[private] my bad habits lead to wide eyes staring at space

[Nashua]

There is the start of a small smile, and Nash lifts his blazed face to better see her own. Her features have always seemed made from stone (at least to Nashua), her expression already set. She is a striking woman, but when she smiles, it is the most captivating thing about her. He likes the way that it tugs free, the way that it breaks lose and lights up her two-toned face like the dawn he imagines she is.

She who is Illuminae. His grin softens, letting the knowledge settle in his mind, in a place where he will never forget.

Nashua would be content to just stay here, at the start of a conversation without pressing all his troubles and worries on her. It doesn't seem fair, not when she has existed in a separate part of his mind. Sometimes he had wondered if she had really existed at all - instead of a figment of an imagination run rife with pain - and now that he knows she does, he doesn't want to burden her with his painful realities. It somehow seems selfish, though he wonders if wanting to keep his own plights to himself is also selfish.

I asked you first, she says and Nashua lowers his head, sighing softly; trying to push away the storm swirling in his chest.

"My son was taken," says the winged horse. Nashua is angry - and he certainly feels the hatred burning towards Gale and Mazikeen, the ones who took him - but he is most angry with himself. He should have been here. "While I was out on the Isle. My family was here and I failed them." He looks away from Illuminae then, unable to look at her and see his own failings projected back at him. How it had felt with Noel.

He thinks of his youngest son - Bolder - back in Hyaline. With monsters, and the memory of blood staining his child's lips rages through him. He is glad to be tucked away in the shadows with her, where nobody can see the way that his copper coat becomes brighter and brighter, bleeding out across his hide until it was the same color as the fallen animal that Bolder had slain. An accident, is what Mazikeen had called it, while his half-brother had looked on with a delighted expression that turned Nash's heart to stone.

Illuminae comes forward and touches him.
Nash closes his eyes.

"I feel too much these days," he tells her, trying to even the pace of his pulse and still the rise of his temper. His flaxen forelock covers most of his pale face until Nashua looks up, as his normal coloring starts to come back to him. "Surprise," Nashua says at first. He hadn't expected to see her. The Northern-born stallion wasn't even sure that she had been real before this moment. He had felt the wariness, too. But that wasn't uncommon for this part of the forest.

Not when he knew the shadow-dwellers were nearby; they protected their own.

"But I'm glad to have seen you again, Illuminae."

@illuminae