The world can be a cruel place to such special creatures as herself. Her father had made sure to explain as much to her and she had listened with rapt attention. From the day she was born she was coddled and doted upon, for she was indeed something of a gem in her parents’ eyes. She is her mother’s firstborn child and her father’s first child in many years. Of course, Citadelle does not understand this - all she cares about is the looks of awe and admiration they gave her. They would lip her short forelock and praise her for nothing and her heart would swell as she beamed proudly back at them.

Such overconfidence is not exactly safe for children to handle, but that fact seemed far beyond the care of her parents and Citadelle certainly isn’t about to ruin a good thing. She already knows that she can get away with most anything she wants, which is why she is now wandering away toward the Meadow. She’d awoken with a sense of adventure and leaving her parents behind had been a simple task.

She wants to bring flowers back to them, maybe to braid into her father’s hair. She plucks blooms in purple and blue with yellows jjust for accents, and then some others for her mother as well. Her mother has red hair, so she chooses pink and white flowers, meticulously clipping and bunching the flowers with precision. She feels that she has gathered as many as she can find in the Meadow, for there were only a select few of each color that she sought… But then!

Then a rustle and a quiet little clutter of soft hooves breaks past her only a few feet from her nose. The colt runs perpendicular to her and continues on, but right before her eyes there are dozens more blossoms for her to gather.

Rather than hurry to her task, she draws back and blinks in awe, somewhat stunned, before she alters her course. She avoids stepping on the freshly born flowers but keeps her small bouquet in her mouth as she follows the trail that the other foal had left.

When she reaches him, she dips her head to settle the flowers she’d already gathered into a small bunch before she prances around to face the stranger. “Hey!” she bleats in a soft-yet-shrill voice, bright red ears perked forward and a slight frown on her face. Her expression is curious though, not angry. “How’d you do that?” she demands, gesturing toward the little haven of bright green grass and flowers that Beelzebub had left in his wake. “I want to know how to do that!” she adds with admiration.

If she had known the potential danger she had just arrived upon, she may have avoided interaction with the colt. Her parents had not quite taught her how cruel the world could be. Her mother, young as she was, had given her little to go by. Her father, in his old and supposedly “wizened” age had left him oblivious. Everclear may have experienced plenty of strange cruelties on his own, he did not imprint an instance of it on his youngest daughter.

Instead, he doted upon her. Citadelle felt like a princess, as if she were the one upon all the eyes would fall upon.

And yet… here is this young colt. He is just the same age as she, and he stares at her with a fixation that she expects and so for a moment she prances and flaunts….until she realizes there is a silence around them after she demands her answers. The birds chirp, the quieter daylight bugs chirp and hiss around them and then the colorful colt reaches forward towards her. Did he think he was going to touch her? She takes a small jolt backwards, alarmed, watching as he reaches his nose toward the flowers at her feet.

Those were her flowers!

“Hey!” She snaps again, nearly biting toward his nose except she stops abruptly with her little mouth agape near his nose. Her pale green eyes are trained instead upon the flowers that are now rooting back into the ground in front of her small hooves, trapped in wonder.

“What did you….?” She stops once her eyes have taken in the newer appearance of the colt, the shimmery scales, the rest of his words.

“My name doesn’t matter to you!” She stamps her little feet once, twice, three times. “Why did you take my flowers back?” She snorts. “Those were for my mother,” she lies.

“You’re mean, do you know that?” She scowls at him and turns a little, an instinctive effort to make herself seem a little bigger than him. “My mother and father would never let you do anything to me, Bub.”

Her horn is small, but it still bears the small carved pattern of a whittled spear, and she glares at him with a smirk and a pale green gaze, hooves prancing. “I want my flowers back.”