Despite being a pegasus by birth, Vanilla Cake knew very well what magic sounded like. Mommy used it sometimes when she was in the kitchen making a cake or a tray of cupcakes; her horn would light up and shoot off sparks the same color as her eyes, and the sparks would sing to her, tinkling and chiming against the air as they soared off Mommy’s horn and danced around a spoon or a spatula or a big giant whisk as big as her hoof.

The Stallion was the one using it now; she called him that because she’d never figured out his name. He had just showed up yesterday, and Mommy had let him in and talked to him for a while like they had known each other forever. She didn’t seem to like him at first, and Vanilla herself didn’t quite like him either. He wasn’t Mommy’s friend, for one thing. Vanilla had friends, two other fillies who lived down the street and were called Cirrus and Buttercup, and she saw them every day when she went outside to play. That’s what friends were: ponies you saw every day, ponies you liked to be around. Vanilla had never seen the Stallion in her life before.

More importantly, he was a pegasus just like her, and pegasuses couldn’t use magic. Everypony knew that. So when she woke up that morning and heard magic in his room, she knew she had another reason not to trust him. How could she be friends with a pegasus that wasn’t even a real pegasus?

Already in a grouchy mood from being woken up so early on a Sunday, she followed the Stallion downstairs as he trotted out of his room and down the stairs, nearly knocking her over as he passed with his tan wings stretched out and his brown mane messy from rolling around in bed. She was still navigating the landing halfway down when Mommy saw him trying to leave, when he turned around with a look like he’d been caught doing something bad. Which he probably had been. Pegasuses who weren’t really pegasuses probably told a lot of other lies too.

“Pumpkin, I-I’m so sorry,” he started saying, “This isn’t... it’s not my choice, I told him I was off this weekend, they’re being completely unreasonable...”

To her credit, Mommy wasn’t buying it. In fact, she looked a weird kind of happy, like she knew this was going to happen. Like she knew the Stallion wasn’t really her friend either.

“Look, I promise I’ll write sometime and I’ll be back as soon as I can... it’s just that I got this letter now from the boss and he actually bothered to magic it out here just to tell me I’m fired if I don’t...”

“It’s fine. Just go,” Mommy said. Her eyes were hard. She was mad.

“I...”

And that was all. The Stallion muttered something that Vanilla couldn’t hear, and then he was gone, out the door and into the sky faster than she’d ever seen a pegasus go. She watched him fly for a bit, wondering whether he was a pony like the princesses who could fly AND do magic, and then Mommy was next to her and pulling her back up the stairs, telling her to go back to bed and quit staring ‘cause it’s not polite.

“Who was that stallion, Mommy?” she asked just before Mommy closed her door again.

“Nobody,” Mommy said. She was still mad, but her eyes were watering now too. “Just an old friend.”