Mine is a Quest for a Mouthful of Skies

[Nashua]

NASHUA

He likes the wild wind.

It’s why when he is done in his little clearing - when his knees have a few scratches, when there is an ache in his young wings - he follows the siren song. It calls and flows, ebbs like a tide in his veins. (There is a pull there; a familiarity which he will come to understand with time.)

The wind gives a command and he goes, as swift (that he is sure of) as if his hooves didn’t touch the ground.

(Someday, he tells himself again and again. A promise, an oath. Someday.)

The fog is thick, near impossible to guide a horse through but the wind sings. It blows past his auburn feathers and the boy goes, sure and confident in his steps and stride. Taiga has been his cradle. His wings long to stretch outside this place (and his mother had promised with sweet smiles - soon, she had said, Nerine. Ischia, perhaps. Soon, they would take another trip. Soon.)

Soon is so impossibly far away to one so young, to one who is brimming over with wanderlust.

Soon is still so faraway. She, however, is not.

She looks like a creature out of his mother’s stories. She’s almost feral. Dark-winged and dark-eyed. His mind flickers to the fire-woman, to the woman that Elio had described but this is an entirely different entity. There is no flame here. Just wind and mischief.

The gleam in her eye is the calm before the storm, the sweltering heat that comes before the angry hoofbeats of thunder. Her eyes spark like lightning strikes.

Curious, he tilts his head. Nashua doesn’t quite think of these woods as his but why should he return to his mother? A storm is brewing and he likes to think himself old enough that he doesn’t need to cower underneath his dam like a nursling.

”Where is your mother?” he asks, wondering if she blew in from the sea. A wild thing like her must have been a gale and that thought does disturb him. Her mother might be a hurricane.

and for every king that died
they would crown another

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@[Popinjay] nash got 'your mom' jokes