> Three Words
>  by Noble Thought
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1: City of Lights
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	“You can do this, Sapphire. You’ve got this.”

I love you.

I stopped myself from tapping a hoof. The show would start, and soon. I could feel the crowd’s roar through the cables. Up above, Showstopper would be waving the dancers onstage into their starting positions, signalling the show was about to start.

My earring gave a warning buzz.

Ten seconds.

Months of planning and practice, months of shuttling back and forth between Canterlot, Manehattan, and Ponyville for costuming, venue scheduling, and advertising. This would be a success. Aside from almost a year’s worth of groundwork, Princess Luna’s patronage and favor had been a boon, attracting more than the usual crowd. 

My earring buzzed again, twice.

Five seconds.

I exhaled.

The butterflies in my stomach stilled themselves as the dance routine, practiced a thousand times, and the song, rehearsed a thousand more, tingled in my hooves and tickled my throat.

As the opening chord swelled and the platform began to rise, so did the crowd’s roar. The headdress swayed, steadied, and the dolphin stitching held, just as Rarity had assured me it would, all those months ago.

It was too bad I hadn’t had a dolphin dream since. Maybe letting myself get involved with Rarity’s family issues had been a mistake. Getting involved in family squabbles was always a mistake.

I hope you don’t hate me, anymore.

My mother’s phantom voice drifted through me again, setting my coat to standing on end under the tight outfit. But, as the platform steadied, and was locked into place, the beat rose and carried my soul into the joy of linking note, step, and word into a symphony of motion and sound, sweeping her voice away.





The ticking of beads on an abacus and a scritch of quill on paper. Showstopper, tallying up the losses from gifts given away post-show, and the take-in from the last-minute ticket sales.

The quiet murmur of conversation, muffled by the door, growing louder as the night wound on, and up. The crew, celebrating the end of another tour.

My little jewel. My mother, an unwanted voice in my head.

I rubbed a hoof at my brow, just between my eyes, where a phantom ache was already starting to spread. Why couldn’t she just leave me alone? It had been almost two years since our last visit had ended with both of us screaming at each other.

Over tea. Tea! 

At least we hadn’t gotten tagged by the Ponyrazzi that time. My hoof curled against the smooth padding of the bed stuffed into the back of the wagon, and I forced myself to relax, let out the building tension between my shoulders. I rolled to my side, one foreleg curled over the edge.

I laid my head against a cushion, closed my eyes, and tried to lose myself in the murmur of everything but my mother’s presence. She was quiet, most of the time. Thankfully. But she had an annoying habit of breaking in when I was exhausted. To offer comment on our relationship, or how things used to be, or just to weep at me.

That’s how I knew it wasn’t really her. My mother demanded, or wheedled, or lectured. She didn’t ask, she did.

“You okay, Sapph?”

“Yes. Tired.” I studied Showstopper from under my forelock as she went about the business of wrapping up the tour. I was glad the tour was nearly over, that we could go back to normality, and be what we were in the off-season: friends, confidants… occasionally more. But, the last year had been dry for us—on tour most of the time, stopping at this or that larger village or town for a week or more to be seen, spreading the word, and letting the word carry ahead of us. A number of smaller troupes had followed behind, using our passing as an easy boost for attention.

Now that we had stopped, our first real stop in more than a month since the spring rains had made the back-roads a slog and pushed us behind deadline, things were starting to settle down. Mostly.

“And wishing the mail hadn’t caught up with us yet…”

She looked at me, stopping her tallying for a moment, her lips compressed into a thin line. “You should go see her.”

I opened my mouth, felt the words crawling up my throat, threatening to restart a years’ old argument again. I shook my head. “After the next couple shows. I will. I promise. I’ll try to get along with her, even.” If she would let me.

“You’ve never said that before,” she muttered. She shuffled the papers in front of her again, sighed, and set them back down. “She loves you, Sapph. I know she does. Every mother loves their children.”

“Not every mother!” I snapped.

The tick-tick of beads on the abacus started again, and the scritch of the quill on paper filled the rest of the silence. She didn’t frown at me, quite, but the way she never lifted her eyes from the paper, her ears folding back as the beads on the rails snicked and clacked rapidly back and forth, spoke her disapproval loudly enough.

I wasn’t even sure she was wrong to be upset at me.

She had a functioning family that loved her, and whenever we went back to Canterlot, she took a personal day, or three, to reconnect. She always invited me to go with her, and I always turned her down. I didn’t want to drag family drama into what we had. 

“I’m sorry, Showy. I know… I know your parents love you.”

“And so does your mother.” Snick-snick. Scritch. “Not so sure about your father, though. Did you know he scalped the ticket you sent him?”

I sighed, shaking my head. “He’s just…” She shot me a look. That, too, was an old argument, and I had promised her I wouldn’t apologize for him anymore. I cleared my throat. “It was an attempt to get him to see me. I haven’t seen him in six years.”

“And the one parent who does try to get in touch with you, you ignore.”

“I’m not ignoring her!”

“Avoiding, then. It’s the same thing, Sapphire.” Tat-tat, snick. The abacus thumped to the table. 

“We fight too much. I can’t even think straight when she starts in on my lifestyle. It’s always about how that one-piece makes me look… provocative. About how embarrassed she is for me, up there on stage. And how mortified she is every time she reads one of those smear jobs in the tabloids. It’s always about her and how she thinks I’ve gone wrong!”

“So she’s more traditional. A lot of ponies from her generation are. One of you needs to get over it first, and of the two of you, you’re more flexible. She’s in her late fifties, for pony’s sake! Try, Sapphire. At least try.”

“I do! But she never. Lets. Up!” I took a breath, let it out. “It’s gotten to the point that I don’t care anymore.”

“If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t let it bother you. The tabloids don’t bother you, because you don’t care about them. You laugh at them!” She reached over the desk to tap my foreleg. “Don’t you at least want to know how she’s doing? Why she’s being treated? Why she didn’t send the letter?”

“Oh, she—” I clamped my mouth shut. “Tomorrow, Showstopper. I’ll talk to you about her tomorrow, I promise.” Her lips firmed into that thin, disapproving line. “I’ll even schedule something. Please. I’m exhausted.”

Her horn glowed briefly as she shuffled the papers in front of her, and jotted down a short note. “Scheduled. Tomorrow morning.” She held up a hoof when I opened my mouth. “Not negotiable.”

“Fine. Tomorrow morning.”

The paper got tacked to the back of the door, and a gold star sticker attached to it.

“So… What does our ledger look like?” I asked, looking at one note, above all the rest.

“I thought you were exhausted.”

“Showy… I don’t want us to go to sleep angry.” I waved a hoof at the door, where a number of notes were pinned to it with various oddments, most of them purchased from local vendors along the way. One of them was a note to always end the day on a positive note.

Some days had stretched into two because of that note…

Her ears perked back up as she turned around, eyebrows raised. Numbers were safe. I held back a sigh, and turned it into a smile.

She smiled back. “Good. I think you were right. The grass-roots tour really did boost your numbers. You don’t think about it much, but ponies here really have a lot of relatives out in the countryside, and word of mouth travels faster than we do.”

“I didn’t realize it either, you know. Not until I left home to come out here and started talking to the pony on the street.”

I looked out the window of the wagon we shared, one of four for this final leg of our cross-Equestria Back to Basics tour. Most of our venues had been little more than a field and a stage, but it had been nice to see parts of the countryside that I didn’t see year in and year out. Spending almost a year touring the backwaters and bumpkin-villes of Equestria also meant the mail and I left my mother behind for a while.

“There’s a reason I like to have Manehattan as my last stop on any tour.” I waited for Showstopper to say something, but she only nodded and set her things aside to make room for her foldout. “There’s a lot of good memories here. Getting started with my first project, failing and having fun doing it, getting my own crew together… meeting you.”

“Mm. I thought you were crazy, going swimming in the bay at night.”

“It’s my inspiration.”

The Manehattan skyline flickered as it did in my almost forgotten dreams of swims taken under a full moon, with a seapony’s tail and nothing but the water and a pod of dolphins. 

The reality wasn’t any less enchanting. I let myself sink into the nights I had spent at the bay, letting lyrics and choreography meld into one, the moon shedding its cool light over every wave. The nights Showstopper had waited for me on shore with a towel were my most cherished early memories of Manehattan. In those days it had been a dream to be one of the stars above us as we lay together, laughed, and talked and dreamt in their light, and the bright moon with the mare that watched over us.

That light never touched the city—it had a light and life all its own, with music and a rhythm that had inspired my first hits. But the bay, and the sea, were where my heart always called me back towards.

“It’s something to look forward to before we head back to Canterlot.”

“Back to civilized life, you mean?” She grinned as she finished folding down her bed.

Back to avoiding my mother.

“Yes.”
	

> Chapter 2: Haunted Dreams
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The steady, metronomic precision invaded my thoughts. I wished the nurse had put the machine on silent when she had left, but the mare had been preoccupied with a chart when she had left me alone. At least she had remembered the paper and pen.

I really shouldn’t have used my magic, but my hoof was none too steady anymore, and I had never gotten the knack of forming letters with a pen between my teeth. What use had a unicorn for her lips?

I stared at the blank page, pen hovering above the top left corner.

Beep. Beep. Beep.



Dear Sapphire,



Was that how a mother should address her daughter? Did she think of me as her mother anymore?



It has been a long time since we last spoke. Do you think of me? I can’t blame you if you don’t. It’s only lately that I’ve grown to appreciate just what was missing from my life, and I wish that I could take back all that’s come between us since



My pen wobbled on the last loop of the e, trailing into a droop as the memory came, as it often did, with a tired ache behind my eyes.



you left.



Beep. Beep. Beep.

Three simple words was all it took. Three words to make her leave my life forever. All it took was three words and an accident. I hadn’t meant to hit her. I hadn’t meant to let my anger at her fester. But I had.

And my sweet Sapphire had left. 

The sheet of paper under my hoof shook.

Beep. Beep. Beep.



These words are so difficult to write. I should have worked harder to mend our relationship. I should have let you vent your anger at me without responding. I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to make you stop… doing what you do. I’m afraid that it’s only now that I feel like all that anger, all the fretting that you were in show business just to spite me… It was all meaningless. If I’d only left it alone, and let you work it out.



What else was there to say?



I love you, Sapphire. My little jewel. I hope you don’t hate me anymore.



Beep. Beep. Beep.



Sincerely,
Distant Shores
Love,



I stared at the crossed out salutation, the automatic end to every letter I had ever written until now, at the started correction, my pen teetering on the tail of the comma. I grimaced, and shook my head.

When would I get it right?

The letter crumpled in my aura, and I tossed it with the others in the waste basket.





“Wait!”

Bang. Bang. Bang.

“If you’re not Showstopper, go away!” The migraine that always followed the dream ripped away at my eyes, pounded in my ears, and set every hair of my coat on edge against the bedding. “Ugh…” Even that small utterance dug away at the bridge of my muzzle and left my teeth buzzing.

“It’s me,” Showstopper whispered into the silence that followed.  “I’ve got some headache powder, and you’ve got a package. Sorry I didn’t stop the mailpony in time.”

“Thank you… Just stop that noise. Please.” The compress slipped as I let the tension fade again, and I shoved it back in place before the light from outside could get to me. I wished, for a moment, that I’d had the pleasure of actually indulging in enough drink to bring this on. There might have still been some around, if I had, to drown the throbbing ache and the fading splinters of a dream I could barely remember. “What time is it?”

“It’s a bright and beautiful morning.” Her hooves sounded like jackhammers on the thick carpeting inside the wagon. “Nice breeze from the inland, too.”

“You are entirely too chipper. Tone it down or I’ll have you dock your pay.”

“Ha ha. Here you are, Ms. Grumpy Pants.” The clink of a glass and the pouring of water heralded the drink as she held the rim to my lips. It tasted terrible, but I drank it down and lay back.

“And the package?”

“Must be one of the packages still catching up to us. It’s from Canterlot, one of those ‘to the care of things,’ and marked urgent, response requested from a week ago.”

I pushed the cloth up higher and cracked an eye at Showstopper. In the faint light, her pale, sandy coat looked almost orange, and the dim flicker of light from her horn cast odd shadows over the slim lines of her aristocratic face. “From who?”

“Just says Offices of Case and Law. It’s not very hefty.” Showstopper’s horn flared brighter as she lifted it to demonstrate. “Maybe a few pounds.” Crinkling followed. “But it’s all paper.”

“Can you open it, please? I had another… dream last night. Every time, and I get a migraine. Blasted mare can’t even let me sleep.” I pulled the towel back down and laid a foreleg over it, intending that it wasn’t going to come off until the ache went away. “I just want her out of my head.”

“Mm. You didn’t say anything about the dreams being the source of the migraines. Is it the same one?”

I rolled my head up and down on the pillow. Even my mane hurt. “She kept on trying to tell me she was sorry. Just like every other time.”

Showstopper’s snort sounded ambiguous against the flaring of spots in my vision. “They say dreams are lessons we haven’t learned yet. Go see her, Sapphire. You need to.”

“I know, I know. I will. I promise. It’s just… Celestia, the times I tried to make up with her over the years, and that stubborn mare just keeps throwing it back at me.” My head pounded at me, berating me for making so much noise. “And now she can’t even let me sleep.” At the very least, my mother’s dream self could have offered some headache powder.

The sound of packaging being opened and twine being snipped crackled like the rustle of a wire brush against my ear.

I waited, sinking down into blissful, silent darkness.

Showstopper’s indrawn breath brought me back.

“Oh. Oh, dear. Sapphy…” Her voice caught.

“What? Is it something from the producers? Something from the Princess?”

“It’s your mother.” The papers rustled more. I forced myself to lay still, waiting to hear that she’d sent another letter, this one pleading. “She, um… this is a…”

“Just say it… what’s she want me to do now?”

“Nothing.” She paused again, taking a deep breath. “She… she passed away. Two weeks ago.”

I jerked upright, the towel falling to my chest, and caught her eyes as she looked up from scanning the paper. Her eyes were wide and there was a shimmer of tears in them already.

“It’s fake. Some tabloid jockey looking for a story.” I settled back on the folded-down bed and dragged the towel back into place as her eyes returned to the stack of papers. The shuffling and rustling as she leafed through them dragged like rocks over my ears. “Throw it away.”

“Sapphy, it looks official. There’s a death certificate here, stamped with the Royal seal. Forging that is a felony, and I don’t think a two-bit tabloid would risk it. What would they even do with it?” She ruffled the letter so I could hear it. “It’s even notarized, and it’s written in the letter that she had been in a coma for four weeks, and died without waking.” She rustled a piece of paper. “This is a request to attend a will reading as the sole beneficiary.”

“There’s a lot those ‘two-bit’ tabloids will risk. What’ve they got to lose? Remember that one that tried to smear Princess Twilight?”

“Point, but that was slander, not forgery. Forgery involves jail time.” 

A whole parade of agony rampaged through my skull as a troupe of diamond dogs redoubled the thunderous ache hammering away between my eyes. “She’s not dead. She’ll be there at the will reading ready to beg me to let her back in. This is a last-ditch attempt to get me to reconcile, to build up pity so she can beg me to leave this life to stay with her. She hates what I do because it looks bad for her! Her daughter, shaking her rump on stage. Her little jewel! How could I dare embarrass her like that!”

“Your mother isn’t like that! I’ve met her. She’s dowdy and proper, but she was sweet to me.”

“To you!” I flung the towel at Showstopper and sat up into a blinding white haze decorated with pony-shaped spots. “She spent the entire visit prattling on about how nice it would be if I settled down and stopped ‘that whole showbiz thing’ like it wasn’t my life.”

The white haze began to fade. Showstopper stood in the middle of my wagon, a sheaf of papers spread out in front of her, the light from her horn spreading dim shadows across the walls. It was an off day for us, resting after a show before starting off to the next town, and she wasn’t wearing her usual saddlebag full of gifts for the fans.

“You read far more into it than I did.” Her voice was quiet.

“It was there. She never could out and say it… but it was there. I could see it in her eyes, and she always wanted to go on vacation in the middle of a tour. To take some us time to reconnect. Remember that part?” I lay back, damping the still glowing coals in the agonizing forge in my head. 

“I do. I think she was trying to get you to spend some actual time with her. What if this isn’t fake? What if she is gone?”

“So, what? I don’t care.” I winced, covering it with my foreleg.

“Sapphire!” Her sharp rebuke stung my ears. “She’s your mother. You’re not so cold to her as that. I know you, so don’t even try to pretend.” Papers shuffled in the silence that followed, and their hard edges trampled painfully through my head as she tapped them into order. She tutted as she found the bottle of F&F’s ‘Guaranteed Miracle Wonder Tonic’ I’d bought at some hoedown, shindig, or hootenanny… whatever they called a party in that part of the country. “It’s the migraine talking. We can talk about this later. Like you promised. Do you want me to get you something stronger?”

“I want some quiet… This stupid tonic didn’t do a Celestia blessed thing.” My hoof groped for the bottle as she dragged it out of reach and glowered at it.

“I tried to tell you it doesn’t work half as well as those two shysters claimed it does.” The continued rustle of papers and the clink of glasses grew louder, cranking up the intensity of the ache sucking at the space behind my brow. “Feeding the local economy, my flank. You just liked their song and dance routine.”

She wasn’t wrong. “Stop that… hurts.”

“I think you need to give her another chance, Sapphire. So what if the letter’s not real? She’s not going to be around forever, and she’s your mother.” A clank and crash of bottles clattering in the waste bin set the miners off. 

They slammed home their pile-driver.

I slammed my hoof against the wagon’s side. “She’s never going to die! She’s going to cling to life just to try and make mine miserable.” I threw myself back on the bed, squeezing my eyes shut and pressing the backs of my ankles to them. “Because that’s what she does. Everypony has a place in her world, and if they’re not where she wants them to be, she tries to fix them so they are, and she doesn’t stop until they are.”

I didn’t know if Showstopper left, or simply went quiet. The rustle of paper and the gentle splash and trickle of water answered me. I sighed. “I’m sorry, Showy…” A thousand thoughts, all of them apologies, or things I had said and later apologized for, choked my mind as the powder finally started to work.

“I won’t let her make me miserable anymore. I won’t. I’m happy. I like where I am.”

“I know.”

She was with me in the next moment, her lips on my brow, and a cooler, damp towel pressed down over my eyes. The weight of her body at my side, her warmth nestled close, her breath against my neck… It all pushed back the lingering ache little by little.

My sweet Showstopper laid a lingering kiss on my brow, her warm lips resting just above the towel. Then another, and another to my cheeks. Her head came to rest on my barrel, one foreleg thrown over me like a blanket. It was enough to lay next to her, as we hadn’t in so long.

“We can’t do this, Showy,” I told her after the pain faded enough for me to feel anything else. “I thought we agreed. Not on tour.”

“We did. But as of yesterday’s performance, we’re not on tour anymore.” Her lips on my nose sent a shiver down my spine, and she settled down more heavily. “Besides, you don’t need your manager now. You need me. So, I’m here.”

Any objections I tried to come up with fell away as her breathing slowed to match mine.

I drifted away as her warmth enveloped me, and finally let me rest.

“I love you,” she whispered.

My little jewel.
> Chapter 3: The Mind's Labyrinth
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	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,
	

> Chapter 4: Three Words
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

	I cancelled my next few shows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was friends with Showstopper, wasn’t I?

I asked her.

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

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

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

Showstopper stroked my hoof and leaned against me.

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

“Yes,” she said.

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another reminder…

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

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

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

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

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

I love her.





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

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

That, too, had been in her letters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their history, my history, lay with the sea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I would, too.”

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

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

I didn’t know if I wanted to know.

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

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

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

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





Dear Mother,

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

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

I’ll write again, soon. I promise.

Love,
Your Daughter
Sapphire