[private] I saw the end in the mist of the river

[Nashua]

There is silence between the brothers, and in that moment, Nashua heard that louder than anything else. They banter along as siblings might, an ease which can only come from years of close proximity and contact, but as the striped stallion stood there, he wondered when things between them had gone so quiet. Was it when Yan had first gone missing and Nash – suddenly a sole sibling where had been always part of pair – had pushed everyone away?

Had it been after Lilliana’s mysterious death? Bolder being won over by Gale and Mazikeen with their promises of power?

Reave quirks his lips and it would seem that it reaches his blue, gleaming eyes. When Nashua looks to meet them, there is nothing shining on his face. Even the little humor he had summoned for this meeting fails him and vanishes; all that remains is a torment that he has refused to let anyone else carry. "It’s not your inability to understand that I worry about Reave,” the former King of the North said quietly. "I worry about how well I make myself understood,” he continued quietly. ”Maybe it will be easier for you.”

Nashua certainly hoped it would. For Reave’s sake, as well as the North. He sighed then, and tore his tired face away from his youngest sibling.

"There was so much darkness here when I was growing up,” the striped horse murmured just barely above the Nerinian breeze that came gusting from a gray, choppy sea. ”And then it felt like everybody was just holding their breath, waiting for the next horrible thing to happen.” The North had experienced many changes and upheaval over the past decade of Nashua’s life (some even taking place before it), and for a moment, he remembers what life had been for him as a young colt in Taiga struggling to find his wings beneath those colossal trees. He remembers meeting Elio and Pteron, remembers that ”Gale was the only sibling on my father’s side that didn’t make feel ashamed. I thought that -,” Nashua stopped himself as he felt those old emotions rise up in him – the anger and the hurt –  “I once thought that, with his help, we might have made sense of all that madness. Find a way to overcome it for the good of Beqanna.”

(That old dream lingers in his memory, and Nashua struggles against his bitterness as it rises up in him like bile. It had been so close to becoming a reality. The three of them – he, Reave, and Yanhua – in the North. Gale, alongside Mazikeen, ruling the West. Cheri to the South. That was Nash’s dream of an empire, a founding that would have started with family.)

And now it was all gone.

He was rambling. He was lamenting. He was doing nothing that would do any of them any good.

"Just be careful, alright?” Nashua finally said, forcing himself back into the present, and turned to look at Reave again. Then, at last, a hint of a smile quirked against his pale lips, attempting to reciprocate his brother’s jest. ”And maybe I’ll eventually make up my mind about something.”

@Reave