[private] i saw the stars and didnt ask why

[Nashua]

Nashua is a flawed creature.

He has known it since he was young. He can still remember standing in this very forest, looking over to his mother, and despite noticing Yanhua’s distance from him, pleading with Lilliana, asking her why their father couldn’t remain in Taiga. He remembers the envy that came from realizing his brother shared their mother’s gift - as well as the blue of her eyes - and that his stripes and wings marked him as different from them. He remembers chasing light from land to land, driven by an almost incessant need to find the good, never realizing how close the darkness was waiting to swallow him whole.

Perhaps Reave had been right. Perhaps he did only see the world in two contrasting shades. But hadn’t it been the gray that had blurred everything? It had been the gray where he lost sight of Bolder, unable to forgive his son for continuing a legacy that should have been buried. It had been the gray where Nashua dwelled in the loss of his twin brother, blinding him to the comfort he might have found in his others. It had been the gray where he had lingered with Illuminae, and despite trying to bring out the light in her, he had brought out the darkness in himself instead.

He had brought it here, in his self-righteous pride, to them.

Noel’s trust is a radiant thing. It comes shining up at him from the luminosity of her dark gaze and it twists Nash to the very core of his soul. No, you won’t. He thinks and the revelation quells whatever light might have remained behind his summer-green gaze. He looks down at her and realizes that despite how badly he wants to reach for her, to graze his pale muzzle against the curve of her delicate cheek, the only thing he should do now is give her his honesty (which he should have always done). This is how the gray began, how it crept into his life like the fog that came drifting through the Taiga, by thinking he was protecting her by sparing her harmful truths.

”Something has… happened.”

The words sound far too opaque to his ears, and so Nashua forces himself to elaborate.

He forces himself to elaborate everything. The damage has already been done. Now it needs to be brought to light, out of the murk and the gray. So he tells her about the angel that lingers in these woods; he explains the massive scar on his chest and though Noel might know that he gained it from a monster during the Eclipse, he explains that it was her healing that saved his life, not his. He explains that the something that has happened is her, and then he stops explaining. He stops saying anything at all, and the only thing to be heard is the distant sound of waves crashing against the Northern shore.

@Noel