369 - Broken Spirit
There’s no hope now…
Numbly rocking the snoring baby in her forelegs, Feather Duster couldn’t remember how long she’d been sitting there staring at the wall of the train station. Had it been a few minutes, or a few hours? Or maybe a few days? She didn’t know, and even the sunlight shining in from outside was no help in figuring out how much time had passed. After all, the sun only moved if the princesses moved it, and the princesses couldn’t do anything now. They couldn’t move the sun, and they couldn’t save everypony. No one could…
Feeling herself shaking, Feather Duster started to rock the baby a little more, humming a soothing tune even though the infant was fast asleep. The lullaby made her think of Cleansweep, and it dimly occurred to her that she needed to go check on her, to make sure she was alright, even though she knew that there was absolutely nothing she could do to protect her anymore. Not against that monster that had not only casually slaughtered that black-and-white stallion that had offended him before, but had also crushed the princesses when they’d tried to stop him. Crushed and crippled, turning Princess Luna from a regal, resplendent alicorn into an ordinary-looking unicorn.
Having been a pegasus her entire life, Feather Duster couldn’t imagine the level of cruelty it took to rob somepony of their wings like that. But Lex Legis quite clearly had no such compunctions; for him, killing or maiming other ponies came with no hesitation whatsoever. And if he was willing and able to do that to the princesses and their guards, then he wouldn’t think twice about doing it to a mere maid who displeased him, or even to her daughter…
“Hello? Is anypony-, oh! There you are!”
Blinking at the familiar voice, Feather Duster turned her head as she heard hooves clopping on the floor, watching dumbly as the earth filly that had given her that baby before – one of her daughter’s friends, who had fought the Royal Guard alongside her – trotted up to her now with a small smile. “Hi. Sorry about shoving Tiddlywinks on you before. I didn’t-” Her smile fell away as she got within a few feet of her, stopping in place and giving her a worried look. “What’s wrong?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer as she hurried forward and took the sleeping baby from her hooves. Looking the child over worriedly, a look of relief crossed her face when she found nothing wrong. But that relief turned back into concern as she looked back at Feather Duster. “Are you alright?”
Her thoughts still sluggish from trying to process the enormity of what she’d witnessed and what it meant for her and her family, Feather Duster could only blink, not sure what the filly was talking about. “What?”
The girl nodded towards her, still looking worried. “You’re crying.”
Confused, Feather Duster put a hoof to her face, and was surprised when it came away wet with tears. When had that started? “I…”
When she didn’t finish speaking, the filly’s worried look got worse. “Listen, you’re Cleansweep’s mom, right? Do you want me to go get her?” She pointed back toward the door. “She’s right outside with Fruit Crunch and Lex and everypony.”
A surge of tension went through Feather Duster at that. They’re right outside. She felt like her chest was in a vice, squeezing all of the air out of her lungs. The monster and my daughter are right outside. If she did anything wrong, if she upset him in anyway, it could very well be Cleansweep who lost her wings, or worse, next. It was enough to make Feather Duster long for even one day ago, when all she’d had to fear were River Bank’s threats; after what she’d just seen, the other mare’s promises of ruining her reputation to the point where she’d never work again if she didn’t serve Lex Legis now seemed positively merciful. “Is Cleansweep alright?” she heard herself ask, a cold feeling settling into her gut at the possibility of a negative answer.
The filly gave her a wan smile. “I think so. I know she’s sad about losing Venin, but she’s putting on a brave face. Braver than me, at least. She was telling us that the Night Mare might bring our spirit animals back.” She sniffled, but made herself keep smiling as she glanced down at her brother, holding him protectively. “I don’t know if I believe that, but I figure that even if she doesn’t, Lex might be able to ask her to as our reward.”
It took Feather Duster a moment to process that. “Your…reward?”
The filly nodded. “Yeah. After we saved Lex from that Silhouette guy and those other guards last night, Miss Nosey said that Lex would want to give us a reward.” She shifted her weight between her hooves, clearly anxious. “I really hope he can make it so Nemel and the others come back! I know I only met her this morning, but I already miss her so much…”
But Feather Duster wasn’t listening, still trying to process the notion of Lex Legis giving rewards. In the short time since she’d been introduced to him – though “sold” was a better word for it, since she’d been given to the dour unicorn along with all of River’s possessions as part of her apology – Feather hadn’t ever seen him so much as smile, let alone do anything that could be considered kind. It was far easier to believe that he’d simply use his magic to punish anypony who disobeyed him rather than rewarding them for-
Wait.
River had apologized to Lex…and he’d accepted her apology. Feather had seen it herself, although she’d been too petrified to fully appreciate what had been happening at the time. River had offered Lex everything he had, and his girls had been making their opinions known, but Lex himself had been silent for a long moment, leaving River fidgeting nervously. Then, he’d gone up to her and quietly said that he’d accepted her apology.
Lex Legis had done something that wasn’t callous.
The realization was enough to rock Feather Duster back on her hooves, and she held out a hoof as she heard the filly call out to her again in a worried tone. Lex Legis had shown that he could be something other than monstrous last night. And, she realized a moment later, that hadn’t been the only time. Although River Bank had introduced her to Lex Legis, she’d seen him before that, when he’d been performing that “ritual” thing, which according to Cleansweep had been to change that Aria mare into a pony instead of…whatever she’d been before. And then there were all those stories going around about how he’d saved everypony from zombies and sea monsters, protecting ponies even when it had gotten him terribly injured.
The vice that had been around her chest a moment ago had disappeared, and Feather Duster took several deep breaths, feeling almost dizzy. Was I wrong about him? The thought floated through her mind, tantalizing her with the possibility that maybe things weren’t as bad as she’d thought. He might be gruff – he yelled at everypony this morning just for having breakfast, for Celestia’s sake – but he…he… The use of the princess’s name made Feather Duster glance back toward the window that she’d been looking out earlier. Moving between the jagged stalactites of black crystal and the craters dotting the ground, teams of doctors were picking up fallen ponies. Several were gathered around the princesses, with the ones surrounding Luna exchanging horrified looks as they all spoke at once, clearly having no idea what to do for her.
The sight hit Feather Duster like a bucket of cold water, immediately dousing her hopes that Lex Legis was simply misunderstood. How could he be? She might have seen him accept River’s apology, but she’d also seen him kill that black-and-white stallion, as well as hurt Princess Luna so badly after he’d already defeated her. Was he just insane, being cruel one moment and kind the next with no rhyme or reason?
“Listen,” said the filly, drawing Feather Duster out of her reverie, “I should get back. I’ll tell Cleansweep you’re here, okay? I’m sure she’ll want to come see you.” Giving her an uncertain smile, the filly turned and headed for the door.
“What’s he like?” murmured Feather Duster, still looking out the window.
“Huh? I mean, I’m sorry?”
“Lex Legis.” Swallowing nervously, Feather Duster made herself look at the girl directly. “What’s he like?”
Clearly not sure what the make of the question, the filly paused for a moment. “Well, um…I don’t really know him very well.”
“But you must have some idea, right? You and Cleansweep and your friends, you’re all in his fan club that you started.”
“We’re the Night Mare’s Knights,” corrected the girl. “And Fruit Crunch is the one who knows Lex the best, though I guess he is kind of a fan.” She managed a smile at that, rolling her eyes a little. But that fell away as she considered the question again. “But to me, Lex is…he’s like a dragon.”
Feather Duster’s eyebrows went up. “A dragon?” she repeated. The association escaped her, save for overhearing someone in camp say that he’d killed one of those.
“Yeah,” nodded the filly. “I mean, he’s got his hoard, and he’s really serious about protecting it, but instead of being made out of gold or gems it’s, well…us. Other ponies.” She looked like she was going to say more, but at that moment the baby she was cradling began to stir, and a moment later the sound of crying filled the lobby. Wincing, the filly started to rock him back and forth, the motion doing nothing to calm the upset child. “I think he’s hungry,” called the filly, raising her voice to be heard over her brother’s wailing as she started to head back toward the door. “I’ll make sure to tell Cleansweep you’re here.”
Feather Duster nodded absently, already turning the filly’s description over in her mind as the girl left. Lex Legis is a dragon, guarding his hoard of ponies. The analogy seemed to fit, but that wasn’t a comforting thought. Although she didn’t know very much about them, Feather Duster knew enough about dragons to know that she didn’t want to be anywhere near them. She’d even skipped going to see the once-in-a-generation Great Dragon Migration last year, worried that one of them might glance down at her while flying and decide it wanted a snack! And now there was a pony of similar temperament ruling over them. And my daughter and I are part of that hoard.
The thought sent a bitter laugh through her, one which threatened to turn into a sob as it left Feather’s throat. She doubted that Lex would try to hang on to everypony in Vanhoover the way a dragon would every coin they’d collected – she’d heard he’d already sent some sick ponies to Tall Tale for treatment (though some ponies were saying he’d taken over that city also) – but there was no way he’d let her or Cleansweep go. Not when he’d already accepted her as part of River’s payment for her misdeeds, to be added to his collection of mares to play with. Not when her daughter was already part of his group of would-be followers, fighting beside him and praying to that “goddess” that he seemed to admire. Through their own bad luck and poor choices, both of them were now firmly part of the group of ponies that he’d collected.
And there’s no way out, she knew. Running away wouldn’t work – with magic as strong as his, Feather Duster couldn’t imagine that it would be hard for Lex Legis to find them – and rebelling against him would be suicide or worse. The only ones who could have liberated them were the princesses, and that hope had died with the Royal Sisters’ defeat. Both of those options would serve to do nothing except call down his ire to such an extent that apologizing, as River had done, probably wouldn’t save them. But if there was no escaping Lex Legis, no defying him, and no being rescued from him, then that left only one option…
Slowly, Feather Duster climbed to her hooves, heading to the nearby restroom to splash some water on her face. Then she smoothed the wrinkles in her maid outfit as best she could, making sure her hemline showed off her flank. Finally, she ran her hooves through her mane and tail, making sure they were free of tangles. Looking herself over one last time, she let out a slow breath before she turned and headed for the door, her earlier panic having faded into a dull sense of resignation.
It wouldn’t do to keep her lord and master waiting.
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Ouch, poor Feather Duster. At least she still has her daughter and in her eyes, so long as she serves Lex dutifully, she'll get to keep it that way. Still, she'd probably be singing a different tune if she had learned about Aisle and Cozy's own escape.
Still, the description of Lex being like a dragon protecting its horde is rather apt now that I think about it though if Lex has his way, his horde of ponies would encompass the entirety of Equestria and maybe even beyond it in the long run. For now however, he'll need to lick his wounds and figure out a way to deal with the princesses and their guards once they awaken. Hopefully with Aria's enchantment on Celestia worn off by then
9696212
Depending on how the enchantment is worded, Sonata might be able to communicate with Celestia fine.
9696212
I agree with this totally, and man i love the nightmare knights <3
9696238
Well, given our view of Celestia's thoughts a few chapters ago, it does seem to have been set up to force her to believe Lex, specifically, wasn't trustworthy. However, her own internal logic might cause that to incude anyone directly working for him as being untrustworthy too...but we'll see.
Honestly, with what Lex did to Luna I doubt Aria's spell will matter too much on Celly's opinion of him anymore.
I wonder how average Feather Dusters response is compared to the residents of the camp, and just how the Guard are supposed to be sorting themselves out now. If they had Drill Sergent then things could be organised, but resistance wise very quickly, otherwise theyre just a headless chicken running around without a clue?
I feel bade for Feather Duster she has things so wrong about Lex.
9696212 It's possible that Feather Duster will realize that Lex isn't quite as bad as she thinks he is once she learns more about him, his beliefs, etc. But given that she seems to be rather prone to being fearful, she might simply have made up her mind. After all, being told that he's really working for everypony's best interests is one thing; personally witnessing him defeating the princesses and stripping Luna of her alicorn-hood is quite another. Given that she's already decided that she and her daughter are Lex's possessions and that there's nothing they can do about that, I suspect that she won't really be open to having her mind changed. After all, a dragon might want their hoard to gleam beautifully, but that's all the more reason why it'll never let them go.
Lex, of course, would almost certainly dislike that analogy, but I doubt that Feather Duster or Fiddlesticks will be sharing it with him anytime soon. As you said, he has more important things on his mind now anyway.
9696516 At this point the Royal Guard all seem to be unconscious or otherwise incapacitated. The rest of the camp ponies seem like they were too far away to have seen exactly what Lex did to Princess Luna...though given all the shouting, and that there was a lot of fighting in the air, I suspect they know who won the fight at least. Even so, with the doctors having seen what happened to Luna, and how everypony seems to love a good bit of gossip, I suspect that it won't be long before Lex Legis is known as the pony who un-made an alicorn.
9696765 It's sad how her own fear is her real prison, isn't it?
Hmm, Feather Duster does touch on an interesting question. Given the way the common ponies feel about the princesses, even with all Lex has done for them, a large portion of them will quite likely want to leave Vanhoover now that Lex is basically at war with the Equestrian government, and the trains seem to be running. Is he prepared to let them go, given that a critical mass exodus would basically make Vanhoover fall apart? And if he was, from what we've seen of Severance the scythe might just hack apart any such train engine and herd back any ponies who try to leave, since Severance now has a veto on Lex's policies.
Of course, the trains are not running quickly or often, so this could be more of a long-term problem than a short one.
9692219
It's not really a superior force if you can override it. Lex doesn't pursue immortality for all because he knows such a feat is beyond him. But taking someone's immortality away is indeed morally similar to coming back in 70 years and shooting them in the head. A far greater override of the "natural process" than removing immortality is raising someone from the dead! It seems very inconsistent that Lex is willing to expend incredibly powerful magic to undo the consequences of what happens naturally to a body bisected by a scythe, but when faced with the natural processes of Luna facing old age Lex would shrug. I think it's more likely Lex just hasn't had a chance to think through all the implications of his actions, he's basically trying to hold everything together in real time and (unlike the reading audience) hasn't had a second to catch his breath in like 10 chapters.
Yes, that's exactly what is happening here. Lex's reasoning for punishing Luna seems valid at first, but because we read his thought processes, we know that is the superficial reason.The real reason was to prevent Severance from killing Luna. Lex has complained about the Princesses before and talked about how he could defeat them in a fight, but he's never speculated that would remove their alicorn-ness, nor that he would only punish Celestia and not Luna. He also resorted to removing Luna's power only after his far more risky and unlikely plan of destroying Severance failed.
Now, I'm not saying this means his actions were incorrect, or that Luna necessarily doesn't deserve her punishment. Or even that, if Lex had all the time and freedom to decide on a punishment for Luna, he wouldn't have ended up picking this. What I'm saying is that when Lex was put under intense time pressure and given an impossible mission (keep Luna alive) he first thought "how will I prevent Severance from either killing Luna, or killing me and then killing Luna anyway," then thought "if I un-alicorn her Severance can be persuaded not to kill her," then he thought "oh, but does laying such a dreadful curse violate my code of conduct on doing ponies harm" and then the remaining thoughts were solely about convincing himself that what was convenient for him to do in the moment (for, obviously an extremely unique value of the word convenient, since it required casting a spell that practically killed him) was the right thing to do all along from his code's point of view. Perhaps it was the right thing to do. But that's textbook rationalization, where you start with a conclusion and then generate the argument to support it. And that's probably a good thing for Lex, he needs to be flexible and compromise like this if he's ever going to rule a large nation. I think Lex is going to find that his own moral code can be surprisingly flexible when the needs of his subjects come up.
9697744 With regard to ponies leaving the city, bear in mind that there are barely a thousand ponies in the camp as it is, which isn't really at the minimum threshold to keep a major city like Vanhoover up and running anyway. Given that Lex has only just barely gotten any sort of commercial activity restarted, along with only having made the most minimal improvements to the camp ponies' standard of living, if some (or even a lot) of them decide to leave now, it's hard to see any such loss of civic infrastructure as doing any more damage than has already been done.
As for Severance, it doesn't seem to be concerned with enforcing Lex's promise to the Night Mare with regard to him (Lex) gaining worshipers for her. It will take action with potential new recruits (i.e. the Night Mare's Knights) come to it, certainly, but it's not exactly policing Lex's actions with regards to his promise specifically. So it's iffy with regard to how much it would do something like try to keep everypony there.
Of course, somehow I doubt the fact that he hasn't been able to do anything to the scythe after it murdered a pony right in front of him, and tried to kill another, has escaped Lex's thoughts...
"Similar" is not "the same as." One scenario is actively killing someone before "natural causes" would cause them to die, whereas the other is simply revoking their ability to suspend those natural causes. Now, Lex's main priority is saving pony lives, it's true, but in this case what he's done isn't killing Luna; rather, it's simply left her beholden to mortality. If Lex were to obtain the means to make everypony into an alicorn, for instance, he wouldn't be morally commanded to use it so that nopony would ever die.
If that seems like extremely fine shades of difference, to the point of being disingenuous, that's not surprising. While Lex seems to live by broad commandments (such as "save (pony) lives"), his moral code is actually extremely intricate, being full of precise definitions, clauses and sub-clauses, byzantine criteria by which actions (which are at the core of his philosophy or morality, as opposed to intentions or consequences) are scrutinized and measured, and numerous other considerations. Likewise, these extremely minor differences between what can often seem like identical situations or circumstances are why intellectualism (particularly as Lex practices it) is often seen as untrustworthy, since it comes across as utilizing pseudo-reasoning to make something wrong sound as though it's right. It's the issue of rationalization in a different context. But similar how there are shades of difference between "killing" and "murder," Lex would certainly perceive shades of difference between "saving ponies from something that's going to kill them" and "revoking somepony's already-obtained immortality." In fact, there's an example of that shade of difference in your very next sentence:
Au contraire, the d20 System's rules on bringing the dead back to life specifically state otherwise. There is no resurrection magic that can bring back someone that has died of old age (well, except for how Pathfinder changed how the reincarnate spell functioned in that regard from its 3.5 counterpart, which has always bugged me). In this case, the implication is that resurrecting someone can give them back the time that they should have had if something else hadn't killed them first, but is otherwise unable to override the "natural process" that otherwise ends their life.
I know it does (only a little more than the idea that Lex, who can come up with intricate battle plans in less than two seconds, wouldn't have thought this through), which is why – before it comes up within the context of the story itself – I'm trying to explain it here. The difference is paper-thin, to be certain, but there's a lot of room to maneuver in such spaces if you've previously sat down and charted them out, rather than going by feelings, heuristics, or other broad strokes. As I said, Lex recognizes that everypony has an inalienable right to live (though perhaps I should have said "inalienable right not to be killed"), but not an inalienable right to live forever. Taking away Luna's immortality returns her to the basic state of everypony (in terms of life expectancy), which is the status quo that Lex fights to preserve for them. That Luna was able to escape from that does not mean that her new, ageless status becomes the new default that she must therefore be allowed to retain (particularly if we hold it to be self-evident that all alicorns are made, not born – since Flurry Heart hasn't been born (yet) in this story – since that's what the show itself strongly suggests, and because I don't trust the secondary media that says otherwise).
The thing about this, and which I apparently did a bad job explaining, is that his reason for punishing Luna wasn't because of what happened with Severance. Rather, it was presented back in Chapter 341, when he was raging over being told how little the alicorns were going to help with Vanhoover's restoration:
That was when he made the decision to punish Luna (and Celestia too). He'd made up his mind at that point. It was only because of issues of feasibility and practicality that he elected not to go through with it, as stated in Chapter 344:
It was just that later, the practicalities of his situation changed: he went from having no (acceptable) choice but to abandon his plan to punish the alicorns to having no choice but to go through with them, due to Severance forcing the issue. But that they deserved punishment had never been in doubt.
That's why I say that this wasn't a rationalization (in the truest sense of the word) on Lex's part. There's no element of deception involved, no instance of him lying about why he's really doing this. Luna always deserved to be punished, as Lex sees it; it's just that the circumstances changed from his not being able to afford to make that happen to his not being able to afford not to.