//------------------------------//
// Chapter 4: Three Words 
// Story: Three Words 
// by Noble Thought 
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	I cancelled my next few shows.

“Let the press run wild with speculation,” I told my publicist, Stage Presence. “I need some time alone.”

“There’s gonna be rumors, Saph,” he warned. “And this is gonna cost you big time in the pocketbook. All those pre-paid tickets…” I could practically hear his mind calculating the cost, and saw the bit reserve dribbling away.

“This is personal business.” I considered a moment, looking around his Manehattan office at the posters of other stars he managed and consulted for. Fleur dis Lee, Photo Finish, so many others… Even if I never came back from this, he would do well by them. “You can let the press know that much. I… Stage… I need some time alone. I just found out my mother died.”

“You got it. Not a word of the last, but I’ll get you the time you need.” He tapped his hooves together over the desk, and held one out to me. I took it. “My condolences, Saph. I know you two weren’t close, but still…”

“We weren’t… but I wish I tried harder to…” I wanted to cry, but I had spent the first hour after waking up doing nothing but that. I felt empty and cold.

It took no more than that. Stage Presence shooed me away, and promised he would see to the fine details.

Showstopper handed the reins of the show to her assistant, as she did during the off-season, and set about helping me arrange my life around a visit to Canterlot, where my mother was buried, and to the home that had once been my family’s. Well, my mother’s. My father had long since abandoned her and the home they had raised me in.

It was mine, now, I supposed. Or would be, once the legal details were hammered out. A part of my parents’ legacy, and mine.

Showstopper had booked no less than five fake tickets to other cities, and given those details to my publicist. When the Ponyrazzi were off, haring after rumor and gossip, I left with Showstopper, in disguise as married country ponies, to Canterlot.

The train trip there was on a cloudy day, with the sun breaking through here and there to paint the land in bright light and flowing shadows. The countryside rolled by, past towns and villages too off the beaten path to get a proper train station, only a platform and a loop with a water barrel.

“What if we stopped pretending, Showy?” I asked as a farm trailed by. 

She looked up from her book, closed it, and kissed my cheek. “Pretending? At what?”

I shook my head, not able to say I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if I didn’t know.

She smiled that sweet smile of hers and let the next kiss on my cheek linger.

A mare and a stallion were hard at work in the terraced fields in the outlying hill country, one pulling a ploughshare, the other trailing behind with a basket of seeds and a barrel of water. I wondered if they were married, or if they were siblings, or friends. 

I was friends with Showstopper, wasn’t I?

I asked her.

“Of course.” She tucked the book into her saddlebags, her brow creasing. “What’s on your mind?”

The mare looked up as the train trundled along beside the field, slowing to rise up a shallow hill, and I waved at her. She waved back, scattering seeds all over, and then we were past them, and another field with two mares working it.

“What if… I were to ask you to…” My thoughts drifted away.

Showstopper stroked my hoof and leaned against me.

More landscape rolled by, becoming hillier as the trail steamed into the foothills around Canterlot’s Heart, the mountain where the city perched. What I wanted to ask her got lost in the flash of verdant forest that climbed with us, even as the train slowed, and the track curved around, switched back, and curved back over itself.

“Yes,” she said.

I hadn’t known for sure what I was going to ask. I told her this, too.

“I know.” She pulled me close, and held me as the first tunnel enveloped us. It would be hours, yet, before the train chugged into the station, after it had wound around and around the mountain on its way up.

I fell asleep in her embrace, and my dreams were empty except for her warm lantern light.





We visited my mother’s home first. Everything was neatly in its place aside from a stack of papers that had slipped askew. Mundane things. Bills. A bit of correspondence with a mother’s support group in Fillydelphia, and another in Los Pegasus. There was even a letter from my father, buried far down the pile, unopened and dated more than a year ago. 

It went into the trash, but I promptly fished it out again, shaking my head. I couldn’t do that anymore.

I found, too, a more recent letter from a local garden club, thanking her for her time and charity. I hadn’t known she was a part of a garden club, before. That had been what the garden party had been for, to show that she did have an interest in traditional earth pony things, and after I hadn’t shown up… I knew, from her letters, that she had stayed, because they were her friends, and maybe, just maybe she could try and understand me better. And they had welcomed her with open hearts.

I could have told her it was pointless. I could have no more sprouted a seed than flown. She would never know that about me. But she had tried, and I hadn’t.

Showstopper held me while I wept, the innocuous letter crushed to my chest. It was such a stupid thing to cry over, I told her. But I did, anyway, and I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t pointless. It had been her way of trying to connect with me.

She cooed in my ear, and pulled me close. It felt like hours until I could let go of the paper and place it reverently in my saddlebags, and set about to find more things to hurt myself with. She stayed with me the whole time, doing more than she needed to, as always. 

I had all of her letters in my mind. It was too much to comprehend, and the smallest things made me cry: a key; a tea tag still hanging over the side of a kettle on the stove; her pantry full of sensible food; her closet, full of sensible clothes; and her garden, full of life.

We had never had a garden when I had lived there. I remember my father had thought them frivolous, for all that he, too, was an earth pony. Every variety of blue flower outlined the small garden, and bordered the straight, level walkways. The garden plots were as neatly squared and tended as if she had just stepped out for a moment. The gardeners of her club must have come by every day after she slipped into a coma, caring for her field of sapphires.

Another reminder…

In every corner, I saw a letter. A bit of her life, stored away in my head. She had not been alone, at least, and I knew, too, that she had not wanted for company. I wandered the plots, and pathways over and over, Showstopper at my side.

It was night before we made it to our hotel, and by then I was little more than a piece of luggage for all that I could move myself around. I had no energy left, as if I had bled it all out at my mother’s home. 

Showstopper had scheduled our visitation for the next morning. It was going to be a clear day, with only a slight overcast into the afternoon.

I spent the night at the hotel’s writing desk, pen rolling back and forth in my lips. It was morning before I wrote anything down, and then Showstopper was bustling me into the bath, doing her best to help me get clean and dressed.

She grumped at me for not sleeping, but picked me up when I stumbled, poked at me when I drifted off, and caught me when I floundered.

I love her.





The walk through Canterlot, past the busy markets, through the slower outskirts, down the winding trail leading along the steep mountainside, with its many ledges carved out by wind and rain and magic, restored some of my vigor. The crisp, summer air of the high mountain, continually refreshed by the strong winds that curled and danced around the graceful spires and smooth stones of the ancient city cleared away some of the grief and tormented thoughts.

Even the sun, high above, lent its aid, warming me from without as Showstopper’s presence at my side warmed me from within. There wasn’t even a cloud in the sky, just the bright, high-mountain blue that reminded me of a deep lagoon I had once visited with my mother, so long ago.

That, too, had been in her letters.

The cemetery my mother had been buried in was a small one, halfway down the mountainside. It wasn’t the cloistered, claustrophobic burial caverns of the rich and powerful, but the place where our ancestors, the sailors and ship-ponies who had plied the seas before their retreat to Canterlot, had been lain to rest for century after century. 

My mother hadn’t stayed in Canterlot for the culture, I knew now; she had stayed because it was her home.

We were the only two ponies there. In a way, I was happy we were alone.

The ponyrazzi would have been welcome. I could have shouted at them. It would have been wrong. My mother had lived a quiet life after I left to live mine filled with song, dance, and a free will to do what I wished. Aside from being in the tabloids from time to time, ponies had left her alone.

Not even my father, living out in Los Pegasus with his current wife, had come. I don’t think he knew. I didn’t want to tell him. But it was the right thing to do… and I would. Later.

Showstopper and I sat quietly. Summer was in full swing, and the flowers spreading throughout the cemetery would have done any grower proud. A wreath of flowers planted in a pot at the base of the headstone still held a card, little weathered by the previous few days of intermittent, scheduled rain. It was from the garden club.

May love blossom, it read, may your troubles be at ease, may your soul rest.
With love,

A list of names spilled out, in every manner of writing—rough and slanted, neat and blocky, even the graceful calligraphic strokes of a master of the brush. 

She had not been alone, here, but it had also not been all she had wanted. The reminder that I had not been there did not comfort me as I thought of my mother and her letters, of the life she had lived that I had never known or been a part of, other than the rare tangential moments: passing and then parting.

The soil was still bare of grass, save for a sprinkling of budding seeds sprouting from the rich, dark earth and lighter, clumped clay nuggets sprinkled throughout. My grandmother rested beside her, the rough headstone lightly decorated with a constellation, and my grandfather beside her. Both of their graves had fresh flowers in pots, too.

I hadn’t known either except as vague impressions before they had passed on. If I cared to, I would find their ancestors farther down the curving row, going on and on back through history, almost to the founding of Equestria.

Their history, my history, lay with the sea.

Showstopper stayed at my side while I sat, staring up and down the rows, my mind         going slowly blank as my thoughts chased down the bits of understanding my mother’s letters had unfolded. 

What was I supposed to do? Should I say something? Should I feel something?

I groped after the grief I should have felt, but clutched only a numb ache. Was that how ponies were supposed to feel?

“It’s a good place to rest,” Showstopper said. “If you squint, you can see the western ocean from here.” She levered her muzzle under mine, and nudged me about towards the open cliff-face bordered only by a thin, wrought-iron fence.

I walked with her as she led me there, to press our noses between the bars and look out and down. Their magic wards buzzed against my cheeks, unpleasant as they were meant to be, but didn’t distract me from the view.

The lands of western Equestria lay spread out below the high plateau, rolling green turning to gray and misty, until the flat gray-green ocean stretched out to apparent infinity, merging with the distant horizon. Far below, the wail of a train’s whistle echoed up the mountainside as it exited a tunnel. Birds chirped warbling responses and darted between the trees scattered among the headstones and monuments. Flowers, leaves, and insects stirred in a wind that rushed up as though the train had called it, coaxing the cemetery to life around us.

I wandered down the long line of ancestors as the wind continued, rising and falling, rushing and then drifting. It recalled to mind the letter where my mother had told me our family’s history, and why I was a Shores, who we had been, and why I dreamed of dolphins and the sea.

We stopped again at her grave, the last in the long line arcing through the yard.

“I would like to be lain to rest here, some day.” Showstopper pressed closer, her voice quiet.

“I would, too.”

As the sun began to drift lower, throwing rich shadows in among the flowers blooming all throughout the headstones and from barred fence lining the cliff’s edge, Princess Luna came down from her tower. She sat on the walkway above the plateau, two dark-armored guards trailing her at a distance. She said nothing, only watched. 

I wondered if my mother watched with her, if my mother knew anything of what went on. Did she know what I had written?

I didn’t know if I wanted to know.

After a time, the wind died again as the sun drifted almost to the horizon, she gave me a small nod, and rose to go back up the road, leaving me alone with my Showstopper and my mother’s memories.

I hoped she would know, somehow, that I didn’t hate her anymore.

“I’m sorry, mother.” Three words, said far too late.

I laid a letter of my own atop the gravestone, and left with Showstopper at my side.





Dear Mother,

I was not the best daughter. I was not the kindest, or smartest, or easiest to get along with. But you loved me. Despite all I did, and all that was between us, you loved me. I don’t know how. Maybe I will, someday.

I know that I love you, and I wish we could have one more cup of tea. Do you know that I miss our yearly ‘attempts’ to patch things up? I dreaded them, but now… I will never see you again, and I miss them. Even as painful as they were, I miss them.

I’ll write again, soon. I promise.

Love,
Your Daughter
Sapphire