[open] If your lost and you look you will find me; Any

[Nashua]

Nashua watched Fyr’s outburst - both the vocal and literal as flames began to ignite along his spotted spine - with a patience that came from rearing six children. His green eyes flick from the young horse back to the former Freyr, wondering if they were both seeing the same thing. The boy had a touch of arrogance - which in a land full of strange gods and elementals and mages - was not a bad thing. But it certainly should be a measured one.

Appearances only went so far.

If Nash wasn’t in such a melancholy mood, he might have disappeared before the adolescent just to remind him that there was almost always more than meets the eye.

But this lesson had been brought to head by his mentor, and so Nashua remained silent, reflecting that he hadn’t been much older than Fyr when he arrived on the Isle nearly a decade earlier. How quickly the time had passed; how different everything was now compared to then. Neither of the men standing here were Kings of the North any longer. The Isle was a territory again. The other leaders that once stood alongside Leilan - Neverwhere of Nerine and his own dam, Lilliana - had long since vanished.

A portal appears as Leilan rumbles to the youth in his familiar, deep baritone. They often appeared with the Ice Mage wherever he went, and so it doesn’t catch Nash unaware. His blazed head turns back to Fyr, though, waiting to catch his reaction. This was the Isle, in all its raw wonder. The sun glistened off the icy peaks, the wind whipped angrily past them, stirring up snow as it danced across the frozen landscape.

It wasn’t a lush paradise like Tephra or its islands. It wasn’t a haven like Taiga, where the forest kept its secrets. It wasn’t even like the open loneliness of the moors, where the gray granite met the gray of the sky and the gray of the sea. This was a place where a horse either thrived or did not. It was wild and rugged and unforgiving and there was a hardship here that suited Nashua. He had been the product of something unforgivable, and living amidst this severe realm allowed him to carve out his internal struggles rather than keep battling them within.

There is a surge of pride for this place flaring in his copper chest as he flares his wings open and follows after the pair, taking to the sky as if he was born to it. Nashua soars, still remaining quiet and content to let Leilan lead them, thinking that after this particular lesson was done they would return the boy to his mother, whoever she was. An ear swivels towards the larger stallion while Nash turns to look sharply at Fyr, surprised to hear the mention of his only remaining full sibling. ”Aela?” He asks, looking over the adolescent again. Aela had a son?

”Aela is your mother?”

@Fyr