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

[Nashua]

"Is it wrong of me to want to keep you from it?" comes his ragged voice, sounding like the fatigue that had settled between his winged shoulders. The exhaustion that came from ruling the North, from trying to keep his remaining family safe, and Nashua isn't impervious to the pain behind the Curse. He mourns the loss of Gale, just like he grieved for Lilliana and Yanhua and Bolder.

He has to keep a fastidious mask for the Northerners; there are already rumors that he is troubled and distracted by his losses.

"It's brought so much darkness." He tells the angel beside him, trying to find some semblance of his old humor and failing. Nashua's green eyes are heavy with the troubles that he carries and he can feel gravity wanting to drag him drown, even as he lifts his gaze to look at Illuminae. The Freyr has told the story a few times now - first to Ciri and then Noel - but the striped pegasus tells it again (the story of how his father had been a violent man, that his fury had been felt across Beqanna, that his mother had been one of Wolfbane's favorite targets) to her because he wants so badly to keep Illuminae safe.

And then at the end of it all, Nashua says: "But it is my fault. I was the one who tried to foster relationships with my siblings. I was the one who invited Gale and Mazikeen to the North." If he had only done what Yanhua had - giving their fraternal brothers and sisters a wide berth - perhaps the North would have been overlooked. Perhaps the resurrected Curse wouldn't have looked towards the woods that housed his mate and his children.

Nashua thinks again of the disappearance of his twin, of Amarine, and feels the fault settle there as well. Just like there hadn't been the chance to check on Maze during her first pregnancy, there hadn't been the time to discover what had happened to them.

There have been so many wrongs committed, and the Freyr thinks they have to land somewhere; why not settle with the man who had failed his kingdom and his family?

"Hyaline," Nash explains, finally calming the storm inside him to look down on her lovely face. He thinks of that day, when he and Noel had flown to retrieve their youngest child. They had come empty, a corner of their next that stood as a physical reminder of his shortcomings. "He has family there. And I don't think he's in real danger." The pegasus goes on to say, "but my brother Gale knows that this would -." Illuminae's warmth beside him steadies the growing anger, stifles the way that Nashua himself might have taken another coat color, made his wings wider, become bigger than the problems manifesting in his life. "Bolder is a shapeshifter, like him." He says tersely, quietly, as level as he can, though he can't keep the full contempt from his voice. "Like our father was."

The man that had caused so much suffering, as his Cursed brother did now.

Nobody has understood Nashua's pain where it regards the ability to change skins or shapes as easily as a horse could blink. He's tried to explain and yet, it feels like (to him) that nobody has listened. Not her, not Ciri, and even his niece Cheri seemed to harbor her own doubts.

"They all go mad." He tells her flatly, turning his blazed face towards her so that their halos graze against each other. A silver moon stuck that gets suck somewhere between Illuminae's shadowed grace and the hell that Nashua is currently living.

@illuminae