Dearest Sunny,
How long has it taken you to stumble upon this letter, I wonder? I hope it finds you in good health and in greater spirit. Is this the first of my little secrets you’ve stumbled upon? Our little home holds many of them—only good ones, don't worry. I hope they will keep you busy for quite some time, and maybe less lonely as time goes on. Oh, but perhaps I’ve given too much away already!
Why, Dad, you’re surely wondering, have you stuffed this letter in such a hidden little nook? Well, I could have made it a little more obvious, but that would make our game a little less fun. I hope you’re reading this many years after I had it penned.
That being said, this specific letter was hidden so carefully because of the book resting underneath it. Don’t open that just yet, at least wait until you have finished reading this. Knowing your curiosity, I’m sure you’ve already skimmed the last few intact pages there, but please be careful! Tomes such as this one are indeed a rare discovery. Once you finish this letter, the book will be all yours to explore if you so wish.
But first, a story.
There’s great power in a name. Ponies have always emphasized the importance of a name within their culture—and not just Earth Pony culture, but all three races. Whether it’s purely coincidence, innate clairvoyance, or some dormant prophetic magic that still influences our subconscious, we ponies are magnificent at choosing the correct name for the correct foal.
Your name was no different.
But to begin, we must return to my own foalhood. Maretime Bay has changed little since then, so hopefully it's not too hard for you to set the scene. I was an awkward foal in every sense of the word, but that never stopped me from making as many friends as I could. I was—and this may be hard to see from me now, but really, it's the truth—quite the bundle of energy in my early years. Few ponies could keep up with my ramblings about Equestria and the princesses and everything in between. It actually reminds me a lot of you, Sunny.
The only pony who was just as excited about all of my interests was a little filly in the same level of classes as me: your mother. We were foalhood friends in every sense of the word, the only two schoolfoals who were wholly absorbed by the great empire of the past, enraptured in any worn-down tomes and folk tales we could get our hooves on. If we weren’t studying Equestrian history, we were roleplaying some of the great moments throughout it—the banishment and the eventual return of Nightmare Moon, the defeat of Discord, the Royal Wedding, the ascension of Twilight Sparkle—and making countless cherished memories in the process.
The two of us were dedicated to our roles, and we quickly found the ones we preferred to play. I was always Twilight Sparkle, Princess Celestia, or Starswirl the Bearded; I wanted to be a hero in a way only a foal could. Your mother was more fond of playing the villains: Nightmare Moon, the Chaos Lord, and the Changeling Queen were common foes I would find myself up against. She was always putting her heart and soul into the performance, better than any other pony I had played with. More often than not, we reenacted some adventure of Twilight Sparkle’s—what can I say? I idolized her quite a bit. I still do.
But I digress. Those games couldn’t last forever, and the two of us drifted apart as years went by. I dove more into understanding and preserving Equestrian history, but in the process, became a lot more sheltered and secluded, a bit too anxious to really let anypony back into my shell. Your mother went in the opposite direction; before I realized it, she had joined the rest of the foals in our grade in mocking me and my obsession with the past. Gone were our grand adventures and epic reenactments of hero and villain; instead, it became a standard case of bully and victim.
Please understand, Sunny, I don’t hold this against your mother. Everypony desires to fit in. I never once began to dislike her; I pitied her for losing the confidence to be herself. I never fought with anypony that attempted to bully me; I just had no time to spare for such foalishness. They all grew out of it when I stopped responding, anyway.
At the end of our schooling years, just as our class officially upgraded from fillies and colts to mares and stallions, your mother seemed to realize the error of her ways. After being quite cold to me for many years, she abruptly asked to follow me home one evening. Suspecting a chance for reconciliation, I invited her to this very house, which I had just inherited, and showed her how much my historical collection had grown over the years. Quite the first date, huh?
Well, it seemed to work, because soon enough she dropped to the floor and promptly bawled her eyes out, saying she was sorry for everything she had done over the past few years. She had missed our halcyon days and wished she had never left in the first place. She just hoped I could find it within myself to forgive her, and maybe we could start over.
You know me, Sunny. It doesn’t cost anything to extend a hoof toward somepony in need.
And so it seemed like the eventful days I spent as a colt had returned in some form, albeit we had moved beyond our playground games. We were focused on a different type of game that, as I’m sure you get older, you’ll find yourself playing too: courtship.
It was a classic case of two ponies in love and everypony knowing but themselves. We would spend days and nights studying Equestria, hypothesizing about various historical figures, and filling in the gaps when we felt particularly bold. I also began small expeditions to nearby areas I had deemed historically significant. Your mother quickly followed along to help me sift through debris or jot down any old text to be deciphered back home.
One day, a year or so after we had graduated and our back and forth had become insufferable for even the most hopeless romantics in town, we took a long trip out into the wild, hoping to stumble upon something of historical value.
After a day or so of travel, we found ourselves in front of the abandoned ruins of a city. Oh, if only I had drawn a map! It was truly a fantastic sight: so many streets and houses straight out of our foalhood imagination had become a reality before our very eyes.
There was something odd about that place, though, a whisper in the back of our head telling us to leave. We didn’t stay long, just filled our wagon with a few particularly interesting artifacts and headed back home. Some of the books still on my shelves today came from that place. I'm hesitant to say the name of the city—we really did not spend enough time to be certain—but if that was not the mystical Canterlot, then I have no idea what it could have been.
Our haul, although quite plentiful, had little information we didn’t already know of. That, combined with the eerie feel of the city—and the following events upon our return—led me to forget to write out any directions for future reference. Life soon got in the way, as it always does, and I never found the time to retrace my steps. If you’re reading this and interested enough, Sunny, let me know if you would like to try and find that city again. I’m sure I could find my way back with you by my side.
Upon our return home and examining of various artifacts and trinkets, your mother became quite interested in one worn-down book she had stumbled across. I, however, saw little value in it at first glance. Its binding was practically falling off; there was some circular emblem on the front cover, but it was so worn down that we could not make heads or tails of it; and the vast majority of the pages had either shriveled up, crumbled to dust, or lost all of their faded ink completely.
But there were about three pages that actually had legible writing upon them. And, Sunny, until this point, your mother and I were just amateurs. Everything we did was second-hoof, and there was no discovery of our own to make. So when we examined these pages and found that they matched Princess Twilight Sparkle’s hornwriting to the letter, we became pretty ecstatic.
Whatever that book was, it contained some undiscovered writings of Princess Twilight Sparkle herself. Closer examination showed that all three pages we had left were specifically letters of some kind. Even more interesting was that all three of the letters were dedicated to the same recipient. Twilight began each one the same, addressed to a mysterious pony.
“Dear Suns(...)”
Who is Suns, exactly? We scanned every particle of that book to try and find the last few letters of their name, but it was no luck. Every note had either faded or torn just where we needed it. Trust me; this kept your mother and me up for days. Sunspot? Sunshine? Sunshimmer? Sunswirl? We created a list of every known “Suns(...)” and tried to find somepony Princess Twilight interacted with who fit the moniker.
But there was nopony on record today that held a similar name and was close with Princess Twilight to warrant perhaps a whole book of letters. We tossed around going back to the city, but your mother could not even remember where she found the book, so it would just have been a shot in the dark. The only thing I could come up with was that these letters were secretly addressed to Twilight’s mentor, former Princess Celestia, and they all used some nickname involving the Sun. But that’s unprecedented on record, especially when there are plenty of other sources of Princess Twilight very carefully writing out “Dear Princess Celestia . . .”
But this failure was not all bad, you see. We now had the opportunity to do a historian’s favorite thing: interpret. Oh, I should mention we both quickly got tired of calling this mysterious pony “Suns” and gave them a nickname you may be familiar with. “Sunny” just rolled off of the tongue.
I believed (and still do today) that Sunny never actually existed. The book we found was some sort of private poetry journal of Princess Twilight’s, and this Sunny was nothing but a formless muse given name. I relented that, at most, Sunny may have existed in reality, but she was still just a generic placeholder. That felt like the rational answer from my perspective, considering the limited resources we had at our disposal.
Your mother, ever the emotional one, thought quite differently. Sunny had to have been a real pony, a deep friend or even a lover of Princess Twilight, depending on how far we read into the subtext. She wanted just to dig a little deeper, find one more page or line to prove that Sunny existed and was the missing piece to Princess Twilight Sparkle’s life.
And so we argued for several more hours. This was really the first time we had ever found ourselves at such an impasse, at least since she stopped making fun of me at school. I said she was ridiculous and had nothing but a hunch. If there truly were somepony close to Princess Twilight this much, they would be cataloged somewhere, and all good sources had no recollection of this Sunny whatsoever. She said that Sunny could have been a secret lover. I noted that Princess Twilight was celibate all her life; a secret lover was an enticing thought, but she was probably just a friend—if she even existed.
And so we went back and forth, and eventually I told her that we could not create some story of a whole missing pony with so little evidence. That unless we found other sources to corroborate, nopony would take us seriously—not as if there were any ponies we knew interested in this stuff anyway, but I had ideals to uphold. What she was asking for was practically wish fulfillment, not historical research.
Sunny, here’s a tip: if a mare or stallion ever takes an argument far more seriously than you are, there’s probably something else going on that you should figure out before you say something you'll regret.
She didn’t speak to me for a week afterward. I was just confused. What did I say? It wasn’t that important of an argument; I thought we were engaging in scholarly debate. I apologize in advance, Sunny, if you inherited your father’s denseness. For being a historian, I sure wasn’t reading the subtext of my own conversations very well. It took a while, but it eventually dawned on me why your mother was so upset.
In the games we played as foals, I was always Twilight Sparkle, the hero. I played her because it made me happy. Your mother, on the other hoof, played the villain not because it made her particularly happy, but because it made me happy to have somepony to go up against. She wasn’t a villain, no matter how well she could play the part.
Who your mother might have identified with—and this took me far too long to realize—was a love interest. She wanted to play somepony who was pining after Twilight Sparkle, just as she was pining after the colt who was pretending to be Twilight Sparkle. But that didn’t exist; it never existed, at least not on record, so she was stuck playing the next best thing.
And so we get back this mysterious Sunny. Can you blame your mother for wanting to read between the lines? Maybe Sunny really was Twilight’s lover. And as I thought more and more about your mother and what she meant to me, I began to hope that Sunny really was, too.
I eventually got out of my stupor and searched for her all across town. The second I saw her I got on my knees in apology, saying I was sorry I didn’t understand what she was feeling, and that I’ve always loved her; typical phrases of a foolish colt finally realizing what he actually wanted in his life. It fortunately did not take much for her to forgive me, and we officially became an item that day. She gave me some of the best years I ever had. The whole debacle with Twilight and Sunny faded into memory, too; we had a life to live and a family to build.
And then came you, our beautiful daughter. As always when one deals with a new foal, a question quickly arose. What do we name you, our firstborn? The one to continue our legacy?
Without hesitation, your mother turned to me and said it should be Sunny, after that mysterious pony who we knew nothing about.
I said, Why? What’s so special about Sunny that’s worth giving it to our firstborn? There’s power in a name, and sure, “Sunny” wasn’t bad by any means—hopefully, this foal would grow up to be a bright and happy pony—but we should think a little more on it. There was potential baggage attached to that name, for all we knew. We couldn’t even agree on what Sunny meant in the first place!
She silenced me with a kiss and, knowing exactly how to capitalize when I was caught off guard, said that, If the two of us could not agree on who Sunny was or what she meant, then maybe we should let our child decide. Give her that name and let her blaze her own trail with it, define what it means for the next generation, or maybe reveal what it meant all along. You needed a name that let you find your own path, yet hold close all that had come before.
It was a gamble we took under the intuition that you would spend your days not roleplaying great victories, but creating them yourself. Our destined part to play, then, was preparing you for what was to come. But before all of that could come along was the simple, yet most crucial first step: you needed a name.
So you became our Sunny Starscout.
Love,
Dad
(P.S: The tome underneath this letter. That’s the book! Give it a read if you’d like; just be careful!)
Sunny set down the letter and eyed the journal in front of her carefully.
“What’s the matter, Sunny?” called Izzy from nearby while sorting through a pile of debris.
“I found a letter from my dad,” she said.
Izzy stopped, trotted over and placed a hoof on her back. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Sunny sighed. “Well, eventually, but there’s just one thing . . .” She grasped the old book in her hooves. “My dad said in the letter that this book was nearly destroyed when he found it,” She quickly flipped through the pages, “But it looks good as new.”
“Well, what’s it about?” asked Izzy.
“I don’t really know. He didn’t either.” Sunny opened up to a random page in the middle and squinted at it closely. “It says, ‘Dear Sunset Shimmer . . .’”
Author's Note
Thanks for reading this little idea of mine! Check out my blog post here if you'd like.
