let them eat cake.

Like poison, her words draped around the girl's exterior, checking it for cracks. And there were plenty, though she hadn't touched one quite yet. The anger that Nyimara could sense was pulsing inside the girl, so swollen with irritation that it was blocking up some of the smaller insecurities Nyimara might have otherwise been able to get her claws into.

She names Antoinette a pawn again and the girl's teeth groan beneath the pressure of her grinding but she refuses to alter her blind march inland. The spotted girl had known the truth of that the moment she was escorted from the Shore's waters, although knowing it didn't make it any easier. Tony knew that Nyimara hadn't stolen her because she wanted her. It had nothing to do with who Tony was or what she knew she would become, and everything to do with the rotten piece of horseflesh that had convinced her mother to give up everything.

With a little guidance, Nyimara says smugly, burrowing into the girl's ear and trailing a metaphorical mocking finger down her hunched shoulders, you might even learn to be the master of your own fate, darling.

That phrase alone causes the young girl to rollback on her haunches to face the smiling witch again, her ears still nonexistent beneath the damp tangle of her mane. Seawater still dripped down the strands, staining the sand beneath her. "I will be." She snapped, the words still razor sharp. "I don't need your permission either."

Nyimara tries again, claiming that Antoinette was a child of these dusty, disgusting lands and Tony audibly scoffs, a flicker of dark joy alighting her eyes at the prospect of informing the stupid silver-maned mare how wrong she was. "I'm of the Peak." There was a pride curling beneath that assertation that the young mare was not yet wise enough to hide. Had her mother not defected to the Shore and had she not been stolen away to a dusty prison she hated, she would have already been in the Peak and surely nominated for a position of power.

"Shows what little you know," she mocked, the joy firing brighter in her eyes as her tail snapped in the quiet beyond them. "My mother was the Prime Minister. A position others elected her for. A position she deserved." Her gaze narrowed and the spite of a teenager ground the edge of her next words to a point. Words that she could have - and had oft thought about - wielding at her own mother when she was most frustrated. Love had always stopped her before, but there was no love here in this desert.

Just a well of simmering hatred.

"Anyone can call themselves a queen. It means less than nothing. It's a title for insecure mares that can't earn a better title." Earned or not, stolen triumph flared in her eyes as the relief of saying such a long-held belief gave a modicum of relief at last.

daughter of marceline.