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Rogue knew that something was wrong when her mother stiffened in the middle of a mutual grooming session, her teeth raking over her daughter's rump with enough force to make the filly flinch. "Ouch!" The roan girl cried, turning her head to glare reproachfully over her shoulder at the bay mare. "That hurt, Mother." But Fatale did not seem to hear her; she had turned toward the center of the Lagoon, a statue save the quivering of her nostrils. "Mother? Did you want me to do your tail now?" Rogue asked, her inky nose bumping the bay mare's hip. The gentle touch seemed to reanimate her dam, though it did not soften her expression as it had always done in the past.

Stay here, Fatale said, and then she was gone - melting into the shadows that surrounded them.

Rogue lingered in the thicket long enough to ascertain that her mother was gone before she turned in the opposite direction, her small body wriggling through the wall of briar with ease. She wouldn't go far, the filly justified to herself. She just wanted to see a little more of her new home. But once the tether of her captivity had been broken, there was no turning back. The girl was seduced by the scents and sights of the Lagoon, so different than the Falls where the majority of her life had been spent. With one last backward glance at her sanctuary, the filly flicked her tail rebelliously and trotted off through the trees.

The ground was soft and squelched noisily beneath her hooves. Rogue giggled at the sound and ran faster, struggling to lift her hooves against the pull of the mud. Carried away in her solitary play, the filly wound up on the Lagoon's beach, where the soft earth finally yielded to stone and sand. She had never seen a body of water so vast - it was like a second sky, and Rogue wondered if she would be able to walk across it as easily as the clouds did.

She couldn't, but splashing around in the sea turned out to be even more fun than squelching through the mud. Abandoning every care and caution as only a child was capable of, Rogue raced up and down the shore, shouting and squealing every time a wave caught her, and then wheeling around to run in the opposite direction.

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