noel) because Bolder says next, "I'm fine. Uncle Gale and Aunt Maze have been helping me."

The images click into place; a large russet creature descending from above into Hyaline's lake; a sienna hawk; and then the last, the most troubling: a chestnut wolf with lips painted red with blood. He snarls, turning his attention sharply back on the thing that wears his brother. "What have you done?" he asks in a low voice, an accusation thrown at the pair of elder shifters.

Nashua had hoped that they wouldn't hurt Bolder, and his eyes had proved they hadn't. He had assumed that they would manipulate his youngest son in some way, and turn him against his own blood. But why hadn't he expected this?

Why did it surprise him that they made a killer out of his son?

There is a sound that Nashua feels more than he hears - his son becoming the Bolder that he had known - a colt with a bristled mane, a boy with golden stripes and silver eyes that shone like the moon. "Dad," the young shapeshifter starts to say, before glancing back to his mother, and then to Mazikeen for support.