[private] you can't hold back time

[Nashua]

It's easy to pretend that the last few years haven't happened as he glances down to where Cheri presses her dark cheek against his copper coat. For a moment, he can pretend she is a child in Taiga again and that she is thanking him for bringing her favorite flower, lillies, or that he has regaled her with some story about a grand adventure outside the Taiga. He can pretend she is thanking him for something smaller than kingdom politics, and he can pretend that the world outside the North isn't quite so vast.

(Though as his green eyes gaze down at his niece, Nashua imagines that it might not be that way with the dreams that Cheri holds.)

He only quiets his own sigh when she mentions that she knows the history and the bloodlines that connect Loess to the North. Nashua knows them well enough by now; as a young pegasus, he had flown across Beqanna searching for a source of good where it concerned his biological father. He had learned all about the former Pirate Lord, the stories that came straight from Loess about deals made and bargains brokered (and alongside all those stories came the mention of his wife, Lepis). In those days, Nash thought if he could find a sliver of good where it concerned his sire, it might help abate the darkness he saw on the faces of his mother and brother, Yanhua.

But then Lilliana had returned from a visit to Tephra - had met a mare named Wishbone - and told a tale about a Curse and a stallion named Longclaw. Your grandfather, she had said, with a face that looked like it had been torn apart by storms. He'd wanted to hate his father then, for being dead and gone for years, and yet there was his mother's grief shining fresh from her blue eyes.

Cheri sums the history up so neatly, in a way that Nashua thinks their mutual relation - the austere Aletta - would have approved.

She says she'll treat Gale with caution. Makes it a promise that allows Nashua to breathe a little easier where it concerns his Cursed brother. When she draws away, the young pegasus is remembering Yanhua's coronation and the laughter from that day fills the Freyr's ears. It echoes from the past and rumbles out from his pale lips as they quirk in a lopsided grin, momentarily erasing the troubled years since then. "He hated that crown," Nashua remembers seeing the look in his twin's eyes and the way that he good-naturedly wore it, too kind to remark on how foolish he felt. His boyish grin tugs a little more and turns into a devilish grin, hiding the way that something in him falters at the memory. "I told him it looked quite becoming."

Nashua recognizes her need to keep talking, to keep focusing on anything else, because it is a tactic that he uses himself these days.
 

"Looking for your grandmother," reveals Cheri's uncle. He becomes momentarily serious, treating the subject with the deference that the subject deserved. "He thinks that there might be a chance...," Nashua continues to say, "Well, since he came back. And you and Memorie as well...," the flaxen-maned stallion mentioned, "that she might be out there somewhere."

The rest that he knows?

He flashes that grin again - impish and a little daring - as he begins to step towards the coast. Nashua flares his wings as the Northern wind blows through his speckled feathers, ready for a challenge. "Only if you can keep up, sprite."

@Cheri