[private] of the shackles and the dream

[Nashua]

Time is tearing his family apart.

It’s plucking them out like it has been shedding the last of his fledgling feathers. First, his mother. Then Celina becomes another transition in his young life, a changing of another season (like spring to summer) as his sister becomes harder and harder to find. And his father? Other than a few scattered memories, his sire is (thankfully) just one more fissure in his young life.

Nashua tries not to focus on the emptiness; it simply festers there and the copper pegasus always worries that his brother might pick up on it. That he might somehow poison his brother with his feelings.

He doesn’t know how badly he needs to see this one until his green eyes rest on @[elio]. He hadn’t realized how much he had worried for the sunset-colored stallion. He shouldn’t, the young pegasus innocently thinks. He shouldn’t because Elio has always been brave and Nash is still young enough to believe his older brother is untouchable, invincible.

Elio’s grey eyes - like a brewing summer storm -  settle on him and when they do, some of Nashua’s anxieties abate. His brother is making promises and Nash is still young enough to believe that Elio will be here when he needs him. (It doesn’t occur to him that there might come a day that he won’t; or worse, that something could happen to him and Elio wouldn’t be anywhere at all.)

(Or maybe Nash does know these things. It’s just easier to believe in this - in them - than to reflect on splintering souls instead of crashing waves.)

The edges of his dark feathers linger by the vibrant red of Lio as it catches sunlight and the adolescent sighs, wishing that he didn’t feel the weight (heaviness) of his brother’s words. Wishing that he could do something to lighten them and feeling all the more frustrated with himself for not knowing how. "Was it very different before... ?” Nashua wonders aloud, remembering that Elio had lived in the Taiga before he had been born.

"I think Yan can feel the forest,” he admits, remembering what Celina had said about Good and Bad Magic. He was different from his dam and brother; whatever they felt was something entirely their own. It wasn't something he shared with them. "It makes me feel like there is something wrong with me because I-,” the yearling cuts himself off, trying to seal away all those frustrations swirling and roiling in his chest like the sea before them.

Snorting softly, he keeps looking out. "I feel you, Fire Wing. Like I do Yanhua."

ooc - always worth the wait!