Stellar Flare is a scion of the Most Noble Family of Flare, a noble unicorn family traditionally from Canterlot, but who relocated to Manehattan two centuries ago. It is a family known for producing talented wizards and sorcerers, but has since fallen on hard times in recent generations.
This is the environment that Stellar Flare was born into and was raised in. A life of luxury, where she wanted for nothing, at the price of extremely high expectations. It was the hope of her parents that Stellar would have the raw magical talent needed to propel their parents back into prominence again. And while Stellar certainly had a sharp mind, a keen sense of business acumen, and a good grasp of magical theory... It wasn’t what her family had hoped for.
Still, Stellar Flare had a promising future ahead of her, even if it might not have necessarily been the future her parents had been grooming her for. Stellar still had the potential to bring the Flare family back into the limelight. She was extremely popular at her private school, she had excellent grades, and she was poised to get into some of the best higher education institutions that Equestria had to offer.
And then she got pregnant after a brief fling with the captain of the hoofball team.
Her parents were furious. Stellar got knocked up at the young age of 16, and by a common unicorn no less! There were no benefits to be had there, only liabilities. They ordered her to abort the child. Stellar refused. And so, Stellar Flare was disowned and cast out of her ancestral home.
With nowhere else to go, Stellar went to the stallion who had gotten her into all this trouble in the first place. Sunspot wasn’t a bad guy, he wasn’t just going to leave this mare out on the street to fend for herself. And she was pregnant with his kid, for Celestia’s sake! He took her in, and from that point on the two of them had nothing but each other.
It became quickly apparent that it wasn’t all sunshine and roses.
Stellar had never worked a day in her life and yet now all of a sudden she was responsible for herself and an unborn child. She and Sunspot both got part time jobs, and when they weren’t in school they were working their flanks off just to support themselves. Because if there was one thing Stellar refused to do, it was drop out. She wanted her degree, damn it.
It was a degree she would have to get elsewhere, though. Manehattan and their private school was too expensive for the both of them now, so they had to move into the run down outskirts of the city. And Stellar had to go to... public school. A horrifying experience, to be sure.
By the time the baby was due, one thing was extremely obvious: neither of them were ready to be parents. That past year had been a living hell. They were both in school, they both spent all their free time working, and neither of them had any sort of support net. There was, unfortunately, only one option to take. Stellar Flare had to give her baby up for adoption.
Thus began the story of Sunset Shimmer, a name which was the last gift the tearful mother could ever give her firstborn.
But this wasn’t the end of Stellar Flare’s story. She and Sunspot made it. They graduated high school. Sunspot immediately went to work, but Stellar went off to college. It might not have been as prestigious an institution as she was hoping, but a degree was a degree, and Stellar still felt the need to prove herself.
All throughout, she and Sunspot stayed together, even if there was no longer any pressing incentive to. The two of them had been through hell and back together, and who else could really understand them but each other?
By the end of Stellar’s college years, she was pregnant again. This time, though, they were ready. This time, they were resolved to keep the baby. And they took steps to make having a kid an easier experience. The couple moved to Sire’s Hollow, a quaint little village with the potential to be so much more. Nopony knew who they were there and that was perfect. Sunspot found work easily, and soon enough, Stellar came to term.
Thus began the story of Sunburst.
Sire’s Hollow was a tightly knit community. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a foal, and that was true of Sunburst’s early years. Stellar was eager to get back out there and get to work, and soon enough she found a job that suited her talents for organization and her innovative vision. With her and Sunspot’s salary, they found one, a local unicorn by the name of Nova Beam. Nova had a daughter of her own around Sunburst’s age, Starlight Glimmer, and was more than happy to bring her along.
Thus began the story of Luster Dawn.
But time wears on, and relationships founded on mutual trauma and desperate situations aren’t the most stable of things. Stellar and Sunspot were both self sufficient now, they didn’t really need each other anymore... and the cracks began to show. What started as little arguments began to escalate more and more frequently, they began to become less and less excited to see the other, and the naked truth became rapidly apparent: they weren’t really... compatible. They had just stuck together because they’d had no one else. Still, they had Sunburst to think about, so they resolved to push through it regardless.
Or that was the idea, anyway. A few years after Sunburst was born, Stellar found herself becoming more and more enamored with one of her clients. One thing led to another and, well... Stellar quickly found out that she was pregnant again. Panicking, she immediately cut things off with the client and resolved to never see him again. This could ruin everything, but she couldn’t just hide her pregnancy... So she passed the baby off as Sunspot’s.
Thus began the story of Fire Flare.
Everything was fine at first. Fire Flare was born and Sunspot was none the wiser. True, she didn’t really look like him, but Stellar passed it off as Fire Flare resembling one of her grandparents. For a few years, things were happy. They were a stable, loving family, more or less. Stellar kept her shame to herself, and although things were somewhat frosty between her and Sunspot, it had been that way for such a long time anyway that nopony was the wiser.
Then Sunburst got into Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, and that’s where everything began to fall apart. Oh, everypony was ecstatic at first. Stellar was so proud of her little Sunburst. He’d done what she’d never could! No one even noticed the dejected filly in the corner, and they wouldn’t until she grew up and left Sire’s Hollow altogether. But that was years from now.
Thus, Starlight Glimmer exited the picture.
While Sunburst was away attending school, Fire Flare began to shoot up like a weed, quickly becoming taller than either of her parents. Sire’s Hollow might have been tightly knit and supportive, but that just made the townsponies all the more prone to gossip. And gossip they did. They noticed how tall Fire Flare was. How she didn’t have either of her parent’s eye color. How her cutie mark wasn’t even sun related. But gossip spreads... and it eventually reached its way to Sunspot’s ears.
Sunspot didn’t consider himself a suspicious pony, but he wasn’t a fool. Their bedroom had been dead for years, ever since Fire Flare was born. Before, even. He confronted his wife and asked her point blank if there was any truth to the rumors. Stellar, having held in the secret for years, quietly admitted that they were true. She had no tears to shed for this, for the tatters of a relationship that had been held together purely by their children.
And now Sunspot knew that one of them wasn’t even his. It was over. He filed for divorce the next week, gave the custody of the kids up to Stellar, and left town a broken shadow of the vibrant stallion he once was.
Thus, Sunspot exited the picture.
Stellar found herself... oddly un-heart broken. It didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would. In fact, it was kind of... relieving. Things would be more difficult from then on, to be sure. The townsponies would gossip about this for years and supporting two kids all on her own (save for the monthly child support payments) was no easy feat. But still, she felt freer than she had in years. She felt like she could truly begin to live her li-
Then Sunset Shimmer walked into town.
Stellar’s marriage was barely even dead in the ground when Sunset Shimmer knocked on her door. The babe that Stellar had given up so many years before, returning home to meet her mother. And Stellar didn’t recognize her. It wasn’t her fault, she told herself. She hadn’t seen Sunset since she had tearfully given her away! She had been a newborn at the time! How was Stellar supposed to recognize the almost fully grown mare that stood before her?
Sunset didn’t accept any of these excuses. She didn’t accept how Stellar slammed the door in her face and told her to get lost before she knew who she was. It just made her angry. Livid. Sunset screamed in the face of the mare that gave birth to her and disavowed any connection they might have had. Sunset told Stellar all about her accomplishments, that she was Princess Celestia’s personal student, and then she walked right out the door.
Fire Flare found her mother a broken, weeping mess that night. It was that night that Fire learned, as she comforted her sobbing mother, that she wasn’t the only dirty secret that Stellar had been keeping. She learned that she had an older sister was out there, one poised to accomplish great things. It only made Fire feel all the worse about her place in the family, but she kept that to herself.
Neither Stellar nor Fire told Sunburst the truth, reasoning that he already had enough on his plate at Celestia’s school. And so that was the state of the family for a while, a young Fire Flare having to take care of her mother just as much as her mother had to take care of her, all the while Sunburst was away at school.
And then Sunburst dropped out.
Stellar was livid. She had spent so much money keeping Sunburst in that school, and he just... dropped out. Like it was nothing. He didn’t even have the excuse of being pregnant! She had to endure nine months of hell and even she didn’t drop out of school like he had! There was all that potential, running down the drain, and when Sunburst arrived on her doorstep with all of his bags, she let him know exactly how she felt.
It was no surprise then, when Sunburst moved away the first chance he got, unable to stand his mother’s constant nagging about his future.
All Stellar had was Fire Flare, but even she didn’t stick around for long. She was beginning to come of age and decided to pursue her passion. Fire joined up with a fireworks troupe and began to perform all across Equestria... but that meant that Stellar Flare was all on her own.
A single mother with no children that wanted to visit her. They had all flown the nest or outright cut her off. And what did she have to show for it? A big empty house, her job, and... the community of ponies she’d lived with all these long years. Yes... the village. She still had Sire’s Hollow.
A village that so obviously needed a mother’s guiding hoof.
“Oh my precious, darling, Sunburst! He’s done so well for himself! Vice Headmaster of the princess’s very own school of friendship! Now if only he could get on the board of the EEA!”
“I’ve booked the gig for the Festival of the Two Sisters again, mother.”
