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// Chapter 3: The Mind's Labyrinth 
// Story: Three Words 
// by Noble Thought 
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	Beep. Beep. Beep.

It was the dream again.  It was the same room, the same static beep. White walls. White curtains. White floor, and white ceiling. Even the bed was white, as was the small machine humming along at its side, emitting the faint beep. But my mother’s hooves didn’t sit on the desk in front of me, and my mother’s thoughts didn’t trample mine.

I closed my eyes and tried to wake up and find the warmth of Showstopper’s body next to mine. She glowed at the edge of my sight, dim as a bright lantern on a cold winter’s night. There was a promise of gentle comfort in leaving this dream. I wouldn’t have to face it again—if I could reach her, I could let the migraine pass me by.

Warmth blossomed against my flank and I opened my eyes, squinting against the glare. 

I was still in the dream. 

At my side, a small filly pressed herself to me, less pony and more ghost. Her coat was as white as everything else, but her mane was a brilliant, mountain sky blue. I felt like I should know her, but she felt as much a stranger to me as… as…

Our eyes met. My eyes met mine, and I saw into the soul of a filly who still wanted her mommy. Her presence was like a physical blow, and I flinched from her, from who I had been.

At the same time, the filly flinched back from me, and I felt her anguish as a knife running sideways against my soul, the edge sharp enough to bite and draw blood.

Princess Luna stepped out from behind the bed-curtain, her dark blue coat and mane hurt to look at. Her very presence set the room to wavering.

“Hello, Sapphire Shores.”

 It had been a long time since Luna had walked in my dreams, the last time to swim with me as a mythic seapony with the dolphins, the night after we had agreed on our patronage. My dreams were open to her by agreement, but she had respected my privacy. Her voice had not changed in the year since, and held the same sonorous quality, somber now, instead of raised in laughter and jest.

I groaned. “Please tell me this isn’t another one of the dreams about my mother.” The filly at my leg whimpered. I tried to gently nudge her away so I could rise and face my patron.

“No.” Luna’s hooves shattered the dreamscape as she walked, dispelling the world around us until only the bed and a desk remained. In the bed lay an emptiness that sucked at my attention. “There will be no more dreams of your mother, unless they are of your own making.”

“My own…?” For a long moment, as the words wormed their way through my frozen thoughts, I stared at her, mouth agape. Thought connected to words. “You mean my dreams have been… How dare you let that mare shove herself on me! How dare you help her! I want nothing to do with her, Princess Luna.”

Blue eyes glittered in her patrician face. “Dare? I would never do such a thing!” She towered above me, her mane a wild lash of violent indigo and radiant stars. “Your mother has done this without my knowledge or support, and she has escaped my notice thus far by hiding in your dreams. Believe me, Sapphire, I have come to help you, not aid her in this… this… misuse of my realm.” She stamped a hoof, snorted, and tossed her head. 

“What else am I supposed to believe? You’re the only one that can freely walk the dreams of others!” I held my ground even as the echo of her voice boomed through me, the weight of her scowl like a gale wind. “I’ve seen you in my dreams, and I thought we had an accord from the times you’ve swam with me. I thought…” My thoughts faltered, and the quivering anger subsided.

“Others can walk dreams, too. Some fillies and colts can do so quite easily, but few adults. In times of stress, or…” She waved a hoof, firming the image of the hospital around us. “In times of dire need. She felt a need to reach out to you, Sapphire. I think she knew she might not get another chance.”

The white walls glistened, and the sharp, metronome-steady beat of machinery pervaded my senses. An air of hospital clung to the place, as heavy as a sodden blanket, full of chill and despair.

I shuddered. “Why now? She’s given me nothing but heartache and pain, even in my dreams! Do you know what it’s like to wake up, feeling like you’ve been on the worst binge in the world? Do you? Do you know what it’s like to, year after year, try to make up with her, only to hear her make the same mistakes over and over again? Insulting me and what I do? And now she invades my privacy? I hate her.”

The image of my younger self, a filly hardly changed from the earliest photographs I could remember, flinched away from me, tears in her phantom amber eyes. Her mouth opened to cry. Instead, she broke into a thousand shards. They scattered like shooting stars across the dream, scorching away the last remnants of the hospital room. 

“My little jewel!”

My mother’s voice cried out from the void left behind, and mine followed. 

“I love you!”

I jerked away from them both and landed in a rough heap, shuddering.

Luna was frowning at the flickering splinters of me scattered all about. She glanced at me once as her mane and tail flowed out to engulf the glowing shards.

I saw understanding in her eyes before she looked away.

It was too much to bear, but I couldn’t look away from her, either. The stars flickering in the depths of her mane, the darkest, deepest blue of a clear night sky, twinkled as my eyes flickered from one to the next, drawn into their shifting pattern. For a long moment, she said and did nothing but regard the space where my younger self had been, and when she turned her attention back to me, her eyes shimmered, luminescent as the moon.

Luna shrank again, but her eyes held the same cold glow. “What is left of her, here, is not all there is. She loved you very much, Sapphire, in the end. Can you feel it? It is woven into the very fabric of what she left behind.”

My jaw clenched, and had to force myself to speak. “She’s haunting me, is what you’re saying.”

“In a way.” Luna took a breath, her lambent eyes fading to ocean blue even as the glittering points in her mane grew sharper. “Did you know that I used to watch your dreams before we swam the oceans together? You invited me in without knowing you did. You had such colorful dreams even then, but nothing of your family in them. I had wondered why.”

The Princess dug at the dream world with a hoof, studied the furrow she’d made in reality, and stamped her hoof, but nothing changed. 

“This is why it is so much easier to work with foals… not so much…” She trailed off, rolling her eyes. A moment later, she sighed. “Please, open your mind, Sapphire, or this will be harder.”

I did not glower at her, exactly, but tried to let my mind be open. The beat ticked on, steady, as I waited, expectant. She cocked her head to one side, as if listening, and lifted her eyes to mine.

“I’m trying.”

She snorted, shooting me a sharp look, and when she stamped again, we were elsewhere.

At first, I did not know the place. Dust lay everywhere, a fine veil of silver glittering dully like tears shed against a pale coated cheek. Furniture was all there in places that felt familiar, but subtly off, as if I were looking at everything backwards. It wasn’t until I found the trail of stains, ice cream dribbles on fine wood, that I knew…

This was my home from so long ago, where… everything had gone wrong. There was the staircase to my room, a fine pattern of hoofsteps trailing through the powdered memories.

“I think I understand, now.” Luna tossed her head back and forth, shaking out the brilliant motes from her mane. The dust of memories gained an incandescence brighter than before as the young filly reformed from the shards, her eyes wide as they met mine, and darted away. 

Before my gaze could meet hers again, I looked away. Her whimper bit into me. Luna’s soft words, pitched to reach only the ears of the filly at her feet, strummed a thread stretched taught between us. They spread like a cool wave through me, though I could not hear them.

When I looked back, the filly was cradled in the crook of Luna’s foreleg, my patron’s gaze locked with the ghost of who I had been.

When she spoke, it was to both of us, “It was something I had to have taught to me, too. I walked her dreams once, not long ago, before she did… this. I bade her return to her body, as she had been dreaming the same dream, night after night, and day after day, unceasing. But she didn’t listen, and the last of her self drifted away. Or so I thought. All that is left of her is a ghost clinging to a dream.”

The filly wept. Somewhere else, a lantern grew brighter and called to me.

“I confirmed my suspicion with my sister’s staff early this morning.” Luna dipped her head once, slowly, and pronounced, “Distant Shores is dead. The parcel you possess speaks true.”

The proclamation hung between us like an accusation. The foal clinging to her shuddered as the words hung, the echoing of their meaning rippling underneath the ocean-vast silence. It deepened until Luna’s eyes met mine. I saw in them the certainty that what she had said was truth.

I put steel into my voice, hoping she wouldn’t hear how brittle it was. “I can’t say I’m sorry to hear that.”

She regarded me, her chin lifting minutely. “If you wish to be rid of her ghost, you must confront what haunted not only her, but you as well. She is too entwined with you to do otherwise. Can you face that?” 

“Yes.”

Luna strode past me, still holding the filly ghost of me. “Come.” It was not a suggestion. 

Hesitant thoughts curled through my mind as Luna strode away. If I wished to be rid of my mother’s dreams… When I caught up, the filly reached out towards me. Her touch was like a forge-fire, her being the smith’s hammer, and her memory the bead of metal that filled a crack in my mind. 

I jerked away and slapped my muzzle into the chest of another pony, Silvermane.

I stumbled back, shaking my head and looking up at the older filly. She was everything I wanted to be. Popular, pretty, and nopony made fun of her.

The playground was empty after school; even the teachers had gone home, but I had lingered afterwards to try and get an audience with the princesses of the school. The four-square ball court was empty, as were the scattered squares of hoofscotch here and there. Only Silvermane, Blue Belle, and Quick Set, the royalty of Canterlot Elementary, stood around me.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you!” I took another step back, and bumped into the flank of another, Blue Belle. “Sorry! Please, I just wanted to play. See? I have my own doll!” I pulled the small, hoof-stitched doll from my bag. Singing Sunshine. My mother had made her, and she was as pretty as any of the other girl’s. But she was different, too. She had a rough canvas strap cinched around her barrel, and as I held it in my mouth, the other fillies made gagging sounds.

“Ew. She’s holding it in her mouth! Who does that?”

I sat back and hugged the doll to my chest with both forelegs. “I do!” I felt my ears fold back, and forced them upright. “And so did you!”

“Yeah. When we were foals.” Silvermane tossed her head, her horn glittering white in the afternoon sun. “Only foals do that.”

“What? Are you a foal?” Blue Belle snickered, wagging her half-eaten ice cream cone in my face. “Foal want some ice cream?”

I tried to bat at the cone, but she jerked it away.

“Are you gonna cry now?” 

“No!” But I was already. I pulled Singing Sunshine closer, shielding her from their mocking. “I just want to play with you! This is—”

“If you want to play, you have to be a unicorn,” Quick Set said, voice high and haughty. Or it tried to be; it creaked over unicorn. “We don’t want your mouth anywhere near our dolls, mud pony. You’ll get your mud germs on them.”

“Hey! I’ve got an idea. Blue Belle, give me that.” Silvermane’s blue aura overwhelmed the other filly’s in a flash, but the other held on.

“But I wasn’t—”

“Give it to me. Now.” Her voice snapped in the air, and the other unicorn filly gave up the cone. A moment later, it splatted against my forehead and Silvermane’s blue aura twisted my forelock around it. Dribbles of strawberry ice cream trickled down my muzzle, mixing with my tears.

“There. Now you can play with us.”

I would never know if they had been serious, and it hadn’t mattered. Their parents had shown up, and suddenly they were perfectly courteous, offering their tissues and napkins to help me clean up. I had run from them, all the way home, down to the outskirts of the city, past everypony that I knew. 

The entire way, the cone had stuck to my head, ice cream dribbling down my face, throat, and forelegs.

I stared at myself in the mirror in my room. The careful curl of my forelock, the tangle of curls at the nape of my neck hung in a limp nest around my ears where Silvermane had messed them up, too. Worst was the soggy cone, half-melted and rising from my forelock like a mockery of a unicorn horn’s graceful spiral.

I bawled, feeling again the ache of a child’s loneliness, and curled up on the floor in front of my closet. A hoof touched my shoulder, a phantom reminder that I wasn’t alone.

When I looked into the mirror again, I saw myself as if for the first time. I was an earth pony, not a mud pony. I didn’t need a stupid horn to be me. My dad was an earth pony, and he didn’t need one to be a construction forepony.

But… But... 

But I didn’t stand in front of the mirror. I felt a shift, and I was torn free. Luna stood next to me, her hoof to my shoulder. My young self bawled as she battered the cone from her head and trampled it to dust and crumbs and goo. My eyes hurt with a young child’s pain of rejection.

The filly was no longer pressed to Luna’s throat. She stood alone in my room, she cried my tears, and she trembled with my pain.

I watched from without as my mother burst in, eyes locked on the trail of pink hoof-prints tracked all through my room, a scowl on her face that lightened as soon as she saw me on the bed. She halted in front of the mirror, her hoof stirring the remains of the cone. Her ears folded back, and her tail snapped side to side as she heard my muffled sobbing, but she studied the remains of the cone, still—until she lifted her eyes to the mirror, gaze locking on her horn. 

The scowl returned, and her eyes narrowed as she regarded the cone’s remains. I could almost feel the cold fire in her eyes as she stamped and ground the sticky mess into the wood. 

I remembered none of this. 

I remembered hearing her come in… and then a pause before she crawled into bed with me to hold me.

She said nothing as memory caught up to reality. She only held me until I poked my head out, my white-fuzz cheeks smeared with pale pink, like diluted blood.

“T-they made me wear it!” I mouthed the words along with my younger self. They were the words of my childhood, etched into my heart. “They said it was the only way they would let me p-play games with them!”

“My little jewel,” my mother cooed. “Those other ponies aren’t worth your time.”

I tried to tell her, in blubbering sentences, who those ponies were, but she repeated the same, over and over. That they were royalty meant nothing to her at all. I felt it. They had hurt her little filly, and my mother’s outrage filled my chest, held in check only because I was there in her forelegs. 

I recalled, as I watched, that my parents had fought that night.

But that was later. Now, she told me, “Tell you what. I’ll take you out for a treat later, okay? Your dad’s old friend Joe just opened a new restaurant over on Bridle Street, a sweets shop with lots of donuts. It’s not good for you. At all. I thought you might like that.”

“I would,” I said with my young self, and stepped into the scene, reaching out to touch my mother’s cheek. 

She was as warm and solid as I recalled as my young self’s tiny hoof reached up for a hug. I embraced my mother, felt again the foal’s bright spark of affection burning bright in my chest.

“There’s nothing you want to remember?” Luna looked down at me, blue eyes distant as she gazed into my soul. “Nothing you wished to say?”

“Why did she have to change?”

In answer, Luna turned away and walked through the wall of my bedroom. The scene dissolved around me as my younger self clung to my mother for a moment longer, then raced to catch up to us. She leapt at me. I danced away, frantic to avoid that searing touch on my soul. 

I ran face-first into a wall.

No. I had been pushed into a wall. I shook myself off and stood up to face my tormentors. Royalty stood around me, their horns glittering. Quick Set tugged on my tail again. Blue Belle slapped at my left foreleg with a branch, striking the purpling flesh where a rock had mysteriously struck the day before, atop a freshly healed sprain.

“Foal gonna cry?”

As answer, I stamped on the branch with my right, pulling it free of the other filly’s weak magic, and used the footing to buck my hooves to the chest of the one tweaking my tail. I connected soundly with a crack and cry, the impact jolting up both my legs.

Twin gasps sounded from my right, and I launched myself at Silvermane, ignoring the impotent, shrieking Blue Belle. She screamed as I tackled her, both fore hooves planting on her ears, pinning her head to the ground.

“Leave me alone!” I roared, full in her face.

I had a moment to savor the look of sweet terror mixed with agony as I ground my hooves against the rough pavement before I was ripped away from her.

“Sapphire Cartwheel Shores!” 

Abruptly, I was standing outside myself, breathing hard. The bullies fled, one limping with a foreleg held to her chest, Silvermane with her head hanging at an odd angle. Blood spattered the pavement where my hooves had pressed her ears into it.

My stomach heaved, and I stumbled, my four legs spreading wide as I held my head low, nausea clawing at my throat. I retched, but nothing came out. Adrenaline’s sudden departure left me shudderingly weak, and the violence… My past joy at delivering it surged up my throat in a bilious rush, and I vomited it out in a black puddle.

“Young lady, what were you thinking?” My mother held me above the ground, her face… she was afraid, I saw. I remembered that day, clearly. She had been angry at me. Furious.

But she had also been afraid.

“I wanted them to leave me alone,” I said an instant before my young self repeated them.

“You could have been hurt!”

“I wasn’t! I hurt them! I wanted to hurt them.” I swung at my mother. “Let me go! I need to make sure they don’t hurt me anymore!” I swung at her again.

“Stop!” I looked up at Luna, pleading with her. “Stop it.”

“I’m not controlling this memory. You are.”

“My little jewel,” my mother wept as she sat, drawing me into her forelegs. “You can’t hit everyone who—”

I hit her. I felt it in my right hoof again as if I had just done it. My mother rocked back, stunned, as a dribble of blood trickled down her chin. I watched my young self run after the three bullies, them screaming as if they thought I was going to murder them, only to be caught seconds later. My mother hauled me home, wordless.

I paced ahead of her, watching her as I had not remembered. I watched the quivering fear, blended with hurt, in her eyes and the slicked-back set of her ears, as it gave way to tight-jawed determination, and then to resignation.

“That wasn’t the first time I’d gotten into a fight with those fillies,” I told Luna. “It was the first time I was winning. Every time, my mother would lecture me about how it wasn’t proper, wasn’t right, and how it would make her look like a bad mother if I kept fighting. Always about her. Her, her, her. Nevermind that the other girls always started it.”

“I see.” She stamped her hoof, and the scene shattered before my mother had dragged me all the way home.

I raced past her, to escape what she wanted to show me, and ran into myself coming the other way, stumbling and rolling head over hock until I…

I lay on my bed, nursing an ankle that had been twisted when I fell. I had sprained it weeks before, and had just gotten it out of a cast that afternoon, only to have it smacked with a rock that had bounced up out of nowhere. I had told my mother it had been an accident. The fight I’d gotten into afterwards hadn’t been.

“You can’t keep doing this, Sapphire. You’ll get hurt. And it’ll only make things worse for you at school.”

“I don’t care! I hate them!” I glared up at my mother. What did she know about being bullied? She was a unicorn. She belonged. I was just a stupid mud pony.

She didn’t reply as she finished wrapping the bruise on my ankle, kissed it, and laid it back on the bed. For a long time, she just sat there, stroking my mane and looking out over nothing.

This was where I belonged, with my mother. She loved me, and she cared for me. It didn’t matter to her at all that I wasn’t a unicorn. I knew it didn’t matter. I started to cry as she held me close.

She cooed away the hurt, and kissed my brow. “Do you love me?”

“Yes.” I stretched out my injured leg and tried to pull her in close. She resisted, shaking her head, and I saw in her eyes the hurt as I winced, but also the hard edge as she settled me against her barrel. “Don’t you love me, too?”

“Yes, my little jewel. I love you so much. You don’t even know…” Her hoof never stopped stroking my neck. “But you’re hurting me, too. Every time you get into a fight, it hurts me to see you get hurt. I wish you would come to me for help before you started fighting.”

“But dad says I should stand up for myself. Fight back.”

The hoof stopped. “Your father is a very smart stallion, but he doesn’t know what fillies are like to each other, Sapphire. You fighting back won’t solve anything. It will make it worse, and worse, and worse. The right thing to do is to come to me, and I’ll take care of it.”

“But—”

The hoof stroked down my mane again, and she pulled me close, her muzzle buried into the ruff of mane between my ears. “Do you love me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then do it for me, because you love me. I don’t want to get hurt watching you get hurt.”

I stumbled away from my younger self, parting in a spray of remembered agonies that painted the walls with hurt. 

She whimpered up at my mother as I stumbled away, as we whispered, “I will.”

I tried to glare at Luna, but her cool look deflected it, and I turned again to watch myself as I was rocked gently to sleep, my bruised ankle resting on a pillow beside my head. “Why did she have to ask me that?”

“Why did you have to keep fighting?”

“You saw what they did to me! What if my ankle had healed strange? It still gives me fits, and my choreographer and I work our tails off to work around it and keep the other girls in sync. If I hadn’t defended myself, they would have escalated and escalated until I was a cripple! They hated me!”

“Why?”

My young self fell asleep as Luna silently waited for me to close my mouth.

“Seriously? You really need me to explain it to you? You saw! Right? You saw! It’s because…” Showstopper’s words, from when we had first met, came back.

“Why should it matter?” She looked up at me from under the coat she was struggling into. “So what if you’re an earth pony? You can do things I could never dream of, like that somersault. Just the backflip would break my neck. So what if it’s a little harder to get into costume? So what if you use your mouth to grab things? I don’t care, and the only ones who do aren’t worth your time.”

It was my mother’s words, that I had forgotten.

“I saw three bullies teasing a young filly who couldn’t fight back.” She looked back at the young filly laying on the bed, at my mother whispering the last lines of a lullaby in my ear. “I saw a young filly who realized she was faster and tougher than they were… and beat them. You enjoyed it.”

“I was stupid. And angry.”

Luna raised an eyebrow. “Indeed. I can see you grew out of that admirably.” She left me then, walking out through the door, leaving me alone with myself and my mother.

She looked up at me, her eyes bright and wide and as gold as mine. I couldn’t look away as I retreated, faltering step by faltering step, away from her. She still loved my mother.

“When did you stop loving mommy?”

“She stopped loving me, first!”

“She did?” She stopped advancing on me to look at my mother, cradling me still as I slept. She was crying as she held me in her forelegs, her back shaking as she did, silent the whole while.

I stared. How much had it cost her to ask me that?

It was my mother’s voice that answered: “Everything. Everything I cared about, my little jewel. It was the last bargaining chip…”

I staggered away from her, from me, and found myself in the hallway outside without remembering going through the door. Luna waited, but I was nowhere to be seen. “Is it always like that?”

“It’s your memory, and your mind. Your mother hides in these memories, too, and a scant few of hers are here, too, filling in the missing details.” Luna smiled thinly, and nodded down the hall. “She’s not all gone from the Dream, but she fades more with every memory confronted.”

I crept along, looking back often, and around. My younger self was nowhere to be seen. I halted at the door to my mother’s room, and peered around the doorjamb just as I leaned forward to look inside. I kept my distance from the door as I held a hoof to my mouth. I shook my head, and I was me again. The younger me frowned from the other side of the door, but held her hoof to her mouth for a moment longer, then pushed the door open further, as I remembered doing so long ago.

My mother paced back and forth in her room, her eyes red and puffy, her cheeks streaked with the remains of tears already shed. She stopped in front of the mirror, staring at herself. She hated what she saw, and tore at her mane, then stopped and let the broken strands of hair fall to the ground. She paced again, to the window, back to the closet, to the mirror, and back to the window in a frantic circuit.

“Why? I loved you!”

She paced away again, and back. She went to the closet and threw it open. Her sob clawed at my throat. The closet was half-empty. My mother, the ultimate organizer, and there were gaps in her closet.

From the distance of age and years, I saw them as holes in her life. I crept in, staying low, my barrel almost brushing the carpet, as I watched her shuffle clothes and horseshoes and hats around to close up the holes. She only made larger ones.

“Where’s dad?” My voice came from behind me. 

My mother spun about as the closet door slammed closed. “Gone, jewel. Gone. He left us.” She kicked a hindleg at the door, her hoof punching clean through the thin wood. “For that mare!” Her hoof slammed into the door again, and again, and again. “Because I wasn’t… I wasn’t good enough for him. We weren’t… neither of us…”

She collapsed, a sobbing, helpless wreck of a mare.

I turned to see myself staring, wide-eyed at her, and then I was gone.

“Please don’t ever leave me, Sapphire.”

I waited around the corner, I knew. It was after the big fight, after I had sent a filly to the hospital, and caused another to get stitches in her ears. They had fought the night before too, loudly and violently. It hadn’t been the first time, but it had been the last.

“They fought over me a lot,” I said. “My dad wanted me to stand up, and he was proud I had done… what I did. He always said wanted me to be a champion.”

“And she wasn’t proud of you in some way?”

“I—” Was she? 

“She loves my singing,” my mother’s voice said from behind me. I turned to face her, but it was me sitting there, watching me with my eyes, and speaking to me with my mother’s voice. “She loves that I am the best dancer in school, and she goes to all of my competitions. She loves that I am an artist, and she didn’t want to see me give up being an artist.”

“Or have it taken away.” Luna’s hoof touched my bad ankle. “A pony with a broken ankle can’t dance as well as one with a whole one. It was your dream, Sapphire. You still dream them, sometimes, when you let yourself out.”

“What happened? To us? She used to love me… I know that. She used to love me. Why did she stop?” Why did I stop?

“All it takes is a moment, and two stubborn ponies.” She looked at me with eyes that didn’t see me as she continued, “And what had been a strong bond can be shattered beyond the capacity of two ponies to mend. But it must be mended by those two ponies. I dared not interfere, unless I had been asked to arbitrate.” Her eyes glittered. “Or if a foal were in trouble.”

She stamped her hoof again with a blast of light and sound, startling me and myself into slamming against each other.

“I don’t care what you thought you were doing! It’s not right! Whatever your father said, he’s gone, and for the better. Suspended for fighting, again!” My mother slammed the door behind me. “You’re grounded.”

“I hate you.” The words tore themselves from my throat before I could take them back. I cringed away from myself, and who I had been. I tried to glare the words up at Luna. I knew what happened… I didn’t want to relive it.

She looked coolly back at me, then returned her attention to the scene. Unwilling, I did, too.

“Hate me! I don’t care. I’m doing this for your own good!”

“My good? You just want to drag me down to be like you! Do you want to know why dad left you? Do you? It’s because you don’t care about anything except how the world looks at you. He told me himself. I’m happy for him. At least he’s with someone who cares about him! I wish I was her daughter!”

“You’re my daughter, and you will listen to me as long as you are under this roof. I will not have a child who fights, and carouses, and thinks she’s above everypony else just because she’s stronger than everypony else.”

“I am stronger! I’m respected. Nopony wants to cross me anymore. I had to make them understand that I am not to be messed with. They understand, now.”

“No. You don’t understand. I remember when you were on the other side, my little jewel. You were bullied, but you fought back, and you got hurt. Don’t you remember all the practices you had to miss with your cast on?” My mother took a breath as I swelled with pride. I had fought back. I hadn’t sat and taken it. I had gotten hurt, but that hadn’t stopped me, either. “You made everything worse… and worse than that, you are becoming a bully, Sapphire. You’re becoming no better than they are!”

My hoof rang with the remembered ache, the stunned shock on her face. Blood trickled from her lip, and tears welled in her eyes. I had just struck my mother. I had hurt her, on purpose this time.

But, she was wrong! I wasn’t a bully. I had been defending myself.

“Why doesn’t she do anything?”

Luna sighed. “What can she do? She can fight back. She can hurt her only child. She can—”

“I get it!”

“Do you?” Luna’s eyes glittered as she met mine.

“It was the last time I hit anyone in anger.” I looked away, down at my hooves, and lifted one. “I… almost got into another fight, later. It made me sick, thinking about hurting them.”

“So, you admitted she was right.”

I huffed, shaking my head, and settled back to watch my mother for long minutes as she sobbed. My young self cowered back, staring at her hooves.

I reached out…

My mother faced away from me, cowering with a hoof over her muzzle. I could hear her murmuring to herself, asking herself where she’d gone wrong, over and over. 

Was this what I wanted? To hurt her?

I went to her, and she flinched when I touched her back, turning to push me away. I fought her, pulling her close so I could hug her, but she resisted, feeble next to my strength, but growing more determined. Then she hit me. Lightly, but it hurt all out of proportion to the strength of the blow. I reeled away from it, sitting down hard, and pressed a hoof to my cheek. 

“Leave me alone!” She screamed, launching herself away from me to stagger against the doorframe, her hind legs trembling. “Just… stop, Sapphire. Stop what you’re doing. Stop hurting me.”

“Dad was right to leave you.”

When her back stiffened, and she raised her head to look me in the eyes, I saw something in her crumble. I knew, at that moment, that if I had said anything else… anything…

“Get out. Now.”

There were tears in her eyes, still, as I left, slamming the door closed. I heard her wail, thinly, as if through a door, and heard it as if it had come from my own throat. I was her as she collapsed on the floor even as my teenaged self galloped down the street.

I was her as she begged to let the words be unsaid throughout all the years after. And her as, throughout those same years, she felt that one blow, heard my voice echoing up from that one moment, firming her resolve.

I stood in the house, still, watching my mother weep silent tears as she called my name under her breath. My throat caught as my mother’s memory swelled inside me, and I knew that if I had gone back, she would have welcomed me, she would have apologized. We could have worked it out. I could have listened to her. So many things I should have done.

Instead, I was on the next train to Manehattan.

I closed my eyes. The years flashed by, year after year of trying to reconnect, failing, hurting each other more and more each year. And then she had sent me a letter, that I had tossed away, asking me to meet her for tea on the day before I left on tour. I saw, through her eyes, as the sun set, a pot of tea sitting on a veranda table between her and an empty seat. An invitation to a garden party under my saucer.

“Come back, Sapphire.” Luna set her hoof to my shoulder, drawing me back from the memory. 

The memories vanished, fleeing into the recesses of the night, and all I was left with was a vague impression of how much she had hurt, and how hard she had worked to not let it show, even to herself.

I opened my eyes. We were back in the hospital room. White walls held no emotion, white bedsheets held a void where a body should be, where memory and thought and emotion should be.

My mother was dead, and she had died believing I hated her.

The little filly walked up to me, her eyes wide and brimming with tears.

“Did you? Really?”

I was shaking my head before I answered, and froze with my mouth open as I embraced my foreleg, and clung tight.

“I love her,” I said.

In those ghostly eyes, I saw myself, and I looked out from them to see an older me.

“What went wrong, Luna?” I looked up at her, my voice creaking with the strain of holding the cracked halves of myself together. “What did she want from me? What…” What answers would I never get, now? My hooves slid on the nothing beneath them, until I was lying on my side, embracing the half of me I had thrown away so long ago.

Luna was there, her hoof on my shoulder offering the presence of another, but her look said nothing to me. It held neither the contempt I felt for myself, nor the condemnation I wanted from her, nothing of the pity and comfort I longed for.

She shimmered as a river broke from me. A young filly’s ache, a wail calling for mommy to make it right, and I cried in front of my ruler.

After a time, she stood. When she had stooped to lay next to me, her wing over my body, I can’t remember, but that warm blanket leaving shocked me back to myself.

“Thank you,” I murmured. “I’m… sorry for…” For my mistakes? My weakness? “For…”

“It will come to you.” Her smile, so like my mother’s in that instant… I laid my head against her neck, and wept out an adult’s loss of her mother.

She held me close, with wings and forelegs, and let me.

I came to myself again, after a time, my thoughts held together with what remnants of dignity I could muster as she stepped away from me, her face unreadable. “What happens next? Will she ever know?”

“The first is up to you, the latter… This is all that remains of your mother, here. When I visited her, I gave her a… tool. A thought, more than an object. A way to reach out without… reaching out.” She looked away from me for a moment. “I fear that may have been the cause, and for that, I am sorry. It was not meant to cause you harm, but to ease the harm she caused herself. But, because she used it, I was able to preserve the workings of that tool, as best I could, without changing anything.”

A rebuke rose to the tip of my tongue, and fell away as I looked about the remains of my mother’s last thoughts. If I wished it, I could ask Luna to take it all away, to destroy it. That, too, rested on the tip of my tongue.

“I would like to know what she would have said,” my voice said without my thought. “I miss her. How we used to be.”

“Very well.” She nodded at the wastepaper bin by the desk. “It was the most I could do for her without overstepping certain laws I must uphold. There are… boundaries that I can only cross for foals.” She cast a lingering look at my hoof, and I looked down to see me looking up, hiding behind my foreleg as I once had behind my mother’s.

Luna turned to leave, already fading away into nothing. “All I ask is that you remember your mother’s legacy, Sapphire.”

“Wait, please! What do you mean?”

Luna shook her head. “I hope you can find the answers in what she wrote.” A thin smile touched her lips. “Think, Sapphire Shores. Think well and long on what your mother’s legacy means.”

I was alone again.

But not alone, and I was more whole than I had been. The foal at my foreleg was more than just an image of who I had been; she was me, and as thought and being melded into one, the two parts became one. Fractured, but whole.

Showstopper’s warm presence glittered again in the distance, a warm spark in a lessening blizzard. By that light, I saw the balls of crumpled paper overflowing the bin, spilling out across the nothing floor, brimming with…

Memory.

I reached for the topmost ball of paper, and it unfurled in my hooves, opening a window into my mother’s thoughts.

Dear Sapphire,