This girl is a gun, before you know it, it's done
And you'll be wishing that you crossed your fingers

nother is dead by her own hand. Marceline can hardly believe it is true, despite having witnessed it with her own eyes. It had never been her intention to cause such lethal harm. How was she to know that a simple shove would end like that? She'd only intended to thrust herself bodily against him to loosen his footing, to throw him off so she could strike properly at him.

But down he had went, the reverberating thud of his body accompanied by a sickening crack. In the first moments after her assault she had assumed he'd fractured a limb or just hit his head a bit too hard. She stared down at his prone figure, waiting for any sign of movement. seconds stretched into minutes and the stallion remained motionless upon the ground. Tentatively, as if afraid he might spring back up at any second, Marceline had reached out to nudge her forehoof against his leg. Still he did not stir. Panic gripped tight at her throat then, sharp claws wrapping around her windpipe until she felt as if she were struggling to take in each ragged breath.

It was not until after the fled the Lagoon that shock began to set in, her panic replaced by a stomach-twisting sense of dread. She had won Khar'pern back, but at what cost? If the Lagoon men didn't already hold an irreversible vendetta against her and her sisters, they surely would when they found their general dead with her scent clinging to his body. Undoubtedly they would retaliate in their own vicious way, and the cycle of violence between the Lagoon and Peak would spin ever onwards. The likelihood of any Lagoon thug ever believing it was an accident seemed slim.

As Marceline approaches the border of the Peak, the light of day waning as evening approaches, her shock and panic ebbs away, replaced by a tidal wave of indignation. So what if some pathetic Lagoonie was dead? Even if she had killed him purposefully, she would have been entirely justified. The mares of the Islands had suffered too long at the hands of the Lagoon, taken against their will just to satisfy the whims and pleasures of the bachelors who held them captive. Perhaps this was the message they needed: fuck with us and suffer the consequences. If the Islands - if the Lagoon - believed the Peak sisters were willing and capable of killing for one another, their attempts at targeting the vulcan mares might be reconsidered. Perhaps, she told herself, this wasn't an entirely a bad thing.

But she still felt sick when the sight of Vane's lifeless body flashed in her mind's eye. There was no escaping the nauseating crunch of snapping vertebrae that echoed through her thoughts as she shuffled her way up the Peak, her movements awkward and jerky, like a marionette controlled by a terribly untalented puppeteer. Marceline spies one of her sisters ahead on the path and her mouth moves before her mind is fully made up, a sharp edge to her tone as she speaks: "The Lagoon General is dead," she announces. Though her voice is firm and her face settled into a hard mask of indifference, there is an anxious twitch rolling across each muscle of her bruised body that belies her inner turmoil. "Tell all who will listen, and let them take this as a warning that the Peak will not tolerate further abuse by anyone."