[private] could not hold me back

[Nashua]

Nashua stands guarded, unwilling to move from the ground he stands on.

He wouldn't give in to the flame of fury that burns within him. For a moment, the winged stallion imagines Noel and her dark eyes. Trust me, she had said, and at this moment, Nash tries not to give in to the bloodlust that demands compensation for the theft of his son. His green eyes settle on the predatory creature before him, as Nashua continues to stifle his fury.

Daughter?

"Why would I have your daughter, Mazikeen?" Nashua growls, while he angles a now bare shoulder away from her. "I don't take children from their parents." He spits back, leveling his attention back to the shapeshifter. For a moment, Nashua thinks he might be able to be stronger than his anger.

That he might be able to leave Mazikeen with no more than a few terse words.

What Mazikeen reveals next is as strong as any physical blow (and his copper sides heave at her words). That her children weren't conceived when Gale was Cursed, and the memory of his brindled brother aches where Nash had tried to keep out the old hurts, where the bonds of family had once existed. He had been uncertain about being a father then - and Nash had thought it was the usual nerves of an expectant father, coupled with the memory of the one they shared. (But that hadn't been right, either. What Nashua recalls of the monster that roamed these woods had been very different from the stories that Gale and Pteron had told him of the man who had once ruled Loess.) 

But she unearths more, too.
Because Nashua had always wondered if the darkness in him had been something inherited. He'd struggled with it over the years, and had always attempted to be bigger than the anger and fury that he kept tucked beneath his breast. The striped pegasus had started to move away - hadn't even been willing to take this further with Mazikeen than an argument - but she speaks again and the Freyr turns sharply with eyes full of a grief and anger that he has been fighting for years.

One started with the loss of his sister, Celina, and then continued by Gale and then Yanhua, finished only by the loss of Bolder. 

There has been nowhere for Nashua to mourn, and there has been nowhere for Nashua to get angry.

"If you had come to us for help, we would have." He snaps back. "If you had given us any kind of sign, we would have helped you."