Diamond Song's Diary

August 9th year 4LT (Luna’s Return)

Today was my birthday and for all intents and purposes I suppose it was a rather good one. Mother and Father even allowed a few of my classmates from the little school I attend in the village to come and a few of them even brought gifts for me. The gifts were rather random and not quite to my liking. It’s not their fault though as they would have had to at least know me to properly select a present. The few gifts from classmates were toys mostly, a doll filly from Niffle, a horn puppet from Peppermint Sun, and rather lovely crystal Celestia statuette from Lazuli. I could tell it was actually glass but I didn’t dare tell her that. Mother and Father got me the same sort of presents they always get me, books, and one brand new diary to replace the one from last year which had become dangerously close to needing replaced three months ago. I wanted to make it last though, so I started cutting back on my entries. Oh, my name is Diamond Song by the way. It’s probably weird to write at somepony in a diary but I like to think that if I keep my diaries safe that they may be used as historical data some day in the future. I mean, what could make a historian happier than first hoof accounts? Especially considering the times we all live in.The monsters from old Equestria seem to be returning one by one and on top of that we’ve had the return of Princess Luna. No pony even remembered who she was aside from the nightmare moon stories, and even those had been passed off as stories to scare foals on Nightmare Night. Equestria gaining a second celestial monarch has changed the way our government has worked for over a thousand years. Though one must of course admit that Celestia still has a tight grip over the country's politics, Luna’s addition of the night court and the return of the bat ponies can’t simply be ignored either. As time goes on who knows what changes Equestria might see as Luna adjusts to being back and the two acclimate to duel leadership. But a filly like myself has more… Age appropriate things to worry about I suppose. Just on the off chance these diaries become scattered in the future and this is the only one you have, I’m actually only eight at the time of writing this. But mother and father didn’t raise an illiterate, they raised me for scholarly pursuits. Which is why I spend most of my time keeping my grades at the top of the class and why mother tutors me on things even my teacher calls pointless. Not that I think it’s pointless too or anything! Mother and Father have a goal that I share. I only wish I could fulfil that goal. That goal of course is to attend Princess Celestia’s school for gifted unicorns and possibly catch the eye of the princess. After all, she has yet to select a new personal student to replace Princess Twilight. So since the year I turned six we have gone to Canterlot for the entrance and exam each year. This will be my third time taking the test.  The test is a challenging one, at least for unicorns at my age. Levitate a dragon egg. The thing about dragon eggs is that they absorb magic the moment it touches the shell. They feed on this energy to grow within the egg. To describe it in laymare's terms, holding a dragon egg in your magic is sort of like trying to hold an ember on tissue paper. As the egg eats away at your magic and falls straight through (Luckily dragon eggs are incredibly hard, though I doubt they would be used for the test if a fall could break them). To fix this you’re forced to increase the output of your magic to replace the magic being eaten away. It can be rather difficult when your special talent isn’t magic in some way.  I don’t exactly have a special talent being a blank flank but neither did Princess Twilight Sparkle when she passed her exam, or so my mother keeps telling me. For the past two years I’ve been practicing levitation spells for at least a half hour everyday to increase my magical output. I started with a small wooden ball, and then we added another one and then another one soon after that once I was levitating two at once with relative ease. The idea is that the more objects I can levitate at the same time the higher the magic I can generate will become. I’d like to say it worked rather well, that is to say that out of my entire class I can levitate the most object at once while most of my unicorn classmates still have trouble with more than one or two things at a time. I imagine it has to do with how different our training is. They seem to focus on how heavy or light an object is rather than how many they can do at the same time. As for how well the training has worked for the egg during my second exam.. I managed to make the egg roll a few inches.After my failure at the second exam I was upgraded from wooden balls to stone ones. Those were harder but as time went on they became as easy as the wooden ones were and I couldn’t be prouder. Though mother still has her concerns. She worries that if I fail this year then I might be too old next year to bother trying. Of course there’s no actual rule for what age a foal must be to take the exam as long as they’re at least school going age, but there is a certain tradition of going in early or not at all to contend with and I’m already two whole years behind. But I don’t want to give up. Even if mother decides to call it quits I want to keep trying. What was the point of all of this if not to keep going? In one week we’ll be boarding the train for Canterlot and I’ll be passing that test. I simply must pass that test. I don’t know what I could do if Mother really decides that it’s time to call it quits… I suppose there are other magic schools we could look into. But do I really want to think of that? No, not really, because it sounds like another failure to add to my resume.  That’s rather bleak isn’t it?In other news, one of pegasi from the weather team caused a major blunder in Mother’s garden today when a lightning bolt caught one of our cherry trees on fire. I tried to explain to her that we had plenty more of them but she only got cross and yelled at me. She hid it well enough when the guests started arriving but I could tell she was still upset over it. I hope she isn’t still angry tomorrow.