i'm on the edge of a knife; pangeans

[Nashua]

stars when you shine, you know how i feel
oh freedom is mine

It had been another pegasus that knocked him from the sky. Another winged horse fleeing the madness below that was Loess.

Seeing through the haze of smoke made it almost impossible to know what was happening down below. He had looked down for a brief moment - a mistake - because a straggler departing the chaos crashed right into Nashua. They had intertwined, became a wriggling mass of wings and limbs until they had both crashed on the ground. When their bodies collided on Loessian soil - a loud thud that was followed by the cracking and splintering of multiple bones - the pair rolled apart.

He doesn’t know what happened to the other pegasus.
Nashua had tried to stand but one wing hung uselessly at his side while he hobbled from a fracture in one of his hind limbs. He could feel his Magic working furiously to heal, to put things back to rights but it has never been a quick process with Nash. He has never had much use of his Healing and therefore had never practiced with it - hadn’t tested, or challenged it for speed or precision.

The pegasus limped along, moving as fast as he could. The smoke nearly blinded him; the ash that coated his throat made him cough and soon Nash began to feel the sweltering heat stifle what little air he could breathe in. The cries of others surrounded him as the smoke and flames spread - a plea for help, sobbing from around another wall of smoke, a rasping cough in the distance over the crackle and hiss of the wildfire.

"Hel-, he started, "H-help.”

Coughing again and understanding that his cries would be futile (just another to add to the cacophony around him), that his energy was better used for getting himself out of this maze of smoke and ash, he continued to walk. He continued to go on until he tripped over something. A fallen log, he thinks at first. But when Nash looks down, he is staring into the unseeing eyes of a black stallion.

There is blood, everywhere. It seeps somewhere from the corpse and the green eyes of @[kildare] stare up into a sky that he will never look at again. At least not in this life. Nash recoils, stumbles away from the fallen horse who is charred and burned in places. Who Nash can’t fully see because of the soot that threatens to suffocate the remaining souls in Loess.

He can’t see but he can hear.

It’s the sound of hooves on the sandstone that attracts his attention, something that is different from the noise of blackening cacti and blazing grasses. The hoofbeats sound frantic - like a skirmish? - and different from those who had tried outrunning the flames.

(What Nash can’t see is a gray pegasus, desolate and raging and wild. As furious as this fire. His youngest brother had laid out on the ground, their shared blood spilling out for all to see. Their mother’s lovely green eyes looking up, up and away from him. A stare that was already gone by the that Tarian had come. Too late. Too late.)

(What Nashua can’t see is two horses - both winged and both pale - near the edge of a canyon. Where one is nearly feral in his grief, the other has almost been that way. What Nashua can’t see is the way that one horse approaches the other, demanding answers despite the inferno around them. What Nash can’t see is the way that one slips on a ledge and falls.)

What Nashua can see is a gray stallion, looking down the cliff face. He falters forward with his useless wing and a stumbling walk. One wing drags on the ground while he tenderly holds the other. He comes forward and -

Despite the smoke, he knows. Despite the way that the world is burning around them, he knows. Despite the heat that is rising all around them, Nashua grows cold. He nearly freezes here, in this purgatory. His voice had already been going hoarse, made raw from the inhalation of ash and soot in the scorching air around them. Despite all this, Nash knows because despite the hellfire raising all around him, what he sees laying crumpled and broken at the broken of the smoky canyon is a pale form.

The mane is dark, could almost be mistaken for black now with all the grime coating it. The red-orange glow of the sky hides the loveliest of her iridescent stripes (already hard to see even in the best light). Nashua, son of his father’s sport and his mother’s sorrow, had been born into a confusing world; it was his siblings, like Elio and Celina and Gale, that had made sense to him. The way Celina’s body lays does not.

There are no fireflies (stars) glowing.
Only the sparks from Ghaul’s hellraisers. Only the shadow creatures lurk.

"You,” he accuses the stranger standing on this ledge with him. Two lost souls lost among the fire-and-brimstone that had once been Loess. Nashua accuses Tarian because his sister had always been a skillful flier. It had been her who had shown him how to use the cliffs in Taiga to his advantage once he learned how to soar. (Nash knows nothing about a torn wing left to rot in Pangea. Nash knows nothing about what @[Celina] might have wished for at the base of the Mountain.)

Nash only knows that his sister lays at the bottom of the cliff. Nash only knows that the world is burning. (There are other things Nash knows but at that moment, he is ignited into such a rage, such a fury that he forgets them all.) ”You,” he rasps again to the silver pegasus. "You did this.” He takes a step forward, stumbles and seethes.

The older stallion remains stoic though an emotion emerges briefly.

”No,” but there isn’t time for an explanation because Nashua lunges. He is ignorant of the first sparring lesson that Tarian had ever been taught. (And in another life, Malachi would have loved to have been given the chance to teach it to his nephew.) Lesson one: never make the first move. Weak and injured, even at the furious pace that his Healing works to knit himself back together, he is no match for Tarian; no match for the older stallion who has spent his life in one type of service or another, always preparing for battles and who can almost always hear the distant beats of war drums on the horizon.

What transpires is quick (perhaps an uncommon kindness from Tarian) and when the ash settles, while the fire burns at their heels, Tarian leaves the boy. But not before saying, "You are wasting your breath. Save it. Leave.”

When the winged horse finally abandons the other striped one on the ground, Nash tries to stand. He tries to rise. After several efforts, he finally manages it. By the time he gets up, the fire has crept closer. Though Nashua paces what he can see of the ledge, the black smoke hides everything, and even when he half-slides down a gentler slope, there is nothing to see on the canyon bottom.

He still goes down. He still searches through the blackness of the smoke and feels his own skin blister where the fire had burned past him. Nash calls out her name: Celina. He calls it until his deep baritones are no more than a whisper and when the winds start to blow in his direction, it pushes him back.

There is nothing left for him to do.

Hours later, he will pass by the few Pangeans still left without much thought. Hours later, he will still hold one wing to his side and let the other hang. Hours later, he will stumble upon the dappled Queen of Nerine (though startled and surprised to see her), and Nash will say, defeated to @[Neverwhere]: "Let’s go home.”

NASHUA

html by castlegraphics; art by MirrorLands

if anybody reads this, you are lovely.

nash has great timing and went to go visit loess. he didn't have a good time at the bbq. he found a toasted kildare. saw celina fall and not get up. fought with tarian and then ran into neberwhere. they went home. the end.