It was rare for Wordsy Windbag to find herself in a situation where she didn’t know what to say.
Expressing herself through verbiage had always been her passion. She could declaim, delineate, describe, and detail at the drop of a hat. She loved to dramatize, extemporize, and soliloquize, doing so at the slightest provocation. She’d been called a blabbermouth, a chatterbox, and a jabberer at various points, and had worn all of those labels with pride.
Nor was her infatuation with language limited to speaking; at various points, she’d been a columnist, dramatist, and essayist, freelancing for various periodicals as the spirit had moved her. Every few days, she’d find herself writing a letter to an editor, a response to an article, or a review of something she’d heard, read, or watched. Even to relax, she enjoyed a nice crossword puzzle, jumble, or word search.
In her entire life, she could only remember two times when she’d been at a complete loss for words. The first time had been when Pill Bug had proposed to her; she’d been so overwhelmed that it had taken her several seconds to remember that the word she was looking for was “Yes!” The second time was when her daughter, Nosey, had been born; holding the beautiful baby she’d brought into the world, her throat had closed up and she hadn’t been able to do anything except cry in happiness.
And now, for only the third time that she could remember, Wordsy found herself tongue-tied.
After all, sitting across from her was a pony who collected titles the way other ponies collected stamps. Prince of Equestria. Despoiler of alicorns. Lover of Sirens. Heir of King Sombra. Dragonslayer. Dark wizard. Savior of Vanhoover. Champion of the Night Mare. Rescuer. Usurper. Defender. Tyrant. Hero. Villain.
Lex Legis.
The stallion who had saved her daughter from a fate worse than death, only to take advantage of what she’d been through and push her into a relationship that her innocent little girl clearly hadn’t been ready for, capturing Nosey’s heart so powerfully that she’d been forced to flee halfway across the continent in order to escape the hold he had over her. Yet now he was sitting just a few feet from them, his shadow stretching across the table despite the absence of backlighting, as though reaching out to enshroud everything it touched within its dark-
“Madame?” came a voice. “Your order?”
Blinking, it took Wordsy a minute to realize that their waiter was addressing her, waiting for her to make her selection. Nor was he the only one, with everyone else at the table staring at her.
Her cheeks coloring in embarrassment, Wordsy glanced back down at her menu, reading aloud the first item her eyes settled on. “The vegetable hay-skewers,” she murmured, passing her menu over.
Apparently, she was the last one to make her selection, since the waiter didn’t ask anyone else what they were having. Instead, he turned back toward the red-horned unicorn and gave an obsequious bow. “We’ll have everything ready shortly, Your Highness,” he promised, turning and departing only after receiving a grunt of acknowledgment from the stallion in question.
An awkward silence fell then…or at least it would have, had it not been for the breathtakingly gorgeous mare – Sonata Dusk – sitting to the right of Lex giggling as she looked out the window. “This is, like, so cool!” she gushed, watching as the scenery rotated below them, the rooftop restaurant spinning sedately. “Hey, do you think they can crank this thing up like one of those carnival rides? They we could all eat dinner while being stuck to the walls ‘cuz of how fast this place is spinning! That’d be so much fun!”
“I’m not sure how well they’d be able to serve everypony if the restaurant was spinning that fast,” offered Pill Bug with a quiet chuckle.
“Besides,” sneered Aria, “right now the only thing spinning that fast is Blondie’s head.”
The comment made Nosey wince, and Wordsy frowned, maternal instincts kicking in at the perceived jab toward her little girl. “My daughter has a name, thank you very much.”
“Mom, it’s okay,” murmured Nosey. “That’s what Aria’s always called me.”
But the Siren had locked her eyes onto Wordsy now. “After the way your daughter abandoned us, you should be glad I’m not calling her a whole lot worse.”
Wordsy flared her nostrils, but Sonata jumped in before she could say anything. “Aw, c’mon Aria, don’t be like that,” she pleaded, before turning and giving Nosey a grin. “I think it’s great that our bestie’s back! We should totes be celebrating, not fighting!”
“We’re just here on vacation,” interjected Pill. “It’s only for a few days, then we’re all heading returning to Canterlot.”
Sonata’s ears folded back at that, giving Nosey a saddened look. “For realsies? But I thought…” Shaking her head, she made herself smile again. “Well, we should have fun together anyway! After dinner, we’re going to another show! You guys wanna come along?”
“Really?” snapped Aria, glaring at her sister. “This chick acts like she’s our closest friend, only to cut and run when things start getting hot and heavy, and when she just happens to wander back into our lives, your first response is to invite her and her folks to not just have dinner with us, but follow us around all night too? What’s next, you bring her back to our hotel so we can get it on before she walks out of our lives agai-”
“Shut up, Aria.”
Lex’s order – one of the first things he’d said since their unexpected encounter at the entrance to the restaurant – made the Siren grimace. “But Lex! She-”
But the prince was apparently in no mood to listen to more of her complaining. “I said be quiet.”
Huffing, looking like she’d just bitten into a lemon, Aria closed her mouth and looked down, with another uncomfortable lull settling over the table. Out of the corner of her eye, Wordsy saw Pill glance around, as though confirming that the privacy of their dinner arrangements – they were sequestered in a posh corner of the restaurant, cordoned off from the common dining area with curtains, a small stringed quartet playing nearby to help cancel out any ambient noise, creating a private atmosphere that under other circumstances would have been cozy – were still doing their job.
Wordsy, however, was less concerned with anyone overhearing them than she was with their daughter’s state of mind. Nosey was staring down at the table with a miserable expression on her face, biting her lip as though Aria’s tirade had physically pained her. This was an error, Wordsy decided, a mistake, a lapse of judgment. We never should have agreed to have dinner with them. No, she amended silently, we shouldn’t have come to Las Pegasus in the first place.
The idea had seemed like a good one at the time. Take Nosey someplace new, with no bad memories attached to it, and let her relax and hopefully move on from all of the awful things that had happened to her recently. To that end, she and Pill had made – during their first full day in Las Pegasus – to keep their daughter away from anything even remotely related to all of her troubles. No newspapers, since they’d almost certainly be re-running the story about Princess Luna. No gossip rags, since Nosey hated low-quality journalism. And if there’d been some background chatter about “the prince” being here, they’d been unconcerned about whether it was Blueblood or Shining Armor; whichever one was here, it had nothing to do with them.
Until they’d gone to dinner, at which point they’d paid the price for having ignored the talk of the town.
It had been Sonata’s bright idea for them all to dine together, and Lex’s lack of objection had been taken by the waitstaff to mean that he approved of the idea, despite the displeasure in Aria’s body language. While Wordsy had reminded her daughter that they could simply leave, Nosey hadn’t been able to bring herself to do so, clearly feeling obligated to accept. Knowing her daughter as well as she did, however, Wordsy felt certain that it wasn’t Sonata’s forwardness nor Aria’s hostility that was the cause of her daughter’s hostility.
Rather, it was Lex’s pronounced indifference to the situation.
It had only been a few minutes since they’d all sat down, but his complete lack of engagement with her daughter – or anypony, really, save for his admonishing Aria just now – was throwing Wordsy for a loop. He hadn’t engaged in small talk, but he wasn’t going out of his way to snub or ignore them either. Rather, he was simply sitting there, observing his unexpected dinner guests as though they were bugs in a jar. It was highly disconcerting, and Wordsy could only imagine how awkward it must have been for her daughter.
It was getting to the point where Wordsy was gearing up to prompt him. So far no one on her side of the table had worked up the nerve to speak to Lex directly – between his public exploits and the relationship he’d had with their daughter, trying to make conversation with him seemed like a daunting task, even without taking into account that he was apparently royalty now – but the silence was quickly becoming unbearable. At least it was for Wordsy; she could almost feel her cutie mark aching with the need to say something.
But just as she’d taken a breath, Lex spoke. “Nosey.”
Almost jumping at suddenly being addressed, Nosey sat up straighter, blinking behind her glasses. “Yes?” she breathed, and Wordsy almost cringed at the tone in her daughter’s voice, sounding so hopeful and so afraid at the same time.
“I read the interview that the editor of your newspaper recently conducted with Princess Luna,” announced Lex casually, “and while it made mention of my horn having previously belonged to King Sombra, it conspicuously failed to make any mention of using the Crystal Heart to try and remove the curse I placed on her. Since even they’re not stupid enough to ignore such obvious parallels, are you aware of any such attempt having been made?”
Nosey slumped in place, disappointment radiating off of her in waves. “Oh. Um, I’m not-”
“That’s the first thing you ask her?!” Clenching her jaw, Wordsy leaned forward, no longer intimidated by the stallion in front of her. “After everything she went through – everything you put her through – your first reaction to seeing my daughter again is to treat her like she’s just some reporter?!” She brought a hoof down onto the table, making the silverware rattle. Outside, she heard the string quartet start to play louder, trying to drown out the sound of her voice for anyone who might be listening. “Did it even occur to you to ask her how she’s doing?!”
Sonata and Aria stared at her, startled by the outburst. But Lex didn’t even raise a brow. “If you’re referring to the trauma Nosey was experiencing in the wake of Xiriel’s possession, I was under the impression that her coming here to engage in recreation was indicative of her having recovered to the point of resuming her normal lifestyle.”
“Is that so?” growled Wordsy. “Well maybe if you had asked, she would have told you that she isn’t alright-”
“Mom, please,” interjected Nosey, her voice pleading. “Let’s not do this, okay?”
“Maybe we should order some appetizers,” suggested Pill, clearly looking to change the subject. “I think some pickle slices-”
But Wordsy was in full mother lion mode now, refusing to be dissuaded as she glared at Lex. “Do you not understand that everything my daughter’s been through is your fault?! Everypony here talks about you like you’re some sort of protector, but you were the one who let her be possessed by that, that…monster in the first place!”
“Mom!” yelled Nosey, horrified.
But Wordsy was less concerned with that than she was with the way Lex’s features hardened at that. It was the first genuine reaction she’d from him since he’d spotted Nosey, and she immediately pressed forward, unleashing the verbal tirade that was her go-to for when she was upset. “And then you acted like rescuing her gave you the right to take liberties with her! She just wanted you to keep her safe, and instead you forced your affection on her, knowing that she was too scared to refuse!”
Lex actually flinched at that, and the sight sent a rush through Wordsy. He might have killed dragons and laid princesses low, but no one messed with her little girl!
“Hey!” protested Sonata. “That’s, like, totes unfair!”
Aria was less diplomatic, rising to her hooves as her lips curled into a snarl. “You don’t know when to shut your mouth, do you?”
For her part, Nosey was squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head, though whether it was to refute her mother’s characterization of her relationship or to try and shut out what was happening now was impossible to tell, leaning into her father as Pill Bug slipped a foreleg around her, giving his wife an exasperated glare.
Wordsy was oblivious to all of it, continuing to lay into Lex. “And it was your fault that Silhouette pony assaulted her in her home! You-”
“WHAT?!”
Lex’s roar of fury was more than just an angry shout. It was accompanied by a horrific light that filled his eyes, the twin orbs suddenly shining with a sickly green color that looked like something from the depths of Tartarus, purple contrails erupting from their outer corners. More frightening were the black crystals that suddenly erupted upward from the floor at an angle, knocking the table aside as though it weighed nothing at all, sending it crashing to the ground at the edge of the curtains.
Slowly, his motions taut with controlled rage, Lex rose to all fours, the black crystals that had knocked the dinner table aside disintegrating as he closed the few feet between himself and Wordsy, who tried to back away only to trip and fall over her chair. Sprawled out on the ground, she could do nothing as Lex stalked over to her, not even noticing Nosey and Pill watching the scene in frozen shock. Instead, her world was made up of Lex leaning over her, his shadow covering her entirely and making his features seem even darker, obscured save for the glow of his eyes. In that moment, the full weight of who this was – the things he’d done and the power he commanded – fell over Wordsy, and she realized just how badly she’d erred; a mother lion would scare off an ordinary pony, but to someone who’d killed devils and massacred ghouls, it was a puny thing.
“Tell me what happened,” Lex demanded, his voice dripping with wrath.
And Wordsy lived up to her name.