it was not your fault but mine

[Nashua]

There have been some misfortunes in Nashua's young life and @[Aedan] assumes right, that there have been some fortunes as well. His story is perhaps not unique. A distant father. An absent mother. The loss of both parents had forced he and Yanhua to grow up quicker than most colts their age. They were safe in Taiga but safe is nothing against the loss of a mother. It did nothing to keep them warm at night. It did nothing to put their nightmares to rest.

They had been fortunate to have Mother-Aunts. There had been Lethy and Elio and Celina. There had been Leilan, who seemed to take an interest in the wayward Nashua who wandered then as he does now. Maybe he recognized a compass needed a path to point down. Maybe there was a searching in Nash that Leilan recognized, something he had already found.

It's given Nashua purpose and in all his wanderings, it gives him a course.

If not for the Freyr, the chestnut pegasus might have found it harder to smile so amiably with Aedan. It makes it easy to speak of what happened to the Isle without ire. "It was razed by a dragon named Castile," Nashua explains. "There were others as well... but that seems to the name that the Northerner's remember." The young stallion shrugs his shoulders. He had never met the former King of Loess. "They said that he went mad and feral on Fey Magic. Undone by it and so he sought to undo something."

The Isle, his silence says.
(And now they would reshape and remake it, the glint of determination in his green eyes show.)

That the celestial-marked stallion says he will visit Taiga makes the infectious smile turn to a broad one. "Ask for my brother, Yanhua, or my mother, Lilliana, if you do. They would like your stars." He has been raised up on stories of them. An appreciation for them stems deep within his bloodline and Nashua thinks that his family would admire Aedan as he does now. "If your little one can make the journey, there is no better place to play hide-and-seek." Nash says with the experience of a child who knows and he grins. He had been a colt who hid beneath the large ferns and behind the wide trunks of Redwood trees, who had learned to disappear in the fog.

"Perhaps," the striped pegasus banters back. "Though the heat would have bothered me as well." His last visit to Tephra hadn't been about the volcano, he remembers. He had been disappointed that the yearlings they had encountered that day had been more interested in its lake. "I used to think that the cold would bother me, too. But places seem to have a way of growing on you."

NASHUA