[open] back to you; any

[Kensa]

you could break my heart in two, but when it heals, it beats for you

It is mid-afternoon, the warmest part of the day in other places, but up here in the North it is just the time of day in which the sun glares most harshly off of the snow. Kensa keeps her back to it, choosing to linger on the beach. Before her eyes, the ocean spreads out again, dark and deceptively calm at low tide.

She has not decided if she will stay here, or even what she plans to do with herself. There was a time when there were things she wanted, and gazing toward the mainland, Kensa does not have to try hard to remember them. Hidden in distant clouds are the peaks of Hyaline. She is no longer the child that so loved those heights, but they made her strong, almost strong enough to be the woman she should have been. She had risen to a leader up there, made a wish that would alter the destiny of generations, been betrayed, and became the betrayer. It is the love she remembers most clearly. It rises to the top, like the foam crowning the waves that roll in at her feet, drawing her attention as it always does. Kensa hopes someone is loving her little ones, now not so little. Always the years with him come to mind, pieces only, beautiful and flawed. She knows someone will be loving him, and she tries not to think about it because she has no right to.

So her mind wanders back to all the other things and finds it takes little for what has been smothered to flare to life again. Just as she turns toward the sound of an approach, she wonders if she will regret this day and the path she sets herself upon. Then she smiles her beautiful scimitar smile.

Regret lives on either side of the coin and she would rather call it for herself.

“Hello. I don’t think we’ve met?” Maybe they have, but her lovely face drifts into kind openness so that anyone would believe this beauty has forgotten them. (Remember what a fool they thought you were, Kensa?) She is warm in her demeanor, eager, and intent upon the one who has joined her. As she regards them her smile softens and then flares to brilliance again.

“Kensa.”

You know, that’s all the introduction she ever needs to bother with.

Kensa

@anyone

[Nashua]

(and it's harder than you think)
telling dreams from one another

He does this enough.

Nashua stares across the horizon, and watches as sunlight glimmers off the churning water like another universe. He'd wanted to be an explorer, once; he had wanted to see every acre of Beqanna and even Beyond. The only limits that the striped pegasus had ever wanted had been the physical ones of his wings. He had wanted to see every horizon and only be hampered because his wings would not be able to carry him there fast enough.

But the wanderlust of the boy had been transformed into the duty of a kingdom. He had grown up to be a King instead of an adventurer, and the only reckless thing he does these days is wasting his time by staring off this icy coast. The winter wind gusts past him, stirring his speckled feathers and tendrils of his flaxen mane as he angles his blazed head downwind. The scent is faint - but there aren't many horses on the Isle - and the Freyr knows immediately that this is not his Thane nor his mentor, Leilan.

Curiously, the winged horse moves away from his spot on the dark, glassy-pebbled beach. It doesn't take long to find her, as her gold spots glint as his gold stripes do. Nash dips his head in greeting, and the openness of her smile allows the pegasus to close his mind to his troubling thoughts (his stolen son, his missing brother, about Gale and Mazikeen). He good-naturedly grins back and tells her, "No. I don't believe we've met before."

There were others who Ciri had brought back to the Isle - like Leokadia - that he was aware of; and even the strangers that made the stop to Beqanna's northernmost point didn't go unnoticed. (The Northern King might have earned a reputation for being distracted for his familial problems, but he hadn't grown so inattentive that he no longer noticed who washed up on his shore.)

"Nashua," he tells the new arrival, thinking that his name was the only thing that mattered.

Her name - Kensa - was familiar. When he had been young, his mother had been stolen and two mares had stepped in to fill the void that Lilliana had left behind. Two aunts, and one of them had been an aspiring diplomat in Hyaline before it became home to unspeakable evils like his half-brother and his mate. (And he contemplates telling Kensa that her former pupil Elena did eventually become a Queen herself.)

Did she want to be recognized?

Unsure, Nash tilts his head towards the sabino woman. She still smells of the mainland, with scents of various places clinging to her copper skin. "You've picked an odd spot to vacation," he says instead with the obvious humor (of visiting the Icicle Isle in the heart of winter) tugging at the edges of his pale mouth.

NASHUA

@Kensa