achilles' hoof by stimpower on DeviantArt (original) (raw)

Just in case you all forgot. Starlight and Moondancer do have TWO children! This here is Achilles who was in desperate need of an overhaul, and she looks better than ever.

Achilles is born when Vendetta is liiiike 12ish or something. However when Achilles is 2 years old, her sister is, ah…put into timeout. Permanently. No mentions of her ever again. So Achilles basically grows up without knowing she has a sister, except she does know, but as she grows older her memory grows more muddled and distant and they eventually move away from their Dodge City home to Appleloosa.

When she isn’t ruminating the validity of her memory, Achilles has a lot of fun with Moondancer and Starlight. They get her everything she wants (within reason), they go on plenty of trips together, she's the top of the school with many friends, and yet… she can always just tell that something is wrong.

It all gets to her when she dares to sleep: an onslaught of confusing nightmares, fuzzy images, missing pieces. The feeling that her body doesn’t belong to her. The idea that she’s a fraud, that she’s not even really here. Two horns just feels so wrong. Not to mention she keeps changing colors, and it feels like every time she looks in the mirror she sees a stranger, and she was born with a cutie mark that doesn't make any damn sense--

But Starlight says that it’s natural to feel confused all the time because of all the extra magic circulating through her head. She’s even prone to casting in her sleep and wreaking havoc because of it. She also has to try extra hard to use her magic one horn at a time because if she uses both it will vastly overdo the spell. OR she has to use a small amount of magic in each horn to equate it to using one horn. It's the price of having two horns...

Luckily she’s had lots of training in self control and magic from her mothers, which she’s grateful for, but having two horns and needing to lie to everyone with a disguise spell that makes it look like she has one horn so that the media doesn’t go haywire at the birth of the first bicorn… it’s a bit of a struggle.

That aside, Achilles takes to her books and her studies and had the privilege of skipping kindergarten, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade. She even got an invitation to *Celestia's school for gifted foals! She’s just that excellent. Her mothers celebrate her every accomplishment and help her whenever she’s down. It’s weird, because somehow, she feels like they don’t normally act that way…Oh well. It’s just the horns. She has literally no proof of any of her feelings, so no use dwelling on them…

*The invitation was burned so fast you'd never know it showed up LMAO. The last thing Starlight needs is Celestia keeping an eye on her super-daughter after being fired by Twilight...

Fun fact: Achilles actually transitioned very very early. At around 2 (she could articulate nearly complete sentences by then) she told her moms she was a girl and she was confused as to why they kept calling her a boy. They accepted it pretty easily. In fact, Starlight was pretty excited about it. New daughter! Take two!

the old art of achilles is so outrageously ugly im not going to link it LMFAOOO

Characters mentioned:

https://toyhou.se/25552662.moondancer-au

https://toyhou.se/25552653.starlight-glimmer-au

https://toyhou.se/25549027.young-vendetta

Art (c) @@stimpower