Author's Note

Content warning for this chapter: prostitution, underage character soliciting prostitutes, horsey health issues, characters who violate Romeo & Juliet laws, murder, exsanguination, mentions of being stabbed, exposing underage characters to sexual situations/climates, selling children inappropriate things, graphically described dead bodies, implied gelding, gore, injury, body horror(?), ponies being bad, urban aesthetics that are gross, misuse of finances, child being exposed to way too many sexually inappropriate situations, exsanguination, abuse, nastiness/sickness, a bad pony who likes to degrade and humiliate others, more allusions to abuse, mean words. (violence/gore/non-con/sex/profanity/death)
Post-chapter author's notes: 'Tart card' is a fucking bizarre piece of British slang. I stumbled across it when searching for information about tarot cards for another story idea. I hadn't realized I had typed anything into Google wrong until I checked how I was being asked if I needed my fucking spelling corrected. I'm a fucking dumbass, apparently. My research typos lead me down to contributing to learning semi-useless information for completely different projects. However, the term 'less than dead' is one I learned in my usual crime documentary watching and reading. It's used to describe a vast category of demographics commonly targetted by serial killers, such as transients, runaway youths, and others.

Chapter 9: Regarding Disposable Ponies

Marigold had never been served by imagination. That never stopped her when she was on her trips; the tops of tall apartment buildings were as fair game as any in Manehattan. She would pull a rag from her saddlebag, spread it haphazardly and plop herself down. Her mind would dip between frustration and a dull haze. Her Alicorn Amulet would weigh coldly under her clothes and she would squint out at the inky slop of night that Princess Celestia brought forth every dusk.

She would see the thousand-plus lights of the island city below and the bay area so far away, utterly unknown to her. Sitting as tall as she could guess Canterlot would be far inland, Marigold would try and picture her world without light pollution. The numerous puffs of smoke from Manehattan’s numerous fires would mask her vision like a sooty veil and warm her face unpleasantly, causing sweat to bud under her stiff collar. The taste of ash lingered even as the sun went down, as Marigold’s years had taught her.

Whimpering, Marigold coughed into a hoofkerchief, clutching it tightly and wheezing momentarily. Sniffling, she shoved it away again and wrinkled her muzzle, scowling with the small displeasure of a spoiled schoolfilly. The sky was still not dark enough and the sounds from the city below were her clock; they told her that the hour was still improper for her plans.

A fussy sigh left her in a puff, and she passed what time she could by pulling a knife from where the hoofkerchief had disappeared. The kitchen would not miss it; her mother was a parlor-mare, not one who worked in the kitchen. The newspaper it was wrapped in crinkled, and Marigold felt the budding glee from knowing her debut made the front page. Utensils went unnoticed to her unless they were fine pearl-handled silverware or tea sets. No practical item Marigold was made to use in her labors matched such a worthy definition.

There was a distant sneeze tickling somewhere in her throat, but she was not about to let it squeak out of her just yet. She was careful to balance the knife’s thick mouth grip idly on her foreleg first; the limb was carefully covered in shabby cloth booties too worn to leave a print and crusted with the remains of a fun night over in Balikun-Shetland and street-dust. The knife’s balance was becoming more practiced, but still showing the wrong motions could knock it over quite easily.

Marigold nudged it with her other hoof, and the spinning began her wait. She was tired of pretending that one crumby apartment block could let her see the sky any more than slivers of a far bay and dark waters.

…

The night was cloudy and the city’s air was heavier with smoke than usual. Still, Marigold was not so naive. She had no ability with the sky to know that she should get to work before the moon was high in the sky. Her earth pony superiority and the nights she was able to wriggle free from her mother’s attention played a role in that. Something more than milk went into that mare’s before-bed tea in the evenings when Marigold was deemed ‘too aggravating’ to handle. Whatever her mother saw fit to add in there was enough to make the old nag sleep like a stone.

Her ears pricked to make sure that her shuffling had not been too great. Rusty metal offered a few plaintive groans. Wrinkling her muzzle, Marigold gave a small hissing breath and pawed at the old fire escape beneath her. A faint jingling from the overwrought, golden ensemble she had under her plain cloak was the only reply she got.

“Hmph,” Marigold sniffed disdainfully. Under her cloak, her ears flopped down somewhat.

She squeezed her eyes shut briefly, keeping them as tight as possible while alien pressure budded beneath the center of her skull and dazzling ruby light filtered from between her eyelashes. With nothing but twists of dark metal above her and shadowy walls of brick to barricade her, she would be too thoroughly concealed from any prying eyes.

Rustling beneath her cloak was a papery sound. Upon opening her eyes, Marigold’s red-flooded gaze was greeted by the sight of a crumpled bit of newspaper. It had been dipped in vaguely tan paint and was cramped with sloppy mouthwriting.

The shoddiness of it did not suggest the true nature of the card until Marigold squinted more carefully at the atrocious grammar and spelling so clumsily scrawled there. As far as she could tell, that was authentic. Her grades in spelling were poor and she still couldn’t manage the intentional awfulness these all appeared to have. Even the glow of the Alicorn Amulet’s magic made the fat squiggles look that much worse.

Every single one of these slips had only the minimum level of legibility. Each hoof-made card was an illegal advertisement for equally forbidden actions. A false name, an address, general rates, and the vaguest implication of the exact nature of the sex crimes offered were scrawled down — usually by the offenders themselves. They were then distributed to accomplices who bribed with bits to pass the evidence into the hooves of the vile ponies who would share the perverse desire to be the second half of the crime.

Once again, Marigold’s age was of little concern when she finally found an alley-stallion with these under his jacket. He walked so ridiculously, with one hoof shoved under his coat in case he needed to get rid of the cards as quickly as possible, knowing that if caught with them the lightest punishment permissible that he would face would be years in prison and being registered alongside those who had hired him as an offender for the rest of his life. It was all so high-stakes to little Marigold.

She knew that most of the time the kinds of thugs that aided the self-exploitation practices would take a teenager like her and hoof her over to a prostitute eager to make her into an extra source of income — and perhaps somepony to vent onto — for as long they could keep her captive. Library records and newspapers she snuck spelled out the nature of these predators and the innocent Manehattan creatures they tormented from outside of their dreary, disgusting, and violent little worlds.

Other accomplices to these dirty ponies would not be nearly as driven to abduct her. She was too young to be working for the Royal Guard and if Marigold was under the delusion of wanting to be violated — as the law would call her ‘affliction’ — by an older pony, then these forgotten types had no conscious to stop her. Especially if it meant their sunken eyes could see more ill-won bits eventually.

The stallion who gave Marigold this particular card was not the second kind, but a third breed. She had no way of knowing if she had ever encountered the first, just that she might have pacified one such sort by offering bits for what was usually free. For ponies who willingly gave up all hope of financial security in order to fuel cycles of sex and violence, bits spoke a powerful language.

Marigold was given a card to pocket as a result. Now she was slinking around a fire escape in the dark, prodding about the shadowy outline of a newspaper-stuffed window frame with her hooves. The floor listed was the eighth and she was careful to count her descent from the roof. She just needed to make sure she had the right window. Who else but a whore — and yes, she knew it was a whore-mare by the name chosen — would have such an ill-kept window?

Eventually, her hooves patted down a gap in the newspaper and the glass panes rattled their protest. She felt a stale breeze pouring outward, bringing a rancid smell, and watched the reddish glow of her eyes’ reflection grow rounder upon the dirty glass at her success. The bad smell was the perfect sign that the resident was what she needed; it was too much to be explained by just another unfavorable tenet.

With her magic, she dropped a few stray bits through the hole, listening to them clatter down the other side of the glass. Seconds later, the window was rattling like something done by a boogeymare in a magazine horror tale and being clumsily yanked up from the other side.

Greeting Marigold were two bloodshot eyes in a sunken face. The thinness of her prey was so apparent that the mare’s teeth were forever bared, showing off how brown and mossy they were. Poking out from under her ragged shawl were frizzy bits of a thin mane that was mostly pulled away.

Marigold gave a forced smile and tried not to faint from the suddenness of this ugly face or the smell pouring out from her dank cave of an apartment.

“Good evening,” she said thinly, offering a forced wave. Her drawn hood hid her lack of a horn, but her eyes still gleamed with the hidden magic of the Alicorn Amulet.

“Wha’ kinna unicorn be ya?” sputtered the mare, swiping in the air for more bits with one knobbly and twisted foreleg.

Blinking, Marigold decided to resort to semi-practiced mouth breathing. Repulsion wouldn’t make these kinds drive anypony willing to pay away, but she at least had to keep up enough of a front to ease any nerve or second thoughts that could be lurking in this shriveled scrap of a mare.

“One who can make magic glasses,” Marigold lied, using a swirl of telekinesis that produced a pattering sensation under her skull to twirl a lock of her mane and flash a stiff smile.

Her heart ached desperately for her mane to be anything but the dull orangish dark blonde she had been allotted by fate. All the mane-dye bottles during her window shopping escapades proclaimed she had a shade between the ever-popular ‘Blueblood Blonde’ and ‘Antique Carrot’ — though that one was horribly unsold and unwanted. While she was never able to figure out what in Tartarus the latter was supposed to mean her mother would occasionally snidely remind her of the former. Oh, how she loathed that her mother had a fashionable, red bob while Marigold was left with her dreary mane-do.

“Ya gon’ pay or si’ an’ gab?” spat the near-skeletal mare, what was left of any jowls flapping weakly as she fixed Marigold with a dullard’s squinty-eyed stare. Gorgeous, glittering eyeshadow was caked as thick as a layer of plaster over her eyelids, the whole application so grotesque in its unskilled quality.

“Not at all,” giggled Marigold. She grinned and teasingly waggled one of her coin purses about with a pendulum sway of telekinesis. “I was only waiting until the lady of the house invited me in.”

The thin leftover of the mare’s upper lip curled upward even more, and the pained look of the gesture made Marigold shiver happily.

To dispel suspicions further, Marigold produced the cheap card with a flourish. It was already falling apart in the grip of Marigold’s magic and looked so unlike anything that could put a pony in prison for possessing it; the paint chipping around the edges did little to give it an intimidating edge or class. Marigold still pushed it forward like it was a golden Grand Galloping Gala ticket.

Street-whispers she had eavesdropped on in preparation informed her that those who passed the forbidden card on were not always as quick to accept knock-and-enter buyers or those driven to them by word of mouth — and word that was often bought, too, for as mangy as Manehattan’s underbelly was, it was still small. Marigold knew she would not be turned away by the whore, that was for ponies with standards. She was in no mood to be met with any kind of hesitation, especially from somepony that she knew could never afford it.

For Marigold, hesitation meant she would have to force her way inside and start the struggle right on this fire escape. A location like this went against every shred of sense Marigold could claim; she would be facing a death sentence after only one dead mare to her name — that made the Alicorn Amulet under her cloak warm with her worry, as though they shared the emotion.

For this whore, hesitating to accept any kind of coin — and the treatment that followed — would mean no rent, cosmetics, clothes, utilities, or distribution of her cards. If she was paying for groceries and anything else to be delivered to her by her goons, as many of her kind did, then they would have all the more reason to be angered over being money-starved…

...and Marigold had to suppress another delighted shiver at how they might ruin this whore in retaliation. That was what happened in their worlds, as Marigold could not think of any other term for the inner workings of self-exploitation.

She was oh-so-careful to pick only the choicest whispers on the streets of Manehattan as her ‘research’ into finding the best of the worst candidates to serve her.

She, the whore, was all too good at greedily swiping up the bits Marigold levitated over to her. As many purses as needed were floated over, and Marigold watched with wide, sparkling eyes as four hundred of her mother’s bits were surrendered to a mangy whore. Two hours for four hundred bits. That was a few bits too many to burden Marigold’s fine back, and this hag was going to pay for every single one.

Oh, how her mother would be flailing her few good limbs in money-hunger if she knew the manner in which her bits were being wasted!

No matter how generous the sum the Crown sent to Marigold’s mother or the vast amount amassed within her room, Marigold’s mother was always prattling about how they never had enough. Not even the other monthly checks that Rhodium was commanded to send satisfied Petunia’s perverse petty lusts. Yet, she was the very same nag who had not yet noticed a sliver of funds taken here or there. Marigold had done her best to fill what she took from what she got from reselling her thrift hauls, replacing what she borrowed with even more bits, which her mother simply burned through. That was the only significant evidence beyond what she left of the prostitutes themselves when she was not able to snatch back every bit that she used as a prop in these blood games.

“Twos hours,” slurred Marigold’s new whore, “no mores that.”

Marigold smiled, cold and closed-lipped. This one would prove to be especially easy to brutalize. Her jerky leg movements and glazed eyes made everything about the whore clumsy and pathetic. When the whore went to put the coin purses she hugged within her forelegs inside, she simply dumped them all over her floor.

For Marigold, the drum of all those bits was the song of the refund she would claim when her fun was done: teasing, bold, and beautiful. She pretended to pay them any mind and swung herself through the window after the foul mare the way she imagined elite Manehattan mares climbed into the sleekest carriages, their skirts lifted just so.

Soon, all those bits would be hers once again, if only for a night.

…

Marigold had always liked the feel of blood. However, every time she tried to think of why she only recalled a distant memory of her mother screaming. Briefly, she had considered that maybe she had never liked blood in certain ways before this part of her life, or that the Alicorn Amulet’s encouragement was what led her to crave it. While she always craved blood more with the Alicorn Amulet about her neck, it was not as though she never wanted to do vile, wicked things when the amulet was put away. All the Alicorn Amulet did was provide her with a thrum of mentorship. Every scrap of what she learned was called encouragement, something she can’t say she was ever offered before. Thus, whatever scrap of her knew that she enjoyed the feeling of blood was not the doing of the Alicorn Amulet.

The fabric of her dress slipped over the drying warmth of the streaks she had painted over her coat would have driven other ponies mad with the itchiness. She always dabbed streaks and splotches over some of the spots where normal mares would spritz their perfume or rub crushed flower petals, hoping their scent would stick. Those were the current trends, one horde of mares followed blindly in order to make sweet scents waft up from their dresses. To Marigold, the touches of blood were daring, a taunt to the gold-clad guard who would never see the dripping patches and a fashion choice all her own. Who would think to smell blood on her when everypony good and sweet was hiding away from the Mare in the Moon?

There wasn’t a pony still up that would notice, and she slipped through the metal and brick jungle of Manehattan rooftops with only the sound of her own girlish snickers as company and a few stray swipes of a dead mare’s blood upon the parts of her coat that none could see. Her saddlebags were heavier with more bits than she had entered with and overflowing with all she had managed to salvage from the whore’s little cave. By the time anypony would find her corpse, Marigold would be long gone and that apartment building would reek. Or, that’s how she wished that things would go. No neighbors would find all the plentiful leftover blood she had poured down the drains, watching it tint the water. Whatever cronies of the whore’s that forced their way inside to demand their share of bits would only see what was left of her.

Teleporting meant that with every rooftop she disappeared from, there would be frequent intervals when her dingy urban surroundings faded away. Her world would be engulfed in crimson magic, and there she would get to play back what she had done over and over again.

There was the way that horror finally ravaged the expression of the mare when she realized that Marigold was one of those buyers…

...how the first slice into anypony always made her mind burn, knowing she was the one who controlled what came next…

...that she got to remind her carefully picked prey so many times of the simple fact that every one of them would never be anything but less than dead, not when they had nopony who cared about them, not when they were no-ponies too...

...and that nopony ever came to stop her.

The only regret Marigold ever had was how she could only wonder at what her nightly baths would look like if they were made red with all the blood she wished to harvest, and how in the end she would always have to scrub it away.

…

The next night she was able to slip out mirrored the first. The Mare in the Moon hung far above Manehattan Island, a pale-eyed sight that was one of the few magical things Marigold Blueblood had ever seen in her life. None of the dinginess of her mortal life or city had managed to touch the moon so high above, and no painting or print managed to wrangle even a fraction of its essence in the way the sun had been captured and caged by art so long ago. Everything was just a touch red, and she felt that she might burst from the familiar anticipation and magic thrumming against her skull. The usual sensation of her magic aside, her craving for violence was carving her out once again until Marigold could no longer subsist on reminders of what she was capable of that struck her in idle moments. Days would always pass, and Marigold would find that reliving everything in her recollections over household chores was never, ever enough — not when there were so many more ideas to swarm her mind, making her body agree.

Her skirt was less of a burden this time. The silky, shiny affair slunk with her as she crept along Manehattan streets, yet long enough to hide her hooves and flare out, a sheen golden mimicry of a nightgown. Marigold’s saddlebags were slung over the top of a formal blouse, the puffy sleeves stiffer than she had wanted them to be. Instead of the brooch favored by fillies her age trying to look like mares, Marigold had coils of scarves wound around her neck. They were neither too fashionable to keep her from standing out nor were they too shabby as much of Manehattan-style apparel was because she preferred to allow herself some taste.

The pounding of her heart was second to the pressure building at the center of her head. Every time the Alicorn Amulet was slipped on, Marigold noticed that the ache was growing more pronounced. Something about her skin had begun to feel different too, there was a variety of crawling, tingling sensations that never quite went away even when she took off the amulet.

None of these were bad, in fact, they even kept her more focused upon her dark desires. She figured that every unicorn felt these phantom sensations and that it was a part of their weakness she only had to learn to overcome. So, she let them weigh down upon her like the tart card in her front pocket, where it could be safe from the rain.

…

The wooden stairs creaked each time she stepped on them, but Marigold still managed to slink her way up to the fourth floor. Never before had a prostitute been quite as careless as this one, who answered ponies right at her own door. She was no doubt an amateur, then, and how lucky she would be for Marigold to find her instead of the guard. They would have her name, her true name, branded on a sex offender list forever and she would never again be able to set hoof in any place deemed pure, public, or both. Marigold cared little about making sure ponies like her spent their time in prison; she would much rather immortalize them in her own special ways.

Marigold rapped at the door eagerly after shoving the crumpled card under the door and trying not to breathe too heavily. Her vision swam with ruby light that made her have to close her eyes from the intensity.

Not now! She let her thoughts hiss in her head, directed at nopony. Immediately afterward, and much to her surprise, the magic dimmed. Marigold caught only the dim sizzle of something reddish deep in her gaze when she stared at her reflection in the doorknob.

That she could still see such beads of fire in a doorknob felt like a good omen. Today, Marigold wanted to play an earth pony instead of a disguised unicorn. She hated having to claim she was the enemy, even though it explained her new powers so much easier. Most of all, she knew that there would be such a look of betrayal if this mare shared her race. There was a dim paranoia that one always had around those terrible, tricksy unicorns, knowing that their magic gave them the potential for horrid things. Nopony ever felt that subtle brutalization around an earth pony, and anypony who did was a filthy rotten liar whose slander ought to be shamed.

After some shuffling, a mare eventually opened the door. Marigold was immediately struck by the newness of the whore. Her skin was near civilian health, as long as one was willing to ignore the knotted, angry scarring as thick as snakes that wound across her. The way her dress fit unevenly around her back and the red stains that seeped through the fabric made Marigold’s heart beat faster with delight.

This mare was still so new to her abuse that she winced, and her eyes brightened with pain when she moved. There was no dead-eyed glaze that usually set in so quickly, and that had Marigold’s hooves just itching at the thought of all the things she could do to a mare so fresh and broken.

“Mmm,” she hummed dully. “Yer a mare?” There was a pained exhale caught in all her words. “Nawt one of thems stallions that says he is?”

“Oh, I most certainly am a mare, you dull beast,” sniggered Marigold, smiling widely at the whore who hid behind long curls that looked like they were moldering from her lifestyle, though there was little to be called life in what she did. Goodness, the thought that she still had enough of a mane that could be used for real curls instead of resorting to wigs was just the cherry on top.

“I…” The whore paused, swaying a little and dabbing her sleeve at a bit of blood around her mouth. “I’ven’t a mare before.”

Marigold’s muzzle scrunched up, and not from the assorted telltale odors that this mare had. “Well, it’s not like you get much of a choice in the matter.”

The whore’s eyes fell, and she swayed again, her mane bobbing listlessly while her tail dragged lifelessly on the ground.

“I have all the bits you could want,” sing-songed Marigold as her eyes roved the corset pulled too tight and carelessly over the mare’s visible ribs. Nopony in their right mind would wear such a thing in broad daylight, and the expensiveness of it was absolutely garish. “And you can never afford to choose.”

A heavy sigh came from the half-styled mess of curls and dreadlocks. Marigold’s heart soared at the look of utter resignation that came when her hoof fished out a bag of bits.

“Now, how much must you have for three hours?” As Marigold looked at her, she was already calculating how much this one might be. She clearly subjected herself to absolute savagery and had enough rapid popularity to have her goons order expensive clothing from catalogs and run her advertisements through the city.

The mare winced as she limped forward to look down at the coin purse in Marigold’s hoof.

“One hun’red bits,” came the muffled reply. The prostitute managed to pin her ears down even further. The bruise as purple as plum kept one of her eyes swollen shut; the freshness of it was absolutely fetching to Marigold. She only wished that the popular fillies in her classes would one day have the popularity of ponies like this: as infamous slags.

Marigold could only smile wider; this one absolutely warmed her cockles. She wasn’t the epitome of decay that the average was, but she was getting to that point when she would need to trim herself with every jewel and poorly repurposed articles of clothing to make her a scrap basket advertisement for a mare that had long since rotted away and existed only for carnal purchases.

Not all the stars in the sky could contain Marigold’s wish that there would always be more of these ponies for her to go through.

With the proper bits hastily exchanged, the two retreated behind the door.

…

New to her crimes or not, Marigold knew immediately that the prostitute’s waterlogged corpse drifting under the Bucklyn Bridge would be more fragrant than the faint rotting scent the filly detected when she stepped inside. It certainly wasn’t the scent of flesh, but it made her wish that she was far across Bucklyn Channel to the pure village of the fair name. There the rot-odor wouldn’t reach her. It was just inevitable that this lot of pony smelled like they scrubbed a few layers of their own skin off with sewage instead of taking proper baths. Marigold was beyond guessing the exact causes behind the offending odor too, but goodness did she know it when it hit her.

Why, it was something of a grand entrance effect. There was little else that was close to being described as noteworthy in the flat other than Marigold’s clothes. The flat would have been decent at some point, but self-exploitation brought a dinginess to everything, however distant.

In her reading classes, Marigold had been forced to sit through a variety of boring stories, one of which had made her very angry. A minotaur king named Midas had gotten the best gift in the world from one of the gods and transformed everything and every-creature in his life to cold, gleaming gold. However, his cowardice made him beg for normal touch and the restoration of his worthless friends and family. Marigold despised that ending, knowing that if she had that power, she would never give it up. Tartarus knew that to transform any in such a way would excite her. Her beloved city would be much better with more gold and fewer greedy griffons dirtying the streets, for example.

She was struck so often by that story because when she was around such filthy ponies, it was impossible not to be reminded of how a so-called slut had the opposite influence Midas had, and they brought nothing but ruin, even if Marigold enjoyed the rot. It was that contrast that Marigold adored; she cared nothing for any kind of moral nonsense about supporting bounty-catching and community clean-up and chase-out efforts against the scummy prostitutes who thought they could share her city. All she wanted were some disposable ponies whom she could delight in ruining. Was that not a simple dream for a simple young lady?

Really, the only thing simpler was the sense of design that her latest victim had. The wallpaper had just started to acquire its first layers of filth and the floors were chipped, scuffed, and dirtied. Rags were discarded everywhere, as were the remnants of a sewing kit and various laundry supplies. Some scattered needles bore traces of dried blood, while others were bent at angles suggesting the whore had stepped on them in acts of clumsiness.

Marigold’s mother had purchased the clunky, primitive machine that was a staple for any earth pony seeking to sew. For this earth pony whore to have none and resort to just gripping the needles in her teeth meant she was beyond desperate, and likely even swallowed many more needles than she stepped on.

Frankly, Marigold was just itching to open her up and see how many were inside. She even had to press her lips together — not a full-on lip-bite, but something closer to what a displeased teacher did — in order to keep from breaking out into the silliest of grins.

Marigold made no effort to hide the spring in her step and caught sight of a few discarded coils of rope and an assortment of clothespins lying in the grime on the floor. Those could be useful. Other than all the mail-order garments and their respective catalogs lying on the ground, in various states of disrepair, there was little sign of anything else among the flat’s filth. The closest indicator Marigold had that this mare ate at all was that there was a dusty, stained burlap sack, which some fat black flies buzzed around. It was entirely understandable; this mare wouldn’t be able to go outside on her own. Not with the obviousness of her crimes, untreated chaffing, and carelessness in showing her natural coat color.

Dust and filth floating about settled on Marigold’s muzzle, making her give a high, powerful sneeze. As that happened, she misstepped and nearly tripped over a stray can of mane gel, whose hollow, near-empty sound protested her weight.

Hissing, Marigold pushed herself up and wrapped her hoof around the can before hurling it as hard as she could in the whore’s direction. To her satisfaction, it caught the whore just under her eye, giving rise to a nasty mark immediately.

The following whimper was just what Marigold wanted to hear.

“You stupid, filthy bitch!” Marigold snarled. “How can you just let others wallow in your own filth?”

“I… I’unno!” stammered the whore, rubbing her freckled face numbly. Her eyes were blank and pale while her other forehoof reached for the filthy sheets piled high upon the saggy, frameless mattress in the middle of her flat.

A cascade of bits was spilled across the floor, an arc of gold against the hideous grime. The hotness of anger grabbed at Marigold’s chest from within. With a great huff, she cantered over them and pushed the whore down. She fell onto the bed as though she were already dead. Her eyes were already glazed and far away.

Even as Marigold lept atop her, the mare had the limpness of a ragdoll. She squinted into the near-dead eyes of the prostitute, trying to find something other than vacancy and the dull reflection of candlelight.

Under the corset that dug into the mare’s exposed ribs, Marigold caught sight of how heavily her prey’s pinched breathing was, and let a slow smile spread across her face.

If her toy was already half-alive, there was no point in keeping up her act as just another violent buyer. At least not for too long. She put a forehoof down hard on the mare’s throat, pressing until she got a strangled gasp. Her whore was too weak to put up a proper resistance, and the recognition dimly shining in her eyes told Marigold that this had been done to her countless times before.

Her gasps became faint wheezes, and the slightest twitch came in her limbs, stirring a cruel satisfaction in Marigold. With the mare lost in a dopey, painful haze, Marigold shut her eyes until her vision swam with red and her mind met the Alicorn Amulet’s power. She envisioned the crisp, clean anatomy books in the public library so far away from the world of this dingy whore-flat.

At the same time, there were all things much sicker and oh-so-vivid swimming in her head.

As choked mewls reached her ears and the flailing became less intense, Marigold let her magic slither around to where the lumbar vertebrae would be found on a pony. The beautiful word she had learned just for the purpose of this trip danced in her head with the weight of a favorite song: hemi-corp-orec-tomy.

After making sure the whore was still alive, Marigold put all the force she could into her magic and began to pull. Hot blood started pooling at her hooves, teasing that there was more to come and drive her excited mind wild. Meanwhile, she savored the look of agonized shock on the prostitute’s face, for it was only there for a moment.

…

Marigold had never been good at math. She knew enough just for shopping and paying bills. Oh, and she could split a mare in half while simultaneously stealing her breath. That had to count for something. None of her classmates got to do that. In fact, they were all squeamish at the very mention of high-level magi-biology where students were expected to be able to dissect a jackalope — or make a proper presentation about the process if they lacked the magic to do so themselves.

Those pests weren’t even endangered. Marigold had heard from one of her schoolmates who heard it from her cousin that if you go just past Bucklyn village’s borders, a pony can find them everywhere, in places with rolling hills of abundant green that Manehattanites stopped seeing once they set away picture books. Marigold was mostly frustrated at the idea of how pitiful a jackalope was in comparison to a pony.

There was just so much more to ponies once you pulled them apart. Nopony lost themselves in what they did with a jackalope in the same way that nopony was ever going to gorge themselves on a single pea. Jackalopes were a teaser, a measly reminder of everything she could do to a pony. Imagining a jackalope with everything spilling out and on display confused her terribly. Wasn’t that the way she was supposed to feel about ponies?

Marigold would sit over her school lunches, shoving apple slices and mashed potatoes around while her mind slipped off into the fog of elsewhere. That elsewhere was imagining last week. If her toy had been a jackalope instead of a whore-pony, she would have had little to distribute and examine. Her eye was not a critical one, but there wasn’t a doubt in Marigold’s mind that she had left quite the scene.

All the blood poured down the drain of a rarely-used bathtub…

...two dull eyes nailed to the wall above her mattress with spikes from her blood magic…

...an array of teeth scattered across the floor like jacks…

...and a garland of her innards strung from wall to wall.

In the end, she always got her bits back and she got to have her fun. Nothing else mattered.

Marigold swallowed, her ears swiveling backward as soon as she heard the whispering. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Knight Watch tug at the hoof of another filly who had wandered in Marigold’s direction.

“Stay away from her,” Knight hissed, just loud enough for Marigold to hear.

“Why?” whispered the unicorn filly innocently, clutching her tray tighter in her magic. “She sits all alone, every single day. Surely somepony ought to talk to her?”

“Blueblood is a creep,” insisted Knight.

Marigold bit the inside of her cheek. All the other foals in school called her ‘Blueblood’, which not even the teachers said to Marigold’s face. Her mother fought in court to give her the name of a stallion whom Marigold had never met or acknowledged, and all her classmates refused to call her anything else. They refused her everything: sleepovers, mark mitzvahs, cute-ceañeras, and birthdays.

She had told herself constantly that she never wanted to associate with these ponies anyway. Knight Watch was a hall monitor who got anypony trying to skip class in trouble. His father was in the guard, which made him a complacent horseshoe-kisser to the goddess-princess. In ten years, Marigold was sure he would still be oppressing ponies like her, she just knew it. After all, he was a traitorous pegasus to be willing to think that unicorns and the gods weren’t all awful. Everypony even knew he had a crush on the deer exchange student too, and nopony but Marigold seemed to take up their duty to speak out against species-mixing.

“C’mon, Knight. Calling somepony such a thing is just uncouth. She probably just needs a friend.”

“No!” Knight insisted, his voice a little louder. He tugged again at the filly’s fetlock. “Blueblood is not noble or good like her name. She is nothing more than a bad seed who hates anypony who is not an earth pony or just as mean as her.”

“Oh,” murmured the filly, finally giving in to his tugging. “May I sit with you, then?”

“Of course,” Knight said, abandoning his whisper. “I always have room for more friends. What is your name?”

“Sea Salt!” chimed the unicorn filly. “My family just moved here from Ghastly-Upon-Copse so I can join the naval fort one day. Is it true that Coney Bay has the best magic shows?”

“Yep! My family goes there every summer…”

Marigold huffed and stuck her muzzle into her juice carton until it bulged out, letting her mane cascade around her face in order to shut out the cafeteria lights.

She hated ponies with the kind of unacceptable attitude Knight Watch had. Otherwise, she would have gotten to skip the rest of the lunch period and ended up in the headmistress's office for ‘bullying’ another student, as if anything there was anything wrong about reminding a horrid horn-head where they belonged.

Marigold had made the last pony who dared sit with her flee the cafeteria in tears, and all because Marigold knew that no earth pony who married a unicorn deserved to be able to carry their foal to term, and that filly shouldn’t have told any school-mates she was ‘feeling down’ over what was no great loss, and certainly not the loss of a sibling. If that filly had realized it, she would reject her unicorn blood and disowned the horned beast that sired her. Instead, Marigold got another suspension and none of her schoolmates even acknowledged her, even when she had to read the disciplinary essay ‘Why Miscarriages are Horrible for Everypony Involved’ to her homeroom class.

Marigold bit at the cardboard of her juice carton and tried to imagine if anypony would treat her the same if they knew all the pony she was when Princess Celestia lowered the sun.

…

Marigold Blueblood thinking of herself as an adult was inevitable. Or, at least her idea of adulthood, which was interwoven with concepts of drudgery, authority, and the oft-whispered-about forbidden, risque side of it that she craved. Her classmates may be a few years shy of graduating — and with it, adulthood — but Marigold had much more experience with the things in life she had always been told really mattered: blood and coin.

While fillies her age were still vying for hoof-holding and stolen kisses in courtship, Marigold had to hide just how much she wanted to boast of her deeds. To Tartarus with all the talk about commitment, communication, and romantic fidelity that ruled Equestrian culture. Everything was too tied up in meaningless concepts like consent or compassion that took place in some breezie tale land of ‘intimacy’ — whatever in Tartarus that was supposed to mean — that made Marigold sick to think about. Awkwardness and affection were better replaced with the things she liked, the things that lofty gods, stuffy academics, and know-it-all psycho-somethings would say made Marigold ‘objectively ill’ or whatever their latest tree-killing psycho-babble was about how ‘case studies’ and ‘sample groups’ like her were so ‘perverse’ and all the ways they were therapized or locked away.

Marigold Blueblood was undeniably an adult, after all, she had s-e-x! That’s right, the very thing that all her peers still took to whispering about the way that they used to chatter about cooties! She knew she was the first in her whole year to do so too! Goodness, it filled her with such a sense of accomplishment — one that all the dull adult-reading during her library trips said was a sign of ‘irresponsibility’ and ‘poor impulse control’ that would ‘require consistent counseling in order to instill healthy adolescent concepts of reality and empathy in relation to sexuality without harm’ or some other slop.

Wasn’t that just the dreariest thing? Who cares if whispers started up about somepony being the town carriage? To Marigold, a strumpet was better than a scholar any day, and she couldn’t imagine what in Tartarus’ name could truly be so bad that she could get sick from doing something that was such an indulgence. She was always in control of the little perverts she purchased anyway; nothing could get past that. What did it matter that her first time was with a dead mare?

All that meant was that Marigold got to have her merry way and do everything she wanted, both before and afterward. It was convenient, and how could it be any different than how she was told to shelve groceries at work? Everything was about convenience, and Marigold couldn’t bear to have tonight be any more wrong.

She skipped along, kicking up an arc of water from a puddle. The muddy filth barely gleamed at all during the night; such was the nature of Manehattan water. Marigold’s thick, dark boots were sturdily made by magic and their look was pulled straight from one of her mother’s designer magazines. Shiny buckles were barely dulled by Manehattan grime and the look was perfect imitation leather to mimic what ponies called ‘grotesque abominations’ but was legal in nations like the Shirdal Island, Colthuacan, the Dragonlands, and a slim amount of other nations.

Marigold’s dress was not so extravagant this time, being a simple gold-colored affair suitable for a filly her age. She skipped along, humming in the night and keeping her plain cloak held fast. Her saddlebags were weighed down with bits and instruments of butchery she had /conned/ a griffon out of.

Her song died in her throat when the scent of salt became too overpowering. Manehattan Island was a long and wide one. The shores were spacious enough that plenty of territories existed to build houses, and the particular address Marigold’s card led her to a stretch of row houses not far from some docks. The cramped cobbled streets were dusted with sand, and though they were no pinnacle of poverty like the whore-mares Marigold visited, it was obvious that nopony of great means lived so close to the sea.

Marigold’s lips curled into a smile when she saw the windows; most were beyond dim in the night or had painted newspapers pasted against the inside instead of the luxury of curtains. For anypony familiar with self-exploitation, this was a mansion.

Greasy food wrappers squelched with saltwater as Marigold wove her way past banisters and worn, rusty mailboxes. When she came to the right door, she seized the knocker in her hoof and slammed it down four times. Loudly.

The stallion who opened the door had seen better days. Though his condition was nowhere near the mares she had seen, his shabbiness would be notable on any street corner. His eyes looked too large for his face, a sign of hunger’s effects on him. In general, he looked too lean, and the clothes he wore to attempt to look even a touch more presentable hung off his frame in places where they should have been snug. His suit was missing many pieces, reduced mostly to pants, a jacket, and a tie. His shirt was lacking more than a few buttons. She supposed that this is what happens when you wore clothes not conjured to be grand enough for any occasion. His mane and tail spoke of a water bill that could only be partially paid; they were caked with enough products and slicked back in the proper places to make it look like he could afford it regularly.

“What do you want?” His words had a meanness to them but no energy as he looked her over tiredly. The way he stood in the doorway showed he was plainly making an effort to block the interior from her view. His gait made it clear he was missing a horseshoe.

Marigold feigned sniffing the air haughtily, only to produce a snort of whiny snort. She was careful only to withdraw a few bags of bits from her saddlebags, keeping her magic dimmed. This did not stop its antsy prodding in her skull, like it was swelling under right where a horn would be. One toss had them spilling on the ground, the display of gold coins bouncing off of his hooves intentional with how they had been so loosely tied.

“That should be enough of an answer,” she said to the stud, her tone annoyed and cool. She disliked the name for stallions of this crime, though she had no idea how it arose. For Marigold, a stud was something to wear in one’s ears, not a word to associate with licentious stallions who sold themselves. All the fillies at school had the babyish little treasures, while Marigold had been left to seethe at being one of the few fillies in her grade who did not have a touch of gold, silver, or sterling in her ears.

He grunted and swished his tail. Marigold peered at him. She loved watching how the glittering waves of gold brought out the worst widening light in any creature’s eyes. It made her that much more eager to reach for one of the new tools in her bag. Perhaps the meat cleaver would do. After hurriedly kicking the coins into the depths of the house — somepony clearly accepted any bits thrown his way — he hurriedly beckoned her inside. If he had guessed at Marigold’s age, he hadn’t mentioned it.

The interior was the nicest that Marigold had ever seen owned by such a criminal — which meant it was still dreadfully impoverished by the standards of anypony decent. A few scraps of laundry hung to drip-dry on lines that were strung on the walls, a clear indication that the offender had to minimize time outside. However, the fabric was frayed, patched, and stained beyond what any cleaning could do. For the home of a sex offender, these were quite the luxury. The only silverware was a pewter pitcher and bowl dented from use. They were kept on a wooden stool by a sad table with a basket of bruised fruit on it. A lit and occupied candle holder was nearby. Two hay bales were stacked in the corner of the flat; each looked lumpy from their place under the stairs, which were planks with the nails still visible.

Uglier planks had been fashioned to the wall in crude shelves. A half-dozen beer bottles sat next to a lonely cloth bag of lemon cough drops, which a few moths had flocked to. Spare candles were gathering dust. A few battered tankards overflowed with bits. Next to those was a bundle of disused quills and a rusted letter opener. One hammer and a dirty glass jar of nails were positioned nearby. Marigold guessed that those would be to fix the horseshoe he lost. To be a farrier for oneself was not for the unskilled. Too many mistakes could be made.

“Upstairs,” grumbled a tired voice. It was as though it had been punctured and all personality bled out from the pony who spoke those words. “Now,” said the stud, complaint and command competing in his tone.

“I’m the one paying,” Marigold hissed back. She could not see why so many fillies in her class liked stallions; there wasn’t a single attractive one in the whole world. “And I have to use the water closet.”

“Fine.” He swayed on his hooves, and she could see he’d give into what she wanted but would be annoyed the whole time. “Just be damn quick about it,” he grumbled again.

She scuttled off into the room on the opposite side of the stairs and shut the door. Her cloak and skirts swished to a stop as she pressed her back against the door. She heard him limping up the shoddy stairs. Marigold tried to focus on her saddlebag and the contents within, and their dim jingle. She tried to focus on her surroundings and imagine the dripping song of his blood falling through the upstairs floorboards when she was done with him.

The water closet was small. One dim lantern hung from the ceiling with multiple wraps of twine. It was the perfect safety hazard for wooden row houses. The mirror had seen better days; multiple cracks ran through it and the edges were chipped. Marigold wouldn’t be able to paw at any of the grime with her boots on. Instead, she gazed at the only clean things in the room: the stacks of mane gels and grease in front of the mirror. The toilet area was putrid and the shower tiles looked to be in dire need of replacement: they too were chipped and grimy. Marigold swore that he was actually using the shower stall as a toilet if the overflowing mess was anything to go by — the shower was obviously disused for anything else. The drain cover had been removed, and yet, there was nothing to wash anything down with — he might just be polluting the streets.

Marigold wrinkled her muzzle and busily turned to the mirror. She let her headache flower and forced her withers to relax. Magic flooded her vision and a compact floated in front of her, accompanied by its brush and the little pencil she used to add extra freckles to her face — golden ones.

“Hurry up in there!” screamed a male voice. Her prey.

“In a minute!” Marigold shrieked back, her telekinesis flinging gold powder across the already-filthy mirror in an arc. “I pay, you obey!”

Speckles of her shiny sorrel eyeshadow strayed from their mark and dusted the lace of her collar.

She wanted to hide how sick it felt. The smell was repulsive, but to Marigold, stallions were even more so. Tonight, she wanted somepony to kill — the way that some ponies just needed to eat junk foods from the boardwalk instead of nothing at all. She couldn’t stomach having sex with one, which almost made her not want to murder one — and how could that make sense? She had to just apply eyeshadow until the confusion passed; sex was just part of murder but she could skip it just this once. The need for blood was greater than secondary lusts. Marigold could just imagine she had killed a mare instead.

When she was satisfied with her work, Marigold dimmed her magic. Though she may be the one who owned the situation (and the stud) the least she could do was hurry just enough that her skirts didn’t get caught on the stairs. Studs were like that. Marigold found herself wondering if mares only bought them because they couldn’t afford proper, legal surrogate stallions for foals — and yet, most mares convicted of activity with a stud reported that they didn’t care if they got pregnant or weren’t looking to. Even though she knew that stallions were bought for different reasons than mares were, and had differing mobility, it didn’t make any damn sense to her. She simply could not imagine that anypony would buy a stallion because they enjoyed them the way that mares could be enjoyed.

What could a mare ever see in a stallion that she couldn’t find in another mare?

That was what Marigold thought as she reached the top of the stairs, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the stallion who had slipped out of his poorly fitting suit. All she let herself see was the expected: that he had no cutie mark to conceal. The sleeping loft held only a sagging, dirty bed and a wooden nightstand that was so crooked the firefly lantern atop it was a skew. Heavens help her, she had no idea that this stallion could actually afford something like a firefly lantern. Since she stared at the floor, she could see that numerous cardboard boxes, pouches, and a few wooden trays had been repurposed to overflow with bits. Even a patched-up mess of saddle-bags was shoved under there and bulging with coin.

The stallion’s ears flicked with agitation. She shuddered faintly in response, hoping he’d mistake it for anticipation instead.

Let’s get this over with.

…

His mistake was letting her gag him and tie him up. That’s what his eyes said, with their wavering, desperate light. His body was shaking weakly and his greasy mane was now a sweat-soaked mess. Marigold hadn’t bedded him; she’d done something better. She sat at the corner of the bed, in her dress, with her forehooves held neatly close to her — at least for now. She’d bunched up her cloak and thrown it off so that her mane could spill out, and yet that didn’t stop him from seeing her eyes.

They were flooded with red light despite her lack of a horn, and he couldn’t look away from her. Not even when she’d conjured a ball and chain to keep him in place after hog-tying his legs for good measure. She cultivated the irresistibility of fear in him, and Marigold devoured every second of it.

Marigold flashed him a cruel smile as she let the chain fall from her aura. “Do you know what I have next, honey?”

The response she got was a pathetic attempt at thrashing from her stallion — and yet, no tears. Was he always so aware that he was going to die?

Marigold’s magic rustled into her saddlebags and withdrew a serrated knife. She gave it a twirl in her aura as soon as it was properly withdrawn. “You sicken me, you know that? All your maleness… it just dulls my appetite” She plunged the blade into his wither where she knew it would give way without ceremony. “I think I’ll still be able to have a bit of fun.”

Withdrawing the knife and seeing the first blood of the night sent Marigold’s heart skipping and she couldn’t help but whimper.

“You bleed, honey,” she said, voice breathy and distant as she stared at the dripping blood. “That’s good enough for me.”

Marigold plunged the knife into her stallion’s belly and moved to spill out all he had the way griffons butchered pigs. She watched the softness give way and was delighted to stick her forehooves in the pooling blood. She’d slipped out of her boots for this very purpose, and now she smeared her face with the hot blood with frenzied motions.

She’d find a way to make tonight last.

…

Marigold thought of two things: replaying the duration of the torture she’d just given the stallion and the stickiness of the blood behind her. Her mane was spread out behind her, barely avoiding the pool of blood on the floor. She could feel the hardness of the boards under her back, and the way the now-cool blood soaked into her dress and matted her coat. Marigold knew that she would magic it all away — she definitely wasn’t going to risk lingering long enough to use the water closet downstairs — but that was a distant thought to her. She was averse to introspection in the afterglow of her events — only mentally reliving the act or thinking about what she would have done differently felt proper to permit in such a sacred headspace.

The torn-up form of a stallion lay still in the bed. She’d tried skinning him out of boredom, but gave up halfway through the process and just threw everything with the sheets. Those had stopped their slow-drip of blood and other fluids some time ago, leaving Marigold to listen to the distant patter of blood against the floor below the loft. Just like she’d planned.

She had been the perfect destroyer. She took away those who would never be remembered. She exposed how not every community could feasibly have neighbors. Through the breakage of her toys, Marigold managed to hurt ponies she would never touch.

Only the violence itself made her happier.