[private] the fatal flaw that makes you magnificently cursed

[Nashua]

"You're a Godsend," Nash murmurs distantly, somewhere between the haze of pain and the odd recollection of memories running through his mind at this moment. "I don't think I could manage to even walk straight." It's not as if color is abundant in their current climate but Nashua has always been able to discern the shadows and remember the things they used to be: a mass of brambles that once used to a bush that grew his sister's favorite flowers, a tangling of branches that once used belong to a Taigan sapling.

Everything has turned into a shade of what it once was; Nash with his still-healing wound and the tang of blood soaked into his pelt thinks that he is no different. He is no longer whole.

"As you wish," he tells his guide and the striped stallion easily falls into silence (if Illuminae knew him better, she might realize what a troubling sign that was for the usually conversational pegasus). The mismatched mare leads the way back to Taiga and every time that her gold catches on the dim light of his glowing markings, Nashua keeps being reminded of someone. The color was common enough in Beqanna, even more common in Taiga now, thanks to his mother's bloodline.

(If their conversation had gone that way - if he had some ability to know her mind - he might have shared that he knows that feeling, to think yourself a fracturing of two souls. Or rather for Nash, he considers himself a fracturing of many. He is a living reminder of something awful, something terrible. His father's stripes glow around his legs and his mother's coloring shines from his copper coat. By looks alone, he could belong to both families. It makes him remember the ache behind his half-sibling's eyes when they see him, a physical testament to the Curse that claimed their father, and the pain that he grew up seeing flashing behind his mother's. So Nash knows what its like to grow up in the middle, not quite there or here, and grapple with the ground beneath your hooves as you try to find it.)

While he studies the gilded coloring that adorns her dark shape, fragments of another color start to emerge.

There is a moment of silence - too long, he knows - before Nash speaks, quietly and firmly: "It's not." He tells because the conversation does go that way and despite the blood that he has lost, there is enough left in him to still boil. She is dark and light and that is a battle that has been brewing in Nashua's chest since the day that he learned that he was the son of the thing that caused so much pain and suffering.

That he understood that he was an extension of it.

@[illuminae] - who had been looking anywhere but at Nash - turns to glance at him and he lifts his blazed head towards the sabino woman. His pale lips twitch in a smile and then he decides to show her something. It's safer with her because she doesn't know his history. When his coat bleeds from chestnut to white, when he copies her coloring and takes on an ebony pelt, something behind his eyes is burning. This is something that he hasn't revealed to anyone yet - not Yan, not Noel - and perhaps he feels safer with her because she won't understand what he is revealing to her.

"See?" he says and his voice becomes graveled, the sound of pebbles being churned on a rocky beach, when he finally becomes mismatched as she is. "Not odd at all."