i'm two quarters and a heart down

[Nashua]

NASHUA

The Moon (or lack of it) had been the inspiration for the story tonight.

Nashua can’t quite recall all of it but he knows it went something along the lines of this: in a time long before he was born, the moon vanished. Where it had gone, no horse had known though they trekked across the lands looking for it.

There were more words, more descriptions but his mother had elaborated with images of a bay stallion with a white feather in his mane. An image of a large, pale owl hovering in the branches above him. There had been other images, too. A place where the night sky was infinitely more open than the barricading branches of Taigan redwoods.

What exactly the rest of the story entailed, Nashua couldn’t remember. He had looked above them, searching through the shadowy outlines for whatever part of the sky was offered instead. At some point, his mother had finished the story and had murmured sweet words into their ears as she always did.

And then she was gone.

When it is only the autumn sigh of the wind through the woods and the soft breathing of his sleeping twin, Nashua unfolds his long legs and he goes looking for it. He goes looking for the lost piece of the Moon.

(The moon, the stars are all hidden behind wisps of black clouds from the storms that thundered through earlier. Still, his mind is determined to find it.)

He finds a newly fallen tree, something that has been dead for what he assumes is eons. Leaves have scattered everywhere and dance with melancholy revelry on the crisp breeze. Nash follows a cluster, enthused with the way that they pivot against the darkness and faint light. Ambling and distracted, he barely notices that the mighty trees give way to a lonely beach.

It’s the lights around the figure that distract him even more.

”Woah,” he murmurs as he slowly approaches. So captivated by the glow, he doesn’t think to stop. ”You have stars around you.”

His eyes are up, not down and the winged boy misses her meal altogether. He’d gone looking for the Moon, but as he gazes up, he doesn’t mind finding a few stars instead.

and for every king that died
they would crown another

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@[Celina]