Once upon a time, far away in the kingdom of Surrey-on-the-Shore, there lived a unicorn named Cinderarity who had the very worst possible life.
Oh, sure, her parents were both still very much alive, and they loved her quite a lot. This was probably the start of her problems. Her father was a haberdasher. Or at least, that’s what Cinderarity said, when pressed. Truth be told, he weaved straw hats for the tourists at a gaudy little tiki hut down by the beach, next to where Cinderarity’s mother sold tacky desk lamps with shells glued onto the shades. To add insult to lesser-but-still-grievous insult, they did quite well at their respective trades.
Enough to ensconce Cinderarity firmly in middle-class life. Right where she couldn’t quite arrange to move in the high-society circles she dreamed of, but yet also couldn’t work up a proper agony about being destitute and worthy of so much more. She had never heard of a princess coming from a nice split-level across the street from the park on Elm Avenue. And her parents were far too nice and supportive to be evil ponies who had stolen her away as a babe from her true father and mother of some distant royal line. They kept buying her things, like the sewing equipment she spent most of her time on.
And even her sister never managed to properly oppress her, unless you count the one time when Cindersweetie was eight and blamed Cinderarity for breaking their mother’s favorite mauve ceramic elephant teapot. Which, had she realized the punishment would be so light, she would have done anyways. No, her sister spent most of her time following Cinderarity around trying to help out, which was more adorable that properly tormentful, even if her suggestions for fashion designs combining orange and purple came pretty close.
All in all, it was a very poor start for a prospective princess, she was quite sure. Cinderarity would know. She had read all the literature, several times over.
Still, Cinderarity was a mare with a plan. For all of her life, she had dreamed of one thing, one chance to break out of her woefully intolerable life and into high society, into being a proper Princess. You see, every year in Surrey-on-the-Shore, the castle held a Grand Ball, one where eligible bachelor princes and kings from countries near and far all gathered together, to spend one night dancing and talking in the glittering ballroom, looking for a special connection. Seeking love.
And this year would finally be Cinderarity’s year. She had made all the arrangements. She had saved up all of her money, pouring it into making the perfect dress for the occasion, one to bedazzle the eyes of any suitable suitor. She had pulled all the strings she had access to, leveraging years of favors and straining all her connections in order to secure a ticket to the Ball. She had everything ready.
Until the day of the Ball, when disaster struck.
The problem really started that afternoon, when her sister in a stroke of well-meaning but profoundly misguided inspiration decided that Cinderarity deserved a tasteful saddlebag to go along with her dress. She knew how important it was for everything to be just right, how picky – or as Cinderarity termed it, discerning – her sister could be, and thus decided that she would simply bring the dress with her to the market, the better to make sure the colors would properly match.
Cinderarity had to piece all of this together after the fact. When she arrived home later that evening, she was met by her sister bawling her eyes out and rambling far too fast to understand about some bizarre sequence of events including fireworks, an enraged flock of geese, and copious quantities of tree sap. And what it all meant didn’t really hit her until she saw her father trying to extract her dress from the chimney.
It came out coal-black, covered in thick soot and thoroughly ruined. Even her sister’s tearful protestations that she looked good in black did not assuage Cinderarity’s cold fury. She did not speak a word as she dragged the dress upstairs to her room, leaving a black trail the whole way.
It was only a moment later that the family heard an earsplitting shriek. Cinderarity appeared downstairs in a flash, demanding to know what had happened to her room. Her mother worriedly explained that she had tidied up, transmuting the room from its normal seemingly tornado-struck state into something much more clean and reasonable.
It took Cinderarity several minutes to calm down enough to express that her mother had also thrown away her ticket to the Ball.
She was just gearing up to expound upon that injustice at length, when a knock sounded at the front door. Her father beamed, announcing that at least one thing had worked out today. He proudly walked to throw the door open wide, allowing in a scrawny stallion.
He had heard that Cinderarity was going to the Ball without an escort, and couldn’t bear to see his daughter unhappy like that, so he had pulled strings to get her a date with the son of the owner of the fried banana stand three tiki huts down. And even if the Ball was an impossibility, they could still have a nice night out.
Cinderarity was quite certain that her scream could be heard all the way at the castle itself.
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Cinderarity slammed the door to her room shut. She stalked over to the single bookshelf in her room, packed full of thick volumes with spines adorned with tiaras and crowns and the occasional dragon. She reached for the thickest one, pulling it free with her magic and setting it down on the floor of her now surprisingly-empty room.
Sitting down to read, she flipped through to one bookmarked and thoroughly annotated passage in the middle. She read and read, until a tantalizing idea began to take shape.
Cinderarity was not a mare that gave up easily.
Most princesses simply sat around, waiting for things to happen. Not Cinderarity. She had always thought that fate helped those who helped themselves. She had been the type of filly who at a young age learned to be surprisingly good at trapping frogs from the nearby pond, even if none of them had ever yielded a proper prince.
So even though her idea was farfetched, and not particularly likely to work, it was something. She was going to try.
Cinderarity trotted downstairs, studiously ignoring her family members, each of which nervously stayed out of her way. She trotted all the way to the old dusty supply closet, fetching the item that she needed.
“Need help reaching something, honey?” her father tentatively asked, as she carried it back upstairs. She ignored him as well.
She slammed the door to her room shut, again. Then she propped up the short ladder she had brought against it. She looked around, frowning at the soot-stained dress lying in a heap, before trotting over to open her window up and look out at the stars.
Cinderarity took a deep breath.
“Woe is me!” Cinderarity exclaimed, most plaintively. “Agony! Despair!” She glanced back to her bookshelf, deciding if retrieving the thesaurus would be worth the effort. “Woe!” she cried again.
She staggered back, to fall against her bed, one hoof raised to her forehead. “I am beset by troubles.” She waved theatrically to the door and the ladder leaning against it. “For I have been cruelly oppressed by this evil, wicked stepladder and now I fear that I will never be able to attend the Ball and meet my prince!”
She let out a few more agonized groans, quite thankful for the acting camp her parents had agreed to send her to a summer previous. She was just about to launch into some fairly realistic weeping when she heard a soft plop, like a stone being dropped into a well.
She cautiously looked up to see a pony hovering in the middle of her room.
Her visitor was surprisingly young looking and quite beautiful, with a lustrous pearl coat and large gossamer butterfly wings, gently flapping to hold her aloft. But on a closer glance, the waves of amber hair were unfortunately frizzy, and dark bags lined the pony’s sparkling cerulean eyes.
“Yes, dear child, I am your fairy godmother,” the pony spoke in soothing tones. “Here to—” She stopped short at seeing the stepladder leaning against the door. “Wait, what’s all this?”
“Oh, good.” Cinderarity hopped up, smiling brightly. “You simply must help me. I believe the Ball will be starting shortly, and though I will of course be fine with arriving fashionably late, too late and all of the most eligible bachelors will be taken.”
“This is highly irregular,” the fairy godmother said, frowning. “And I am very busy, you know. I have an appointment with a prince who’s been turned into a mouse in fifteen minutes.”
“This shouldn’t take long,” Cinderarity said. “There’s just a few minor inconveniences to resolve.”
“Princesses,” the fairy godmother muttered under her breath. “Fine. Let’s do three wishes.”
Cinderarity frowned. “Isn’t that djinns?”
“Look, it’s easy, it’s threes and that’s symbolic, and again, I have places to be. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it,” Cinderarity said. “First, I’d like a dress please.”
The fairy godmother nodded and with a soft poof, a ponnequin appeared in the room, with a luxurious deep green dress studded with emeralds draped across it. It came with a golden tiara twisted and inlaid with rubies, and four glass slippers that sparkled and shone.
Cinderarity stared at it, her mouth in a firm line. “Hm. I would like a good dress please. Let’s start with the worst and work our way back, shall we? Glass slippers? Really? Do you plan on having me cripple myself?”
“Glass slippers are traditional,” the godmother snapped back.
“So is burlap, and I’m not wearing that either. And really, emeralds in a green dress? The details are supposed to contrast. And not in the horrid way that green clashes with my mane, either. Or let’s talk the tiara. Do you not have anything in silver?”
“Is this another wish?” the fairy godmother said, somewhat testy. “Because I gave you a dress. You didn’t specify.”
“Fine,” Cinderarity grumbled. “I think I have some heels that will work and I can do something with my mane. Then second, I need a way to the ball, including transportation and proper entry, thank you very much.”
The fairy godmother trotted over to look out the window. Cinderarity heard another poof, and joined her to gaze down at where a pumpkin had transformed into a carriage. It was still quite bulbous and orange.
Cinderarity opened her mouth, ready to launch into a further complaint when the fairy godmother glared her into silence. “Third wish,” she said. “And let’s hurry. Traditionally, this is the one for some prince or another to fall in love with you.”
“I’m saving my third wish,” Cinderarity said, her nose upturned. “I need to find the proper prince first.”
“You can’t do that.” The fairy godmother rolled her eyes.
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t.”
Cinderarity frowned. “Fine. Then I wish that I had a fourth wish that I could save for later.”
The fairy godmother sputtered. “You can’t possibly—” There was a sudden flash of light and a small blue ball of light with wings appeared next to her, chiming away in some language that sounded like tiny bells ringing.
“Oh blast,” she said. “Breezie emergency. Fine, I’ll deal with you later.” One more poof sounded and Cinderarity found herself wearing a silver necklace with a crystalline heart attached to it. “Here, break this whenever you decide you want to make your last wish, and I’ll be along as soon as I can.”
“Thank you,” Cinderarity said, having been raised to be polite when people did nice things for you, even if they weren’t quite as nice as desired.
The fairy godmother sighed deeply, repeating “Princesses,” one last time before she vanished again in a cloud of pink smoke.
The Grand Ball was even more grand than Cinderarity expected. From the moment she was ushered into the ballroom she was bedazzled by the opulence on display. The great chandelier overhead sparkled and glittered. The dance floor beckoned, stately couples twirling across its polished surface. Even the buffet tables looked perfect, lined with tiny plates holding tinier samples of truly disgusting dishes that each had to have costed a fortune. She knew quite well – the proper prestige of a dish was inversely correlated to how likely any reasonable common pony would eat it.
Cinderarity swished in, her dazzling green dress turning more than a few heads, she was proud to see. She kept her head straight forward, nose lifted, not acknowledging the attention as she proceeded at a stately trot to an open area near the dance floor. They would come to her.
When they ended up being a balding old gentlepony who seemed quite enamored of her but entirely too reminiscent of one of her great-uncles, she changed her mind. After extracting herself from a conversation with him, she took to the offensive instead.
She caught sight of one particularly attractive stallion, with flowing locks of blonde hair and muscles that bulged under the surface of his well-tailored suit. He was in conversation with a pair of other flighty socialites, but Cinderarity knew she outshone them. She sidled up, demurely looking up through fluttering eyelashes. “Hello,” she said, voice purring.
He took one look at her and nearly dropped the drink he was levitating. She held back a triumphant grin. “Hello there,” he said, turning towards her.
The two of the socialites glared at her. One moved even closer to the stallion, brushing up against his side flirtatiously. “Oh, you were saying, about the gardens?”
“Later,” he said, wagging a hoof. “Tell me, what’s your name? From where do you hail?”
“I am Cinderarity,” she said, bending one knee in a shallow curtsy. “From… um. Here.”
The other mare raised one hoof over her mouth. “You mean…?” She turned to her friend, whispering, “A commoner. Scandalous.”
“Now ladies,” the stallion said, a deep frown etched across his face. “I won’t have you speaking that way. She has every right to be here.”
Cinderarity let out the breath she had been holding in relief. The stallion took a step away from the mare and the two of them stalked away, still shooting dark glances in Cinderarity’s direction.
The stallion trotted in a slow circle around Cinderarity as she blushed. He leaned his head in, ready to whisper some sweet nothing.
“After all,” he said, his breath warm against her ear. “I hear commoners are really freaky in the sack.”
She recoiled, trotting back and bumping into a serving table. Thankfully, it had a glass of punch on it just right for throwing in the stallion’s face.
He shrugged, unfazed, and moved off in search of the floozies from before.
Cinderarity had always planned to leave the ball early. Of course, she had planned to do so whilst being swept off her hooves by a dashing prince from a faraway land. Not because she was getting sick of stuck-up ponies making not very subtle jokes at her expense.
It hadn’t taken her very long to decide that royalty were not quite as nice in person as they were in the storybooks. The princesses all tittered in her direction, gossiping behind her back – even the ones that looked like they had been dressed by a colorblind mule who had ordered five crates of sequins and was determined to use them all. The princes were worse, loutish to a fault and using their high birth as an stand-in for any kind of manners or class. After several aborted attempts at romance and a rising dearth of glasses of punch to throw in deserving faces – the serving staff had really started to make sure and keep the trays of drinks away from her – she had given up and gone over to talk to the elderly pony that she had first met.
At least he was pleasant enough in his rambling way to allow her to kill some time and not feel like she was being chased out into the streets.
All in all, Cinderarity didn’t know what she disliked more, the thought of never fitting into those circles she had always dreamed about, or the thought of actually fitting in with those horrible, horrible ponies.
After finally giving up and slipping away into the night, she trotted through the quiet streets, forgoing the horrid orange carriage that was parked nearby. The long walk home gave her plenty of time to think, hopes and dreams and regrets buzzing around the inside of her head, fighting with one another. But upon arriving, she hesitated, not wanting to return inside, not to the life she had always dreamed of escaping, that stifling conformity of a family who never truly understood her.
But… as she stood there, outside, she could see a warm light still glowing in the windows of her house. Cinderarity imagined her father sitting up to wait for her return, idly dozing in his big easy chair in the living room. She thought of her mother, no doubt having baked a batch of her favorite cookies just in case they would be needed to soothe a potential disappointment. And she remembered her dear sister, likely having fallen asleep halfway through creating some tremendously outsized work of art as a heartfelt apology.
Three ponies who had never understood her, yes, but who loved her anyways.
She thought for a moment about what the moral of the night was supposed to be. That was important in any proper story, after all. To be content with her lot in life?
“Hm,” Cinderarity said, hoof touching her necklace.
Cinderarity thought that moral was pretty stupid. After all, her family had always supported her, and that meant supporting her dreams too.
Cinderarity trotted over to the park across from her house, standing in front of the fountain. She ripped the necklace off her neck and tossed it to the ground, stomping on it with a crack of shattered glass.
A moment later, the fairy godmother reappeared, her butterfly wings flapping as she floated above the fountain, groaning softly at the sight of the unicorn in front of her. “Alright,” she said. “Time for your last wish. What prince is it gonna be?”
“None,” Cinderarity said, standing straight and tall. “I’d like to be a fairy godmother, please.”
The godmother blinked. She looked at Cinderarity again, waiting there in her green dress. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re very busy, right?” Cinderarity said. “I can help, maybe a part-time assistant thing. I’m very good with fashion and would be excellent on the princess beat.” She gestured towards her dress. “See, you’ve got the stitching wrong here and the colors are hardly suitable. And you didn’t even ask to do my hair – which, I know, my hair is already fabulous, but a night like tonight merits something special, don’t you think? Trust me, allow me free rein and I can turn the homeliest peasant filly into a mare that won’t need extra love-spell help.”
“But…” the godmother said. “I don’t think…”
“I’ve read all the stories. You’ll find that I’m quite familiar with the standard rules and regulations, and am a quick learner for anything new. I can provide a stellar letter of reference from my summer job at the tiki hut that sells giant sunglasses on the beach, and I’m perfectly comfortable working with dragons and trolls. Though...” she shivered. “I’d prefer if you could handle the princes for the time being.”
The fairy godmother squinted, looking her over carefully. “Provisional?”
“Certainly.” Cinderarity grinned. “Oh. And does the job come with a pair of those lovely wings?”
The godmother tapped a hoof against her mouth. “I think that can be arranged.”
And thus, Cinderarity learned that it’s always important to follow your dreams, even if sometimes those dreams change. And that was a moral she was much happier with.