[private] you can't hold back time

[Nashua]

For a moment, Nashua just stares at Cheri.

There had been hope that Leilan was right. He couldn't help; he was a son of the flame-marked Guardian and they all seemed to dream in the face of adversity. If his mother was truly alive, it might abate some of the grief that Nash harbored over Yanhua and his disappearance. That hope even manages to flicker in his copper breast, a small flame that the former son of Taiga immediately quashes because he recognizes it for the selfish want it is.

He remembers sneaking down to the Taigan shore one night, listening over the quiet lull of ocean waves as his mother slowly revealed all the ways that the Curse had torn her apart to her beloved cousin, Elena. And then he remembers all the quiet ways she had tried to put herself back together over the years, hiding her pain and grief behind a patient smile as she mothered and listened and lead.

To know about Gale would have shattered her.

Then he remembers that these moments are too rare and too precious to spend worrying as he does. These are worries for when they are back on the ground and his niece has returned to her home in Loess.

But there is no helping the smile that he gives as she exclaims over the nickname - Sprite. It suits her, he thinks. It always has, with her glowing and the way that she shimmered in the sun. With Cheri, there was no one place to look and not be stunned by her ethereal beauty. She was radiant from all angles and while the title he gives her is far more suited to the youth that crafted stories about courts in the clouds, it still seems to suit her.

Nash - the nag, he thinks with a wry grin - watches as she leaps into the air and immediately takes off. The breeze that she summons serves as a reminder that their forefathers had once been weavers of it, and that swelling pride follows the Freyr as he takes off. His wings widen and his ascent isn't as fast nor as impressive as Cheri, but Nashua reveals a grace and a keen knowledge about the drafts and currents of the winds on the Isle. He uses them to his advantage, moving up with them and with a sense of ease.

"Not bad," he tells as they both hover above with the Isle and sea glistening below them, with Beqanna looming on the faint horizon and gives Cheri a rather conspiratorial smile. Feeling the wind beneath his wings, Nashua draws both of his speckled wings against his chestnut sides and snakes his neck downward. He nosedives for the gray sea, and holds them tight against him until the last moment. One wing flares out broadly, twisting half his bulk upward towards Cheri while the other opens a moment later and cuts through a bitterly cold ocean wave when it reaches its full length.

Regaining his balance, Nashua flaps his wings and rejoins the young Loessian queen, greeting her with a smirk.

It lasts only a moment, before his smile falters and Nash turns his green eyes towards the mainland. Why had Mazikeen gone along with Gale? The striped stallion shares with the other pegasus what he initially thought: "When Noel and I went to Hyaline," he starts and then stops, only because it is still hard to speak so openly of something that had been kept tightly shut for so long. But that had been the problem, he reminded himself. If Bolder and his other children had known about the Curse, this never would have happened. "She seemed... twisted." Clearly not the same mare that they both remembered from the Midsummer Festival.

Sighing, he goes on to say, "They were expecting twins. Or so Gale told me. I only caught the scent of one other child in Hyaline besides Bolder. Perhaps it has the other hidden away somewhere, to use as some kind of leverage against her." Nashua felt it again, that old anger and fury attached to the Curse's previous host. His jaw clenches and though he tries to quell it, his expression turns dark. "This is what it does, Cheri." She hadn't encountered Gale yet, and he would do his best to prevent it so that she wouldn't. "It twists and it warps. Anything that comes across its path, it will attempt to ruin."

Her Accord - this gathering of the North and South - was their best chance of preventing it and other evils from spreading. But Nashua knew (and had learned) that even with the best of intentions, the worst was still possible to happen and he wanted his niece as prepared as she could be, if that day ever (unfortunately) came.

@Cheri

[Cheri]

Watching her Uncle fly made it obvious to Cheri that her craft was nothing like his. Every flick of his wings had a purpose, and the action spread throughout the rest of him in memorized waves. His legs knew just where to shift, his shoulders and hips worked with one another like a strange mechanism - as he dipped and sliced his way across the ocean she suddenly felt silly for being so proud of herself. She’d only really shoved herself off the ground; Nashua was actually flying.

He had the uncanny ability to make her raw speed and power look like childish hops. She shook her head and floated pleasantly, happy to see he was still able to knock her down a peg or two with just a flickering smirk. Have to keep the younglings in their place, Cheri guessed, waiting to cruise over the mainland until he’d joined her again.

There, the topic shifted to Mazikeen. Interested, Cheri noticed her Uncle’s expression darken as the two flew alongside one another. She caught the undertone of hesitance in his voice, how he stopped to consider something before continuing the story again, and it bothered her. What? She wanted to push him, choosing patience instead. A few beats later and her efforts were rewarded with alarming news: Mazikeen might’ve been affected by The Curse.

Or infected, she considered. The wind up here was bitterly cold, but that’s not why Cheri shivered. The couple had been expecting a birth - something her father had known right before his disappearance, though Cheri was only now hearing the news. They left to return home to the East and then … evil manifested. And if the afflicted could turn others, then that only meant the situation had definitely gotten hairier. There was no telling what kind of danger Bolder might be in, if this were the case.

At the fringes of her knowledge Cheri considered that The Curse was probably stronger now than it ever was before, as others remembered it. An imminent threat to everyone who crossed paths with it.

“It will spread.” She predicted, adopting the moniker her Uncle used when addressing the darkness inhabiting Gale’s body. “So many of us have already come in contact with it; who knows where the madness stops.”

The pegasus flew over Icicle Isle’s heart-shaped lake, listening for a moment and collecting her thoughts.

“Fire didn’t stop it. Death couldn’t either. What hope have we got?” Cheri questioned, and she was being (mostly) serious. There was always hope to be found; the goodness in her believed that fact to be true. But even with their combined powers and all their sheltered territories, filled with the few vassals they could convince to stay, it would take an army just to keep The Curse at bay. Her idea had been to join forces - Nash knew that. Now Cheri was curious to see if he had any plans in mind.

@Nashua

[Nashua]

When Nashua had been younger, he had wished desperately to be more like his brother.

Yanhua had shared the same gift that their mother held, and despite all the attempts he made at sharing an echo with his twin, Nash never gained the same ability that Yan and Reave inherited. As the pair of pegasi soar over the largest part of the Isle, the Northern King considers how much easier it would be to convey everything he wished to Cheri by simply showing it. But as it was, Nash only has the ability of his words and he thinks that they are coming clear enough over the sharp, artic updrafts of the North.

"I don't think it will," he warns to Cheri. Nashua harbored his own thoughts about the Curse, and while he had few personal experiences to fall back on, there was still so much that remained unknown. "It seems different...," he continued, unable to keep the contempt from hardening his expression, as if Nashua could hardly believe that he had dealt with it twice in the same lifetime. "Than the last time." While there were some similarities - as Nash suspected that It had coiled Mazikeen so tightly she no longer knew where to turn - there were stark differences as well. When he had brought up Neverwhere and the crimes committed against the North, the Curse had shrugged them away. As a Taigan-born, there was a deep, inherited sense of pride and the thing that wore Gale could have invoked deeper wounds that never fully healed.

But what if it hadn't remembered those crimes?

What if the thing that wore Gale was something else?

Sunlight glistened off the heart-shaped lake below and Nashua kept his green eyes trained on the horizon.

Cheri asks him a question that Nashua had asked himself many times, since he had learned of his half-brother's fate. What hope did they did have? Suspicion clouded much of his thoughts these days. How long had the Curse been resurrected, and why hadn't Gale said something? Given him a sign?

Anything?

And those questions always lead him down the path to darker ones. What other shadows had the Curse cast? Was he involved in any way with Aela, and all her scheming? Reave and Gale shared a similar gift; did they share the same Vision? The questions always lead him to a deeper-rooted one for the pegasus, and one that he wouldn't share with Cheri today. Not until he had some kind of consummate proof that disappearance of Yanhua and Amarine was directly related to Gale.

"We keep going," he says quietly. Something that Lilliana had always said. The Northern leader kept flapping his wings forward, taking harder and faster strokes to spur them on. "Finding happiness where we can and refusing to let anyone take it from us." His pale lips pressed in a thin line as Nashua considered something. 

"Here in the North, I intend to move the kingdom seat back to Nerine when my reign is done. Reave will be named my heir in the coming days." Nashua reveals to his niece. He continues on to other thoughts: that the combining forces of North and South against Gale can only be a good thing. The added strength would benefit both kingdoms and perhaps even foster a trust between them, overcoming a suspicion that had been brought when the former leaders of Loess claimed Taiga for themselves.

As for the rest, he reveals, "There was apparently talk of once imprisoning the Curse on the Isle." The Freyr glanced down to the icy tundra below them, letting his gaze linger on the scorch marks left behind by the Dragon King, Castille. But Nashua was considering a much stronger cell for the Curse that had manifested stronger and stronger after each generation. A sacred place in Beqanna, the only place with potent enough Magic that it might exorcise the thing out of Gale's body. "What if it was possible to trap him in the Mountain?"

@Cheri