[private] you know i never forgot

[Nashua]

She comes tumbling towards him like an avenging angel out of the darkness. For one (blissful) moment, everything is alright. She is alright as his blazed nose reaches for the first piece of skin it can find, moves over her for any sign of harm. He's subconsciously flared his speckled wings, partly from sheer fatigue and the inability to hold them against his muscled sides any longer. The other part of him only wants her near, wants the assurance that she and their children are fine.

But Noel - who is perhaps the most grounded pegasus that Nash has ever known - speaks with a shaky voice and storms are raging in her dark eyes. They took him, she starts to say and his mind starts to race. It jumps to Yanhua, remembering the way that the Curse had once crept into this forest. ('Don't worry about Yan,' the thing that claimed to be his father had said. 'He'll be plenty good at other stuff.') If the Curse was back, was it back to see what had become of that son?

Nashua didn't think he was ever capable of filling with such a violent rage - the sheer need to hurt something.

Not until his mate tells him that it was not his twin - not Taiga's Guardian - that was taken. "Bolder?" he repeats back to the winged mare before him and his green eyes widen briefly before they fill with sorrow. His lightning strike fury momentarily forgotten as Noel looks to him with a begging question that burns through him and nearly reduces to him to ash.

Why would they do that if they know him?

He's seen that pleading look once before; it had been the same look that Lilliana wore before Wolfbane had ripped her heart world apart when he had come to Taiga. A realization that what was happening was a deeper kind of cruelty, a kind that was much more vicious than any claw or fang. 

"Because It loves misery," Nashua suddenly seethes, remembering those days and blazing with the anger that it had taken their son. With a fit of anger simmering inside that he hadn't been here to keep his family safe. Nashua clenches his jaw and fights off the helpless rage that he feels. He doesn't understand Mazikeen's participation in stealing Bolder, but for the time being, he decides to focus on Gale. Perhaps he gave her no other choice.

Something in his unforgiving expression wavers as he looks down at Noel.
They had never spoken of the Curse. Nash had never spoken to anyone about it, outside a single conversation with Lilliana and a few questions to Yanhua. Both of them had always gone dark at the mention of Wolfbane and as the years progressed, Nashua had resented the shadow that the shifter's shadow cast from the grave. He joined his mother and brother of not speaking his name and for those few short years, he had believed the Curse to be gone. That it had been banished.

He'd been wrong.

Wrong to not tell Noel about his history and wrong to assume that something so evil would succumb to something as simple as Death.

"It's an affliction that my family has suffered for generations," Nashua finally says, the words strangling free from his anger. "From my father's side." The pegasus tersely adds, the most that he has ever said about his sire to her. (Noel knew about his father but all Nash had ever mentioned was as much as she revealed; that she was the daughter of Ashhal and Ryatah as he was the son of Wolfbane and Lilliana).  He had learned through his mother (who learned it from Wishbone) that it had started in Tephra, with a stallion called Longclaw.

It destroyed and ruined everything it came across.

"I want you to take the children and go to Ischia," he says when Nash has finished telling her what he knows. After he finishes telling her of the last time it came to Taiga and how his mother had suffered for it. How it went after the Queen of Nerine. If Gale knew about Bolder, what about Bravely or Saffron? Elegance or Luminesce?

Even Noel might not be safe.

"Get out of Taiga and I'll bring Bolder to you there."

@Noel

NASHUA