[private] when you are younger, you will wish you were older.

[Nashua]

stars when you shine, you know how i feel
oh freedom is mine

If this is where wild things go, they find themselves at this edge of Earth. Two creatures of the sky (or so Nashua assumes; he doesn't know that the delicate girl can't fly) find themselves with a volcano sleeping at their backs and the ocean cresting before them. His green eyes are there, focusing on the pale seafoam that rises and falls with each wave. That with each stroke of wind, comes closer to him and the exquisite way it catches the light makes it appear almost iridescent.

(It reminds him of Celina and Nashua has to bury his emotions beneath a deep sigh. Maybe this was a mistake, he thinks. Maybe he shouldn't have left the Isle.)

There is a battle being fought in his chest just as the golden filly fights to come forward. His chestnut ears flick back and Nash looks away from the ocean. His emerald gaze follows the sound of hooves subtly tracking over the sandy beach. She is slim and small and slight; she looks as if Beqanna could swallow her whole and not leave a trace behind. Her trail could come to a stop before him - she could blast into a gust of air, become a pebble on this rocky shore, turn into a bird and never touch the ground again - and she could be gone. Maybe it is the fires of Loess still blazing in his mind. Maybe it was cinders and charred earth that greeted him when he returned to Taiga. Maybe it because he is thinking of his brothers (because Nash has always been fortunate in them) but the presence of the filly rouses something in the young pegasus.

He watches her for a moment. The stallion makes no motion that he will approach her. The wind, carrying the scents of salt and sulfur, gusts past him and then the buckskin. It's her eyes - a deep sky blue - that commands his attention while she flares her nostrils, appearing that the trek here had taken more from her than his flight from the Isle had taken from him. Where he appears hale, she looks frail. The other pegasus remains yards away from him and Nashua looks behind her briefly. That emotion stirs again - that want to protect - and he has to remind himself that she may not need or want it.

But she is on this beach alone.
She is here and Nash is here and so he contends with the biting desire to ask why the girl was out here alone (because his sister had been so much stronger than this one - Celina had been a predator and even she had become prey to something in the end).  The young stallion settles his dark brown wings against his back and waits. Silence says what he does not; an invitation waiting in the green eyes that seek hers. She could come closer, if she wished.

These were her steps.
Nashua was just a temporary caretaker along her way.

NASHUA

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@[Olena]