[private] you can't hold back time

[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