[open] a sky full of song

[Nashua]

"They spit you back out?" Nash retorts, his brow rising in reply to Gale's light-hearted arching one. His green eyes glance over the brindled stallion again, noting the cremello hindleg. It makes him all the more conscious of the zig-zagging scar that lines his copper chest towards his left wing. The monsters might be gone but they hadn't fully disappeared; evidence of their existence marred hides and minds across Beqanna.

Nash is eager to agree with @[Gale], happy that the light had returned and the creatures that had lurked would be reduced to memory.

He is content to breathe a sigh of relief - genuine and a reflection of the tropical paradise around them - as his blazed head nods in agreement. "Yes," he tells Gale easily. "We were lucky in Taiga," he explains, indicating that he and others who had been on the Isle had taken shelter beneath the mighty trees of the North. "There was a mare and her daughter skilled in plant magic. If not for them, we might have all starved." He goes on and then his green eyes go searching down the shoreline past Gale, a frown emerging on his handsome face when his daughter does not.

Casting a knowing look at his older brother, Nashua gives him an easy smile. "My eldest," he says quietly. "Well past time for her first trip." Taiga might be known as a vast and deep forest but for Elegance, she needed more room than the mysterious wood had to offer. "If we had tried to keep her home much longer, the monsters might have made better company." He understood her desire; he knew it all too well. The want for open sky. The desire for freedom as it blew through spread wings. To be above the world, to be untouchable, unreachable from the troubles that could be found on the ground.

Had the world not gone dark, had the times not been so perilous, he would have gladly let Ellie go searching for it.

But that was in the past. The future lay ahead and Nash was determined to make amends with his bristling firstborn. Starting with this trip to Islandres.

The younger stallion watches as she vanishes into the jungle again and can only flare his nostrils, reminding himself that it was far better she goes searching for adventure on Gale's island instead of the Common Lands (or worse, to the East like Yanhua's daughters had). Nash mentions that the adolescent has a twin sister back in the Taigan woods, that there is another sibling due any day. This excursion is close enough that they can return home before dark (some part of the striped stallion dreads the night in a way that he never has before). Nashua settles his speckled wings again, trying to return his focus on Gale and not where his daughter has gone.

"You don't happen to have any blue bundles of joy to occupy her while we're here, do you?" He half-jokes. Shaking his head, he adds: "Just so long as you don't have a resident Kraken in one of your tidal pools."

Or worse, he thinks.

Boys.

NASHUA