Difference

Prologue:

Working Hard were two words that would be used to describe my family. My family owned a farm that had been in the family for generations. Passed from father to son for as long as there were ponies in Equestria. The princesses themselves had even named our farm as a historic land mark and various Archaeologists had discovered artifacts on our land. With our farm being named a historic place and artifacts being found came fame from all over Equestria. My family and I became celebrities in the historic and scientific communities. With all that fame also came buyers offering my family ridiculous amounts of money to buy the land generations of my family had been born on and buried under. My family bought into none of it, the farm couldn't be bought. Even though we had all the fame we could ever want, we never stopped working hard to move onwards. I guess we couldn't simply give in.

I was the second born in my family and I don’t even know what number I was in the list of ponies born on this land. Unlike most foals born in Equestria, I was born during the dawning hours of the day. Most unlike all of my family ever to be born, I was a Pegasus. Of course in a family full of Earth Ponies this came as a shock. My father never accused my mother of cheating, they had that trusting love that is so rare nowadays. My parent’s love couldn't be broken, which is likely the cause for me and my three other siblings. My family searched the family tree like some treasure map in order to explain why I was a Pegasus. Then my grandmother finally confessed.

She sighed looking at my mother and I, which at the time I was still barely a filly. “It has been a family secret for a number of years. Actually ever since your great-grandfather was alive, Cinnamon Lily’s great-great-grandfather. Back in the day when ponies were still settling this area a group of Pegasi came down from what would be Cloudsdale. Mind you the town was vastly Earth Ponies at the time, with some Unicorns here and there. Anyhow the Pegasi came down after seeing our struggle during the winter months.”

“So Saddle Valley had a diversity of ponies,” my mother had said corralling me to her.

“Well as I’ve said the Earth Pony population greatly outnumbered the Pegasi and Unicorn populations at the time. Anyways, your great-grandfather was a stallion who was devoted to architecture and forwarding the Earth Pony way. Being the first born in the family he had a lot riding on him to do something great; without a doubt he indeed did. At the time our family didn’t tolerate marrying anypony that wasn’t an Earth Pony,” she sighed.

“Although one summer while your great-grandfather was building a house for a local family, he met a young wild spirited Pegasus mare. She was working on building the town’s library when he met her. They hit it off almost instantly. Their relationship lasted nearly a year until the young Pegasus mare told your great-grandfather that she had gotten pregnant by him. As you would guess he had to somehow find a way to explain why he had a foal and if the foal was a Pegasus he would have been disowned by the family. So as the months went by he and the Pegasus mare had worked it out, he would get married to one of his best friends and she would claim to be the foal’s mother. The family was elated to hear he finally managed to find a wife and to hear a month or so afterwards that he would be a father. As the due date got closer to his foal’s birth, he and the Pegasus mare became closer until they finally decided to break it off for the sake of their foal. When his foal was born your great-grandfather was relieved to see that she had inherited his Earth Pony genetics.”

“What happened to his daughter’s real mother?” My mother had asked. She was a lover of stories and instantly got caught up in stories.

“They had both agreed that she would keep their daughter until she didn’t need her mother’s milk any more. After all his wife was still technically pregnant for a couple more months. So when the time came when his daughter didn’t need her mother anymore she went to live with him and his wife. His wife claimed to have lost the foal to miscarriage and had adopted his daughter a month afterwards. All of her life your grandmother was believed to be adopted. Only her father, mother, adoptive mother, and I knew about what had actually happened.”

My mother went silent and my father looked at her. “So you and your brother carry the Pegasi gene along with your two sons and my wife. How is it that only Cinnamon Lily only shows the Pegasi gene even though we have three other children?”

“The Pegasi gene is diluted and was a recessive gene in the first place,” my grandmother said matter-of-factly. “It was one in a hundred chance that you would have a Pegasus child. So Dawning Star is truly one of a kind in our family.”

After learning about how and why I was a Pegasus my mother went into studying on how to care for and how to raise a Pegasus child. She did it all in private because if someone found out what she was doing, they would question her. My mother always had my best interest in mind no matter how stressed or over worked she was.

As I grew my mother and father tried their best to raise me like a Pegasus parent would have. On some days they took me and whichever sibling who knew to keep this all a secret out to the woods far out of the town. There my mother tried to teach me to fly from her books that she had read.