//------------------------------//
// Apologies Can Only do so Much 
// Story: The Mask of Despair and the Face of Hope 
// by Wings of Black Glass 
//------------------------------//

Slowly I approached Sable’s hovel outside town.  I hesitated as I reached the door, ready to knock but still unready to meet him again.  It took me several steadying breaths before I finally put a hoof to wood.  No answer came from within.  I looked in through the window, still open from last night.  There seemed to be no one inside, I could see now the table had been slid over to block the door, spilled punch and cake staining the rug.
I turned to leave, he could have been pretty much anywhere.  Looking up at the sky revealed no new information, but did remind me of the other day when I arrived with Applejack.  There was no arrow to direct me back, but I knew the way.
One part of my mind was hoping Sable wouldn’t be here, this little nagging voice was disappointed.  Sure enough, Sable Stardust sat facing his little pond beside the small garden.  Still wearing his black coat, possibly since last night.  Neon blue eyes swiveled towards me, registering my presence before turning back to the water.  It looked like he'd been crying, his eyes were bloodshot.  His black glass wings were absent.  He said nothing.
“Um… hello.”  I broke the silence first, speaking softly.  He said nothing for a while, probably hoping I would just leave.
“Come to gawk, have you?”  He faced me.  “Come one, come all, see the freak.”  He waved an arm in the air, mimicking a circus announcer.  “The one and only pony in all of Equestria without a cutie-mark.”
“You can’t possibly know that for a fact.”  I didn’t mean to sound defensive, although I knew he was probably right.
“Yes, I can.”  He narrowed his eyes.  “I’ve looked.”  Now he looked back out at his pond.  I came up beside him and took a seat, Sable sighed in annoyance but remained silent.
“I’m really sorry.”  He gave no response to my apology, the significance was not lost to me.  “We shouldn’t have done that to you, it was wrong of us.”  I continued to speak softly, the remorse in my voice plain to hear.
“Of course it was.”  He paused before looking pointedly away from me.  “If you’re here just so you can feel better then I’m going to ask you to leave.”  I expected him to sound somehow angrier than he did.  “I’m not in the forgiving mood today.”  I took the time necessary to consider my feelings; had I come here so I could apologize to him, or to be forgiven?  The difference between the two was now the chasm between me and Sable.  Indeed, being forgiven, something I have experienced before, always made me feel better but is that really what he thought of me?  What life could one lead that would bring somepony to that conclusion?  I had no answer that could satisfy him.  Something within said I should go but something else told otherwise and it is to this second voice that I listened, so I remained.
Silence lingered regardless, I didn’t know what to say.  I considered changing the subject but knew it would be an empty gesture.  Something had broken between us now, perhaps permanently.  The thought passed like a flash, and inwardly I steeled myself, determined to not let it just end like that.
“Still… I am very sorry.  It was all a terrible mistake on our part.”
“Don’t make me repeat myself, it's beneath both of us.”
“Sable, please.”  For an instant, I begged.  “I consider you a friend, talk to me.”  I reached out to him but remembered how he shied away from me before and stopped myself.
“And tell you what?  That all I need is a spirited pep-talk to fix everything?  Don’t be naive.  We both know nothing can fix this.”  He pointed to his side, clearly indicating the space where his mark should be.
“You’re right, just talk won't help you get your mark.  But I can do more to help you if you will let me.”  I smiled supportingly, he glared at me from the corner of his eye.
“I’m going to make you guess.”  I had no idea what he meant, and my smile faded.  “How many before you have said those same words?”  I had no idea, I couldn’t possibly know.
“Zero?”  I hoped, knowing somehow I was wrong.
“You would be the fourth.”  He reads something on my face that must have been surprise.  “Did you really think you were the first to discover my secret?  Or maybe even the first to care?  Somehow I suspect you won’t even be the last.  I’ve had this conversation before.”  I opened my mouth to speak, but he cuts me off.  “This is the part where you ask me to explain, to help you understand even though you won’t.”  He sighed and lowered his head, almost down to the water.  “And this is the part where I’m going to tell you anyways.”  There’s something in his voice, a resilience perhaps, I had not heard before.  Maybe he was still hopeful, maybe he hadn’t given up.  “Come with me in the twilight of a summer night for a while.”  Strangely, there was a melody to his voice.  “And tell me of a story never ever told in the past.”  He almost smiled, but it was false and short lived.  “Just something from a song I like, it seemed appropriate.”  He stood, walking to the other side of his garden.  “I suppose I should start with when I was young, when I knew nothing of failure.”
“You told me, before, your father was an astronomer.”
“Yes, and my mother was a weaver.  When I was young they saw great potential in me, they thought I was quick and clever.  And I was good with magic, very good for my age.  But we lived in a small town out near the edge of Equestria, not that different from Ponyville actually, and there was no good school of magic out that far.  So they scratched by and saved until they could afford for me to take the entrance exam to the best magic school in Equestria.”  He gave me a wry smile, clearly a false one.  “Maybe you know it?”
“Celestia’s school for gifted Unicorns?”  He nodded.  I never saw him there, but then again I barely spent any time with my own friends while I was there.  Even if he was enrolled I wouldn’t have recognized him.
“So we came to Canterlot, how excited I was.  But the test was beyond me.  Maybe I was too young, they thought.  So they saved and scratched and sacrificed, and we could afford to try again the next year.  Meanwhile, I practiced and studied what I could.  I got better, no doubt about that.  We tried again, and then again.  But by this point, I was getting older, and it was getting harder to save up enough to make the trip.  So we tried once more, while I was still young enough to be let in.”  He paused, looking up at the distant city of Canterlot.  “It was my best performance yet.  I was so sure I had gotten everything right.”
“They didn’t let you in did they?”
“There was a lot of competition for spots that year.  And later in the day, there was some sort of magical explosion in the sky which shook my concentration.”  I froze, I remembered that day somewhat differently.  “When they told me my results… well… it turned out I met the criteria for entry, just barely.  But they said the last spot had been taken by ‘somepony special.’  And they thought my age was giving me an advantage.  So they turned me away, all the while profusely apologizing.”  I hesitated, but he deserved to know how we had almost been classamtes.
“That was the day I got my cutie-mark… That explosion was Rainbow Dash’s sonic rainboom, it’s what caused me to break through, the day Celestia took me under her wings.”  He was taken aback at my admission, truly surprised, staring at me.  “I think I was the special pony who took your spot.”  Then he laughed, a hollow, empty thing.  It was so unlike how he laughed before.
“There but for the grace of a fortuitous magical detonation go I.”  He shook his head.  “Don’t worry about it now, I’m not going to resent you for the decisions of others from many years ago.”  He had plenty to resent me for now as is.  “In retrospect, I don’t think it would have mattered in the end anyway.  After that, I just had to study magic on my own.  I suppose I’m still pretty good, if somewhat unpolished.  My grades in regular school began to slip, I was devastated by not making it to Celestia’s school, and I kept seeing all my friends getting their marks while I remained…”  He tapped his blank flank under his coat.  “There was teasing at first, naturally, and it stung.  But after a while, the outright teasing went away, as they began to think there was something… wrong… with me instead.  The pity and the revulsion were so much worse, how I wished they would go back to teasing me.  Can you imagine what that was like, to have all your friends look at you as if you were sick somehow, that they might catch something foul just by hanging around you?”  He waited for me to answer, even as the silence between us dragged on.
“No… I can’t.”  He nodded again, and I thought I saw respect for my honesty in his expression.
“I’m not even going to try and explain those feelings.  Words… are so insufficient.”  He sighed, closing his eyes.
“They all abandoned you, didn’t they?”
“Not at first, and not all in the end.”  He looked down at his little garden, at a single lily flower.  “Sereina didn’t.”  Again, I saw him as he was last night, so cold and in pain.  “She didn’t care what they thought.  She was the first to try and really help me.”  His voice almost cracked, and I sould see tears forming.  “She was kind and gentle, and always knew what to say to make me feel better.”  In fact, this Sereina sounded rather a lot like a certain yellow Pegasus I knew.  “You would have liked her, Fluttershy reminds me of her.”  He paused, a tear rolled down his cheek and landed on the lily flower.  “Everything was better then.”  I caught it again, the past tense he used when he talked about her was somehow different, more significant, from the rest.  “Tell me, Princess Twilight Sparkle, do you know what failure feels like?”  I nodded, but he was not looking at me.
“Yes.  I’ve made some pretty terrible mistakes before.”
“No, no.  Not mistakes.  Not setbacks.  I mean, failure.”  His voice hardened as he emphasized the last word, I blinked in confusion.  “I’m going to guess that at some point you found yourself having made something you called a ‘terrible mistake.’  But with some time to think or the support of your friends that everything turned out alright in the end.”  This was an accurate assessment of several great challenges I have faced, including the moment I became an Alicorn.  “That is not failure.”  He paused to let that sink in.  “That is skill, help, teamwork, or friendship.  Maybe even simply a chance to try again.”  He sighed, again.  “Let me show you something.”  Static built around us and then lightning cracked as he teleported us both.  The part of my mind which is always working analyzed his spell, powerful but rough, accurate but energy intensive, and the electric charge stood my hairs on end as we materialized inside his hovel.  Had he received proper training he might even have been as good as Starlight Glimmer.  He pointed to the clock on the wall as I got my bearings.  “If you had to guess, why do you think that clock doesn’t run?”
“I just assumed you hadn’t wound it.”
“I don’t even know.  I made it myself, I haven’t been able to get it running, even following directions.  So much for clockmaking.”  He lifted the soldier toy from the shelf.  “I once thought I could make these and sell them, but there was another pony with a mark for making toys.  His were better, and no one wanted mine.  These were the best I could manage, they weren’t even half as good as his worst.”  He put the toy back on the shelf and held up the ceramic bowl with the crack running down the side.  “For a while, I took up pottery, this was the only one which survived the kiln.”  Then he set the bowl on the stove and turned to point at the mannequin.  “I experimented with making clothes but had no talent for stitching or eye for fashion.  Rarity would agree.  All I got from that was a place to keep my coat.”  He gestured to the house around him as a whole.  “And of course I built all this myself, rebuilt it myself, twice in fact.  It’s still a wretched hovel.”
“What about the others?”  I turned towards the shelves.  “All these things, they are your attempts to find your mark aren’t they?”
“You are correct, in a manner of speaking.  It would seem the princess of friendship is capable of basic pattern recognition.”  Mockery.  “They are all my greatest triumphs.  All my best attempts to do something, anything, with what I’ve got.  There were so many more I didn’t keep.  But, and say it with me now.”  He paused until I faced him again.  “They were never good enough.  Never satisfying.  Always last, least, flawed, broken.”  He started to advance towards me.  “Are we sensing a theme yet?  Even in what I’m best at I get humiliated by those with marks, often casually.”  His voice began to rise, and I backed away.  “That is why you won’t understand.  You can’t understand, and you can’t fix it.  You don’t know what failure is really like.”  He was shouting now, he may not have even been aware.  “You don’t know what it’s like when ponies die because you weren’t good enough!”
Silence fell between us.  Sable seethed, breathing hard through his clenched teeth.  I feared to speak, or rather, feared to make things worse.  Sable blinked and turned away, aware at last he lost control again.  His teleport cracked the air, and I heard him re-materialize outside.  I followed, with my own teleport making a more subdued pop compared to his crack of thunder, appearing far enough away to make it clear I was not leaving without being too close to startle him.  Sable stood beside his garden again, looking down at the lily.
“This was her favorite flower.”
“What happened?  I know you didn’t want to talk about it before.”  He was quiet for a time, I let him think.  At last, he shrugged and sat back down at the water’s edge.
“One night….”  He projected an image out onto the water’s surface, the illusion nearly perfectly clear.  A cottage in a valley, a small observatory on a hill adjacent to the happy little home surrounded by pine trees.  The water rippled and I realized the rain was part of the spell.  “Sereina was over for dinner, with my parents.”  A tiny Pegasus, in a lovely shade of magenta with a minty mane, appeared from outside the bounds of the illusion and approached the door of the model sized home.  An equally tiny Sable, without his distinctive coat, opened the door and let her inside.
The spell followed them in and expanded to show the interior of the building.  It was a cozy little home, warm and inviting.  Along one wall was a series of pictures of nebula and star maps, there was a loom in one corner with a half-finished quilt in the works.  I recognized the quilt as the same one on the wall in Sable’s hovel.  The scene played out, a perfect memory of a pleasant evening with family.  His mother was a light blue Earth Pony with a sandy blond mane tied up in a bun, his father a dark grey Unicorn with a short white shock of a mane.  Only now could I make out the cutie-marks of the other ponies, his mother had an unfurling bolt of white cloth, his father’s a telescope with a trio of stars, and Sereina had a winged heart.  Together they talked and they laughed, although the image itself was silent.  When suddenly the house shook, and the little purple Sable bolted to a window to look outside.
“There was a rock-slide.”  Sable, the real one, threw a stone into the pond, just outside the illusory window.  The tiny figure in the spell fled from the rock regardless and bolted back to his family, throwing up a shield around them.  I could see the strain it was causing him even though it was just an illusion.  The little cottage shook again, and the walls and ceiling came crashing down onto the shield, there was no sound to the display, but I heard them scream anyway.  Cracks formed in the barrier, and it shattered under the pressure.
The tiny family was trapped, his mother huddled close to his father, who seemed to be unconscious, and a structural beam had pinned the little magenta Pegasus to the floor.  Memory Sable stood where his shield had been, himself intact but drained.  The little purple Unicorn strained to lift the beam, first with magic and then with force of arms, but only more rubble falls.  The memory of Sereina reaches up, and he took her arm, I saw him speaking but there were no words.  The little Sable looked back to his parents, his mother waved him away, presumably asking him to get help.  Both Sables looked down at Sereina for a moment and the image flickered, blinking out for an instant, and when it reformed the memory Sable was outside by the observatory panting hard, he almost fell over.  The house was half buried under stone, and the image of the pony turned and fled.
“I ran to get help.  As fast as I could.  They came, friends again in a time of need.”  Little Sable returned, with a bevy of others following.  He stood atop the hill and pointed down, the house remained covered in rocks and stone.  The little ponies began to dig through the rubble, some of the Unicorns started to lift boulders.  “But it was too late.”  A Pegasus in the air pointed to something out of view, and real Sable threw another stone into the water.  The illusory ponies scattered back up the hill, memory Sable had to be dragged away physically.  At the top of the hill, they could only look down in horror as the house collapsed under more rock and mud.  The image flickered out entirely, and I looked up to see Sable wiping tears from his eyes, his voice almost cracked.  “I spent the night there, watching everything I loved get buried in muck.  When the storm ended, we dug out the house, hoping they had been able to somehow survive.  I don’t think I need to say more.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You had nothing to do with it.”  He snapped at me, insulted for some reason.  “What’s the point in apologizing?  It’s not like you could go back and fix it.”  I almost said I could, I know several time travel spells.  But I have been on the receiving end of manipulating history, it could have easily ended very poorly.  Sable, perceptive, noticed my contemplation and locked his eyes on me.  The question hung unasked in the air, ‘could she?’
“I know it hurts, but I’m sorry.  I won’t do that.”
“Won’t?”  His eyes flashed, just not literally.
“Time travel is incredibly difficult, even for me, and extremely dangerous.  Starlight Glimmer had to learn that the hard way, she almost ended Equestria.”  He looked now from my face back to the flower.  “It wasn’t your fault what happened to them, it was a horrible accident.”  He shook his head.
“If I had more practice, I could have put up a superior shield.   If I had been stronger, I could have lifted the beams.  If I had been smarter, I could have teleported them out.  If I had been faster, I could have gotten help sooner.  I’ve thought about it forever, if I had been just a little better in any number of a thousand ways I could have saved them.  No, it is my fault they aren’t here anymore.”  He clearly struggled to continue, his strength left him again and he had to lie down.  “I salvaged what I could, and left.  There isn’t much else to say.”  He stared out at his pond, where the illusion had been.  “I wandered from place to place, taking what jobs I could to get by, trying to find where I belonged.  No points for guessing how that worked out.  Eventually, I found myself here, at the end of a very long road with nowhere left to go.”  He fell silent, unwilling now to say any more.  I stayed, trying to find some words of comfort for him.  For a long time I said nothing, and he refused to look my way.
“Thank you.”  I sat down beside him, just inside arm’s reach.  “For telling me.  I don’t want to even pretend to understand how you feel.”  He did not respond to me, he might as well have been asleep.  “I don’t know if I can help, you were right about that.  But still, don’t give up.  There’s always hope.”
“Weren’t you paying attention?”  He snorted derisively.  “Hope is all I’ve got.”





“…I had no idea.  Poor Sable…”
“I think I understand now why he was so defensive.”
“Last time, I didn’t tell anypony else.  It was a promise I made to him.”
“But… didn’t you just break that promise?”
“It’s better this way.  Besides, you all eventually found out the important parts anyway.”