This is a story about expectations: the expectations we impose on others and inflict on ourselves. It is about realizing a mare’s life isn’t over when she turns fifty. It is about defying cliche. It is about being able to see the flaws in your elders while still respecting them for their accomplishments.
It is also a story about Spike and Rarity having a torrid, passionate romance, though that was mostly for the sake of having something to put on the cover art. Philosophical musings about social pressure are a bit too abstract to put on a book jacket, but a dragon ripping a mare’s clothes off moves copies.
As a story that is mostly about Spike, Rarity, and the troubles of elderly mares, it naturally starts with none of the above. Not Spike, not Rarity, and not an elderly mare, but rather a quite young mare. Rainbow Dash, seventeen years old and perfect in every way.
Every mare wishes they were like her. Young mares compete for her attention and jealously slander her behind her back. Old mares sigh when she passes and think, oh, to look that good again! But they know in their hearts that even at her age, they were not her equal.
That is to say, she is of impeccable construction. Her flanks are taut and shapely. Her wide hips give her a feminine shimmy when she walks, and her powerful wings ensure she doesn’t walk much. Those who gaze upon her think back to old legends of amazon warriors, pegasi mares with wing muscles like rocks and eyes like smoldering coals. Her mane is all the colors of the rainbow.
Ponies say her father was a hero. She projects with her bearing that one day, she will be a hero too. Like the pressure felt during a great thunderstorm, her presence dominates every room she enters. She is intelligent, self-educated, determined. She does not hope for a better life, she commands it.
And yet when we find her, she is not flying high, she is not performing heroic deeds, she is sitting on a leather couch in a cold and damp apartment, where the feeling in the air is not that of the upcoming storm, but of a persistent and deep sadness.
The wallpaper is peeling, full of bubbles where water has infiltrated into the building during past rainstorms. Every wall has a shelf, and every shelf is crammed with a hundred nick-nacks, junk saved from the trash and half-repaired. Laundry has been left over an ironing board to dry. An old TV with a cracked case and a missing knob sits opposite the couch. So too is the whole apartment visible, for a door frame that is too narrow and slightly crooked leads to the kitchen, another to the bedroom. These are the only three rooms in the apartment, for they must share a bathroom up the hall with ten others.
A tiny, plastic Hearth's Warming tree sits atop the television. The gifts under it are likewise plastic, and attached to the tree, both parts having been made in the same high pressure-injection mold. The paint is starting to chip off, and the paint flecks contain lead.
In this environment of enveloping despair, Rainbow labors in silence. She sits on that cold and damp couch, wrapped in her father’s bomber jacket, and she reads student essays. They are the essays of students who were accepted or rejected from the Equestrian Military Academy, filled with red ink in the margins. Her own application essay, written with a pencil, sits on a folding table before her. Though the essays of past years are partially faded, their paper warped and curled by exposure to water, she reads them with the reverence of a priestess reviewing sacred texts.
Only by understanding the failures and successes of others can she ensure her own success. She notes those turns of phrase, those rhetorical constructions that earned the reviewer’s red slash, and strikes them from her own writing. She notes those flights of prose that were considered exceptionally meritorious, and alters her own phraseology to match. Her pencil scribbles, and Rainbow is dead to the sound.
Pots and pans clatter in the next room. “Rainbow, have you eaten lunch yet?”
Through the crooked door frame, Rainbow can see the apartment’s kitchen. She can see a sink filled with pots and pans, a dirty table, a chipped countertop. The look of that sink evokes dozens of memories, every instance of that refrain, “Ah! We are so lazy. We must be better about washing,” coupled with the truth that the pots and pans stay in the sink because the collapsing cabinets no longer have room for them. But she cannot see the mare who has spoken to her.
“I’ll eat later,” she says, turning back to her essay, seeking that state of intense focus she had a moment ago. She attempts to become the task before her, to achieve the unity of mind akin to meditation.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything? I was making something. I could make you a sandwich,” the voice says, and Rainbow’s focus shatters. “I worry about you. You exercise so much and you eat like a bird. I don’t want you becoming anorexic.”
The mare who before eighteen has received two offers to be a model, and dozens of offers to be an escort, keeps the derision out of her voice as she answers, “I promise you, I’m not anorexic.” But, she fails. The words cut.
“I’ll make you a sandwich,” says the mare in the other room, like she hadn’t heard.
“Please don’t.”
Something in the kitchen bustles, rustles, and there in the doorframe appears the other mare. She is past fifty, her once blue coat having shifted towards gray. Her mane and tail are the garish orange of cheap artificial dyes. She is overweight, borderline obese, her wing muscles faded from lack of use. Her primary feathers have unseemly ruffles from not being properly preened, and she wears a dress like a circus tent.
She is Rainbow’s mother. “Well, with Hearth’s Warming dinner at your aunt’s, our next meal won’t be until seven. I thought you’d want to eat something before then.”
“I am not hungry,” she says, without inflection.
The old mare frowns. “You’ve been working on that essay all morning. Can you take a break?”
“I will take a break when it’s done,” Rainbow says.
“Well.” The frown deepens, and as it does, the lines in her mother’s face stand out in sharp contrast. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
There are two kinds of children: those who hope they can live how their parents lived, and those who fear that they can. Rainbow is in this second group, and like all frightened animals are inclined to do, she lashes out.
“You can go away and let me focus,” Rainbow says, and she can see on the old mare’s face how the words hurt. She can see the flinch, the faint narrowing of the eyes, the hunching of that old mare’s posture.
“Oh,” says her mother. “Right. No. Sorry. I won’t bother you.”
She vanishes away then into the kitchen, but Rainbow finds that even in the absence of distractions, her focus will not return. The letters on the page dance away from her. The patterns in the corrections that were once so clear fade, and leave the marks seemingly arbitrary. Her gaze wanders.
Over the TV hangs a collection of family pictures, and the case with her father’s medals. Rainbow often stared at those medals when she was a filly, imagining all her friends and neighbors would be impressed to see them. But they were issued by a country that no longer exists, and have names that foreigners find quaint: the Order of the Eagle, the Golden Feather for Valor, the Laurels of Merit, all the way down to the one that killed him, Hero to All Zubrowka.
Ponies, her friends have said, would find the medals more impressive if they were made of real gold. But her father won them after the nation could no longer afford gold, and in any case, everypony sells medals when they need food money. The couch would fetch a significantly better price than the case of medals. Ponies appreciate good leather more than they do valor.
She rubs her face. She turns back to her essay and pretends to read, but there is no teacher to fool and she cannot even fool herself. She stretches her wings. She paces. She kicks and gnashes and bites. And finally, with nothing else to do, she picks up a pair of pliers.
They are the pliers they keep on top of the TV, since one of the knobs is broken. With them, she can grasp the metal rod to which the knob was supposed to connect, and manually rotate it until the TV comes on. The second knob, the one they still have, selects the channel -- they have ten to choose from. Blurry pictures in bleeding technicolor rush past as she turns the dial: news, sports, some subtitled foreign show about cowponies. At the six-o-clock position, the face of a dragon appears on the screen.
It is a strange thing, alien and reptilian, but full of expression. The young mare’s magenta eyes focus, sharpen in recognition. For a moment, she hesitates.
But then she sits back on the couch, leather creaking under her, and she watches.