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

[Nashua]

He isn't sure how he knows, but Nashua is concrete in his conviction that Illuminae could never be the kind of evil that Gale was.

Nashua can see the shadows that come in waves off her two-toned pelt, that way that they make her appear as something obscure and hazy. But he is absolutely sure that the kind of darkness that is in him (and what of his children, he anguishes? What has he passed on to them? Was there a legacy of darkness waiting for them as well?) - the kind that he is convinced he would find in his half-brother - is not in her. Illuminae could have left him to the dark and the cold; could have left behind for the monsters and Nash wouldn't have lived to see the light of day again. 

Like his mother and brother, he might have ceased to exist if it hadn't been for the winged mare before him.

Under the cloak of her shadows, they remain hidden from the rest of Taiga. They are afforded a kind of privacy that Nashua - as King of the North and then as a father, as a mate and a brother and a son - is rarely given. "It sounds as if you are underestimating yourself," he replies against her firm objections that she is not kind. He doesn't know any more of her history than she's shared with him, that she thinks herself more like her father than her mother. Knowing neither of them, the stoic pegasus counters: "I think you are yourself." He wants to tell her that regardless of who Illuminae thinks she is, Nashua thinks that, "Perhaps, I was only a beginning." He might have been the first that she had saved, but as his mind struggles to grasp those dying moments - the way that his heart rattled between his ribs, the way that his soul shook against his bones demanding to be set free - and the striped stallion turns his blazed face towards her dark.

"There might come a day that you surprise yourself," Nashua murmurs. "Darkness is on your skin, Illuminae, but there is also light." The gold that adorns her wings, that covers half of her slender frame; one eye shrouded by shadows and another gilded by sunlight. His emerald green ones eagerly greet hers. "Don't dismiss that half of yourself so willingly." He adds, hoping that she might come to see the good in her as he did. "But I wouldn't doubt that there is mercy even in your shadows."

Illuminae presses her forehead against his, and Nash rests his head against hers, feeling the exhaustion of the past few months as a heavy weight. A quiet moment of respite before he had to return to the world as the leader of the North and whatever else was demanded of him. He listens as she tells him that these burdens might not be his to bear, but those of his siblings. And to that, all Nash can say is: "Why should anybody else have to pay for the sins of this bloodline?"

@illuminae