[private] could not hold me back

[Nashua]

He surges forward, arching his dark brown neck and flares open his speckled wings. "So Gale deals with Aela," Nash says, trying to round back to a point. If his sister had a similar alignment towards the brindled stallion - the one that Mazikeen seemed so intent on setting herself apart from (why else should we have come alone?) - and the striped pegasus had made his own dislike for the golden Seneschal known, did Mazikeen think he would help Aela in bating her?

What little he knows of the Curse is that he knows that it twists and bends and warps until reason is nothing.

But his own emotions are so tightly bound - and have been so wound up for weeks - that it doesn't take make for the tethers that have kept them restrained to break. He has lost a brother, a son, and another brother; there is still the North to rule and so many other factors that have granted little reprieve for the pegasus.

Nashua is tired, and as Mazikeen wears his brother's shape (something that Yan would have been appalled at), everything about him begins to unravel.

"That Curse wouldn't have fucking touched him," Nashua snaps back. (And Mazikeen can't know how close she comes to a memory, that all the anger seething from him stems from a memory of the Curse telling Nash that there would be plenty that his brother would be good at.  That at the time he had been so jealous of Yanhua to earn their father's attention, and how all these years later, he now worries for it.) She makes a joke over something that he has agonized over, something that is a very real threat to his family and their names on her tongue makes his ire rise.

His green eyes follow her every move and he shadows her, unwilling to allow her unaccompanied access to his home.

"It's none of your business," he says through a clenched jaw while the color continued to drain from his coat. Bolder hadn't known, because if he had, what purpose would it have served him? Better that he knew how to protect himself from this darkness - from this power that Mazikeen so clearly abused - than to draw his children into it. Nashua had told no one, not even the horned stallion that she currently mimicked.

@Mazikeen