[private] I might go interstellar

[Nashua]

Nashua almost wished that Ciri would be angry with him.

The chestnut pegasus almost wished she would have been furious. His mind had conjured scalding words, or even prepared himself for cool indifference. Any of that would have been preferable. But the ebony mare turns around to face him and Nash stops, lifting his blazed head to better look her over. The scars - as Ciri had requested - remain and the evidence of her recent encounter with Gale is glaringly apparent to the striped stallion.

It forces him to think of the scars that Neverwhere had gained from her encounter with the Curse and he feels that writhing, black anger twist everything in him. He wants to tear something apart.

The way that his Thane smiles is even worse; no light reaches her eyes anymore. This is what the Curse does, Nashua reminds himself (to remember that this is no longer his brother; to remind himself Gale is gone). He needs to remind himself of this again and again, despite the way that he can feel the pegasus mare already burning for revenge.

He turns his face towards the coast, turning to look at the aurora that the Isle was so famous for.

His speckled wings tighten, like Nashua is bracing against the cold. But that is a lie. He's lived here long enough that the biting breezes and the frigid temperatures no longer bother him as they once did. The cold is no longer outside but within him. "Did you know that when I first met Gale, he offered to help me find my mother?" Nashua rhetorically asks her. He doesn't expect Ciri to know the full story - that his father had vanished, that his mother had been stolen to Pangea before his and Yanhua's first birthday. "Wolfbane would have laughed in my face," he continues bitterly.

(They had been taught to not say his name but what harm can it do now?
Speaking of the dead could be taken as an invitation to rise, Lilliana had once told him. But The Curse had come back anyway, regardless of what they called it.)

Gale had every right to hate his mother, the woman who had come between his parents, and yet not only had he told Nashua that she was alive, but he had told him that she had been in Pangea and told the young pegasus that he had a sister. And his brother's kindness hadn't stopped there. He had offered to help find her, to help bring her home. As the years have gone on, Nashua realized it for the deep generosity and kindness that it was.

That was Gale.
And now Gale was gone; just like Elio, just like Celina.
Just like Yanhua.

"It's in Hyaline," Nashua tells her, and like Ciri, shoves the pain to the furthest corners of his soul. There will be time later - after all this is over - to mourn his brother. "Northerners are no longer permitted there." He says, an obvious statement but also a reminder that the King of the North didn't want his Thane to seek out the Cursed monster. "Nor in Silver Cove or Pangea," perhaps a rash measure but Nashua wants to take no risks. The entire East will remain off-limits, until the thing wearing Gale can either be contained or... killed.

"It died once before, in Loess," he explains quietly, "but it seems that Dragon Flame was not enough to exorcise it." Those infernal flames hadn't been enough to extinguish it and thanks to Wishbone, Nashua knows that it existed for at least a generation in Tephra. It has existed for two generations before Nash and now it resurfaced in his brother, who has custody of his youngest son. "We're going to have to be patient with this, Ciri." He finally reveals solemnly, because the only thing he can think of is seeking out his youngest brother, Reave. The Nerinian Guardian might have some ideas, or at the very least, perhaps the similar gift that he shared with Gale could give them some insight as to how to handle him.

"I've lost half my family to this and I refuse to lose more. We need a plan; a way to ensure that once It's gone, It can never come back."

@Ciri well this was angst central