[private] heartbreak is a warm sensation

[Nashua]

Nashua comes to the River often.

It moves towards Hyaline, and sometimes the winged stallion likes to imagine that the current could carry his apologies towards the East. The loss of his youngest child is an ache that he can't escape, and the hollowing emotion inside his chest follows him even here. Nash carves out explanations and reasonings against his beating heart and no matter how the thoughts rip him apart, nothing brings Bolder back.

(It's something he wonders often, if Noel blames him for the loss of their son.)

But his misery does nothing in keeping the North together, and so the Freyr is forced to consider other things. Nash thinks about his last meeting with Reave, and the striped pegasus keeps replaying their conversation trying to find the source of his brother's anger. Trying to find exactly where the rift had happened (and all the Freyr can surmise is that it is Aela's fault, as it always is; nothing good can come from her scheming).

He carefully steps along, trying to reconcile his mind to the fact that his younger brother was no longer the lanky colt that once roamed the Taigan woods. He had blinked, and like his children, Reave had grown up with Nashua apparently missing much of his foalhood. Missing enough that the bone-armored stallion who now ruled Nerine (and was now his heir) was a mystery to Nash. Something about the way that the River moves and gleams in the summer sun catches his attention; the way that it churns makes him pause.

A head rises from the moving water - crystal clear and light refracting a thousand ways through the liquid - that makes Nashua cloak himself. He vanishes within a heartbeat, revealing nothing where a striped pegasus had stood moments before. "I didn't sea you there." The now invisible stallion calls out, feeling oddly amused with the situation; did water creatures enjoy dry humor?

@galadriel