Submit to Self-Destruction
Självdestruktivitetens Emissarie
by the parasprite
"Y'know, Tavi, I think I have musician's block."
Vinyl Scratch was loathe to utter these words, as she'd always liked to think of herself as an unusually creative soul. To admit that her creative mind was failing her was about the same as saying she'd cheated on a magic test back in magic school, except that Vinyl didn't care much about her education and she cared a lot about her music.
But it was true, as far as she could tell: in the last couple of months, she'd produced almost nothing at all in the way of new musical compositions. It had become quite clear to her that her career was beginning to stagnate, something that worried her immensely. This was why she was sitting across from her marefriend, Octavia, at a table in one of those fancy restaurants the earth mare insisted on taking her to all the time—with a look of despair painted across her face. That, and Octavia had apparently reserved them seats months ago without telling Vinyl.
"Why do you believe that, Vinyl?" Octavia asked. Her voice was still calm and even as always, but carrying a small note of affectionate concern.
Shrugging halfheartedly, Vinyl replied, "I just haven't been coming up with as many good ideas lately as I used to. It's like I'm not creative anymore, y'know?"
"I'm afraid I don't." Octavia raised her spoon up to her mouth in that overly dainty and formal manner she approached everything with. "Please explain further."
"Hum... I dunno, Tavi. It's like, I sit down with my synths 'n stuff and I'm all ready to write some kickass music... but then I just end up fiddling around and staring into space and pretty much just doing nothing all day. I haven't written anything worth listening to in months. There's just nothing."
"Perhaps you should take a short hiatus from writing music," suggested Octavia. "There is such a thing as being too focused to produce, after all."
"Tried it," replied Vinyl glumly. "Spent a week or something doing... whatever. Didn't help."
"Have you tried listening to other genres besides that dreadful noise you find entertaining?" Her words made Vinyl roll her eyes pointedly. "I'm being entirely serious. I occasionally dabble in less... cultured... forms of music when I find myself at a loss for inspiration."
"Heh, sure you do," Vinyl chuckled. She could hardly imagine Octavia listening to anything but classical music without being threatened with physical torture first. "What is it, like, listening to Neightoven instead of Buck?"
Octavia sniffed indignantly. "Remind me why I'm even dating you."
"'Cause you love me and my style, babe."
The unicorn leaned across the table to kiss Octavia on the lips. Though she huffed and wore a somewhat disgusted look on her face for a second, Octavia gave in and allowed Vinyl to kiss her, even kissing back after a time. They moved apart again, eventually, and Vinyl grinned smugly.
"See?" she said.
"You're disgusting," Octavia informed her flatly, although she'd cracked a small smile. "Absolutely repulsive."
"You love my repulsive disgustingness."
"...Unfortunately."
Vinyl let out an unusually girlish giggle at this and leaned over again so she could touch noses with her marefriend. "I knew it."
"Hooves off the table, Vinyl," said Octavia calmly.
Rolling her eyes, Vinyl took her hooves off the table and said, "You're right, anyway. About listening to more music. I mean, I already listen to tons of music every day, but maybe I should expand my horizons a little, you dig?"
She watched Octavia's eyes light up, having finally gotten through her indifferent exterior with something that engaged the normally unflappable earth mare's interest. In fact, she could easily envision what Octavia was undoubtedly thinking about: forcing her to listen to tons and tons of boring classical music, probably with the goal of convincing her to give up her dubstep and focus on 'true music' instead. Shuddering, Vinyl scrambled to come up with a way to avoid this torture.
"Uh, so, ah, I was thinking," she added hastily, "there's a shop up the street from my place, and I know it sells old CDs, 'n stuff... so I might go get a box of them and spend a few days listening, y'know? Pick up some new ideas."
Octavia gave her a sort of I know what you're trying to do look. "Well, I was going to come over tonight with some classical music. Who knows?" She leaned in close to Vinyl and whispered into her ear. "Perhaps getting laid would help you unleash your creativity. But I suppose you're not interested in that."
"I-I... okay, I definitely am," Vinyl replied without thinking, voice squeaking cutely. Even the dreaded classical music was withstandable if it meant getting laid afterward. "I'll, um, try and get through 'em all before you come over—what time?"
"Around nine would be best, I think." The self-satisfied look on Octavia's face was somewhat maddening, but Vinyl ignored it as she got up.
"Guess I should go clean up my apartment and get those other CDs," she said, soundly defeated. Octavia glanced at the almost untouched salad in front of Vinyl's seat.
"You've hardly touched your salad," the earth mare observed.
"Yeah, well, you know I don't like these fancy frou-frou salads with all the weird stuff on 'em. Gimme a good old caesar salad any day." Vinyl kissed Octavia on the cheek and dropped some bits on the table. "That'll probably cover it—I'd feel like a dick if I made you pay for a meal I didn't eat. Love ya."
"You have absolutely no culture at all," said Octavia, but she reciprocated the kiss and allowed Vinyl to head for the door.
Several hours later found Vinyl sitting comfortably on the vintage overstuffed sofa in front of the massive stereo-speakers set that occupied most of one wall of her living room, listening to some music from a few years earlier. Beside her, there was a box of old throwaway CDs she'd picked up from the music store, and there were a couple of other CDs on the floor in front of her that she'd already gone through.
Some of it was old rock music from twenty, thirty, and even forty years prior. Others were more experimental, which she'd certainly enjoyed listening to for the most part. There were also CDs from other cultures around the world; types of music Vinyl had never even begun to imagine. A lot of it, however, was just garbage: the kind of pop music that Vinyl loathed, the kind that just existed for the sake of existing and making money for corporate stockholders and investors.
"Crap," she decided of the CD that was currently blaring from her speakers. This CD was of the autotuned garbage pop variety; the kind she absolutely couldn't stand. Vinyl was a creative musician, not a greedy one, and she disliked knowing that there were ponies out there who sacrificed creativity for profit.
She used magic to turn off the stereo and took out the CD. Another CD went in, and Vinyl spent a while listening to a somewhat catchy new age album from a few years earlier. It was kind of bland at some parts, but interesting at others, and generally quite experimental. Once she'd listened to the thing in full, she set it aside as a potential source of samples for a song or two. Octavia had been right, she decided: all she needed to do was broaden her musical horizons a bit.
In fact, Vinyl expected to have a bit of an edge over the competition when she got to putting together her next album. Some of the ideas she'd come up with from listening to the diverse assortment of music, and some of the samples she intended to use, were far outside the sphere of what was normally used in her genre. She could just see herself being credited with expanding dubstep and taking it into brand-new territories, and the very thought made her hooves curl with anticipation.
Looking down into the box for her next choice, one particular CD caught her eye. It got her attention mostly because it was just an unmarked jewel case with a blank silver audio CD in it, of the kind one could buy in packs at any music store to burn songs onto from home. The others all had covers and track lists and lyrics booklets, but this one ha nothing except the CD.
She picked it up with her magic and looked at it. There was nothing on the silver CD either, except for a small, insignificant couple of scratches on one side and four large words scrawled across the front in black marker ink:
THIS IS FOR YOU
Vinyl frowned, turned the case over, and found that there was no lyrics booklet included with it. This was actually a delight to her, as she figured it must have been somepony's demo CD. Indie music, naturally, was always preferable to that which was influenced by corporate desires for money and power. There was a possibility that there was some seriously unusual musical experimentation on this one, something that would give Vinyl even more of an edge if she sampled or borrowed ideas from it.
Almost bouncing with excitement, she opened up the case, popped out the CD, and put it into her stereo's CD player. Then she hit play and went to sit on her sofa.
There was nothing, at first. The CD player read that it was playing, but there was no sound for some time. Accustomed to at least some noise from the CD within a couple of seconds, Vinyl soon became impatient, waiting for the music to start. She fidgeted, flipped the jewel case from the CD open and closed a couple of times, and sighed. Then she paused, listening very closely.
Slowly, she came to the realization that the hissing noise she was hearing was coming from her speakers. It grew quickly, revealing some kind of stringed instrument playing the same low chord repeatedly. This was soon joined by a prominent bass whose player often bent and slid the notes, lending it a rather bizarre effect. The music continued to grow in volume until the speakers were blasting Vinyl with an ominous, plodding wall of noise. It was eerie, disturbing, very slow and very lazy; and deep in the background there was also a howling noise like an abyssal well of emptiness echoing.
Straining her ears, she thought she heard screaming far, far in the distant depths of the recording, though she wasn't quite sure. It was difficult to actually make out the specifics, as the music kept changing form as time went on. One moment, it was a guitar playing; the next, it was a piano; and the next, a violin. Scraping out a high, quavering melody that often fell apart into mere feedback and seemingly random notes, the guitar—or whatever it was—echoed eerily as though in a void, while a spine of drums crawled along from time to time below. The bass carried a second, also frequently decaying, melody, one that stopped and started without warning.
The first vocalization started as a sound like someone—or something—vomiting in the background; choking, gagging, and pulsating everywhere. Even after this vanished back into the ether, there was still a quiet sucking noise like something breathing from inside the speakers. Though Vinyl was used to the sounds of grunting and growling—a few of the CDs she'd bought earlier that day were 'death metal'—she had never heard anything quite like this. The noise got steadily louder, leaving feedback in the wake of each slow chord that was played. Then all of it suddenly dropped off into nothingness, save for the original rhythmic humming of synths and bass. The only difference was the addition of occasional notes from a clean guitar or piano or something of that nature, which seemed quite random in their selection. The guitar, or piano, or harpsichord, or clarinet, was still cutting despite how soft it was.
"Dear my beautiful angel..."
Vinyl felt rather bemused by the sudden eruption of a hiss from the darkness. It had a strange effect added to it that made the words sound as though they'd been cut up and digitally slowed down so that they clipped and popped everywhere. If the breathing had seemed odd, that strangeness had just tripled itself.
"My angel..." the voice continued, in an unpleasant sneer, "I'm so, so pleased... so pleased. I'm so cold in here, why not come please me with your warmth...? Oh dear god, the things I'll show you..."
Abruptly, the tempo changed and the music—already a chaotic collaboration of dissonant notes—began a violent yet awkward march forward into what could be called singing only if tearing a living creature's throat out could also be called such things. All in all, it was more of a psychotic howl. "Angel, angel, please! Come closer! Come closer to my teeth! Oh my god, let me show you what I've seen!"
The music had, by then, evolved into something utterly impossible for Vinyl to truly comprehend; the only thing she could definitely make out was a strange sliding noise in the background, as if the sounds were being thrown into a deep pit by the one playing them. Then, suddenly, it came to a painfully weak stop, accompanied by a howling sound similar to what Vinyl imagined the wind in an abyss might sound like.
It was all creepy almost to the point of being cheesy, but it stopped just barely short of that, somehow. Instead, the music managed to be truly unsettling in a way that Vinyl could hardly understand. The voice that sang through the noise was so over the top in its rage that Vinyl wanted to laugh—but she simply couldn't make herself do anything more than smile a shakey little grin at it. Why this was bothering her, and also what was even bothering her about it, she didn't know. There was just something about the song that bothered her, as though something evil were lurking behind the endless chords. But that was silly, she knew. There was no such thing as evil music, as she had attempted to prove to her parents when they became concerned about her rebellious choices in entertainment years before.
"It's a sad, sad life, dear angel mine," spat the vocalist, "When you can't fucking please me!"
Quite abruptly, the music changed from its slow 4/4 riff to a slightly faster 6/8 riff. Though it was slow, it was frantic nonetheless. The chords were bent and hit with vibrato in such a way that it made them sound like they were being churned out by a possessed body's movements. It took some time for Vinyl to realize that a variation on the riff was being played alongside it in 4/4 time. In fact, there seemed to be a number of different riffs going on at the same time, all in different time signatures and at different tempos—each time she thought she'd picked them all up, Vinyl found yet another one buried beneath the others and rising to the top. The end result was a cacophony of noise like she'd never heard before.
"I'm poverty! I'm molestation! I'm suicide! I'm cold! You can't not be cold when you've seen what I have! Forgive me, my angel... Forgive my teeth, that I'm going to bite that fucking smile right off your face!"
A wavering line of single something-or-other notes crawled through the ceiling, and the howling vocals returned once again, while the bass carried a low, almost hidden not-melody to compliment the 'singing'.
"Please me! Beautiful angel, why not please me? It's a miserable life when you don't please me!" Each rasping word dripped with a darkness that hardly seemed like it could come out of a set of speakers, while the higher instruments screeched wildly and hit painfully-pitched harmonics in the background. The song's original feeling returned, to a degree; here, it had been altered to sound far more confused and abrupt than it originally had. Vinyl had never in her life imagined that such a simply composed set of notes could sound so malevolent and... dangerous.
That part continued again and again: the scream of "Please me, my beautiful angel... It's a miserable life when you don't please me!" In the dark, those sounds rang out; the way they cut, they made Vinyl feel as though her heart had been wrapped in steel wire and was being squeezed lifeless; was being sliced and sectioned into pieces.
Suddenly, the sound cut out entirely, leaving nothing but another falling kind of sound in the distance of the otherwise empty noise field; this quickly transformed into another wild barrage of noise that made little sense to Vinyl's ears. It was soon forgotten, however, in favor of paying attention to the suddenly jazzy bass playing along underneath. Once again, it was difficult to make out what was actually playing. There seemed to be dozens of different notes playing without regard for time or key. With the exception of a low ugh and a whimper, there were no vocals here until the repeating chant of "Please me, my beautiful angel... It's a miserable life when you don't please me!" returned.
At that point, Vinyl finally came back to her senses and mashed the STOP button on her stereo, too sick of the incomprehensible noise to continue listening to it. Immediately, the young mare felt a great sense of relief, as though an unbearably heavy weight had been lifted from her shoulders. And yet, still, there was a sense of emptiness or coldness—she couldn't really tell which was stronger at the moment—remaining inside her even after the noise went away.
Feeling rather confused, she hit the EJECT button—but nothing happened.
"Come on," muttered Vinyl. "Stupid thing..."
She hit it again, and again, and again, but the stero still wouldn't eject the CD. Annoyed, Vinyl gave the thing a good, vengeful bash with her hoof, then turned away and reached up for her set of headphones and CD player, resolving to pry the stero open and get the disc out later, when she was feeling a bit better.
At least, Vinyl thought as she sat down on her sofa again and started rooting around for a good album from her favorites to listen to, Octavia could no longer say that her dubstep music was the most meaningless thing in existence—the entire point of that CD she'd just had playing to seemed to be to disturb—or simply irritate—the listener.
Her speakers suddenly exploded with a tsunami of noise: a mad, shrieking yell joined a barrage of wild drum fills, without rhythm or a recognizable time signature; these under a what felt like a completely random series of chords—and this hardly seemed the center of attention compared to the the thundering of the bass notes in between. It was almost painful to listen to, and Vinyl would have gotten up to turn it off right then and there if she hadn't been paralyzed by the sheer bizarreness of the music.
Vinyl nearly jumped out of her coat when she heard the cacophony. Her speakers were playing at full volume; a decibal level much, much higher than what Vinyl normally put them at for the consideration of her easily annoyed neighbors—high enough that the bass levels caused Vinyl's apartment floor to rumble.
That part lasted only a few bars, of course, before it began to evolve and twist into more and more distinct not-patterns, each comprised of different instruments and more incomprehensible than the last. It plodded on and on, the pattern continually changing—first it was 3/4, and then it was 4/4, and then 5/4, and then 1/4; the instruments constantly altering their timbre; apparently every key at the same time. And, yet, it never truly changed, not in the way Vinyl would have expected it to. For all its growth, it remained just as impenetrable to her brain, just as bizarre, just as unmusical.
Hitting the STOP button with her magic and hooves now did nothing at all; the music simply continued to play without Vinyl's consent. Seriously annoyed with her clearly defective equipment, and bothered by both the noise and the volume it was playing at—she only liked incredibly loud noise when it was in a club or at a party—the unicorn staggered around to the side of the stereo and deftly pulled the plug out.
But although the stereo turned off, the music continued to play uninterrupted. Even pulling out the plugs for the speakers, and disconnecting them from the stero, didn't stop it. The music itself seemed to be almost laughing at her, mocking her, as the music's tones would have been perfectly appropriate for a carnival or a clown doing mime impressions for a group of schoolfoals.
"Don't you dare look away!" The vocals returned, as bizarre as ever. "Don't you dare look away! Tell me what you see! Do you see life or death? Tell me, angel! Tell me what you see! Tell me!"
The vocals were still laughably weird, but the words they spoke seemed intrinsically to be full of something unpleasant. There was something so reptilian about this music that Vinyl still didn't understand—though the fact that it was rapidly seeping into her very bones made her need to comprehend it. Why was this music affecting her so terribly, she wondered—why did it almost hurt to listen to? Swirling around in the seemingly unending evolution of the darkness were answers, but Vinyl simply couldn't grasp them just yet.
Closer and closer they came, until she could taste the evil oozing from her speakers. And then the music became a slow, dissonant 4/4 or 3/16 or something or other march; one that spoke of forced conformity, endless concrete, and infinite repression. It was something Vinyl, ever the free spirit, had never thought could exist: music that wanted to stifle inner growth and usher in an age where free thought was forbidden. It was all so antithetical to what she herself was that she could hardly stand to continue listening to it.
There was absolutely no compassion or feeling about this noise that she could find; something that made it unique despite the fact that she could also find little about it that she hadn't already heard elsewhere. It all sounded so terribly mechanical and cold, so unfeeling, in a way that even Vinyl's artificially-generated wubs could never approach. The music itself wanted to consume her; wanted to eat her whole in the name of the same thing that made murderers kill and rapists rape. It wanted a world where there was no freedom, no true laughter, and nothing real; only suffering.
It came to a halt with a vicious scream that trailed off into choking and gagging. Chords banged out—at first, slowly, and then faster and faster, as though the music were gearing up for something spectacular that never actually came. The music had grown into an even more unearthly thing now: a single eerie line of notes that echoed slightly in an apparent void, each fret change overlapped by the reverberations of the previous notes as though a second instrument were playing very softly in the background. It was the most obscene sound Vinyl had ever heard; not even remotely like the marginally similar noise she'd heard in the old death metal CDs among those she'd bought to sort through.
As suddenly as it had begun, the violence ended again, dropping off into darkness. There was only the howling of emptiness left, and the occasional distant off-key chord from a piano. Then there was low zhum as the bass slid downward—and then the backing chords returned in full. When the vocals began, the ride cymbals returned, darting from left to right on Vinyl's speakers. Vinyl truly did want to turn the music off now: it was such an absurd, over the top piece, but there was something truly wrong about it. She felt cold inside; she felt like she were being drained of what made her her. But though she bashed her hoof against the STOP button repeatedly, she couldn't get it to stop.
I... don't like this, she realized, siitting back to hoof at her chin as anxiety began to replace her annoyance. Something's wrong...
The music clawed at Vinyl with its anxiety and mechanical iron flavor, like grinding steel gears as pure noise. Vinyl's apartment now felt strangely empty, a pocket floating though void space without any remaining tethers to the real world, as its occupant continued to stare blankly at the stereo speakers. The vocals ripped at her ears, drilling deep into her with ever-increasing violence.
"Tell me," hissed the voice, which was starting to twist and blend bizarrely into the music. "Tell me what it's like... when your whole world's burning. When you can't get me out of your head."
There was a change in the music now: it was as though it had transformed into the collective words of all the draconequii, and was now whispering ugly ideas into Vinyl's ear. There was something so attractive about it, in a very sick and demented way, that she actually felt a familiar tingling in her loins; the kind she got when Octavia moved her flank just the right way. Along with the cold emptiness of the sound, there was now an uncomfortable and shameful feeling of arousal. The music slithered across Vinyl's body, touching her most intimate places, and none of the protesting in her mind could keep it away.
Evil was such an utterly seductive thing, she realized belatedly. It made her almost feel as though this were a normal thing; to feel nothing, to be empty. The bending, sliding bassline, the cold instruments playing dissonant chords, the snarling vocals, they all seemed so sexual all of a sudden. Vinyl found her hoof moving involuntarily to touch her already slick opening. That she could still feel pleasure signaled that she still existed. Part of her knew that this wasn't the right way to go about combating the music's evil, but she couldn't think straight enough to actually apply that knowledge. The music was warping her brain, forcing dark thoughts into her head that she would never have had on her own.
"I fell like a tree. In the dark I rotted, so I am rusted and cold. But I am still to be pleased! Please me! Please me!"
And as the sound, with a sudden burst of huge dynamics , rose into a despair-laiden quavering prelude to something that would, clearly, be even darker, she began to mash her hoof wildly against her clitoris—almost in time with the uneven drum fills—desperate to keep the feeling alive. But that pleasure was muted by the sheer depression that had fallen over her.
Visions passed through her head; visions of everything burned to the ground, of blood flowing from torn flesh and head wounds, of a racial crown trampled by centuries of parasites, and of a magnificent parade of black, grey, and red; all led by a thing with ten thousand eyes and claws that could reach halfway across the world.
The strokes against her snatch made her feel hornier and hornier, until she was unbearably aroused. The arousal, in turn, took and took from her already limited ability to think straight. She arched her back and whined as the song burst, producing a terrifyingly majestic march to go along with the mad howling, and cried out in frustration and anger. Though she wanted to stop and leave the room, perhaps go to some other part of her home, she simply couldn't bring herself to leave the presence of the speakers. This was the end of something—perhaps her life, perhaps not. But she didn't want it to go, whatever it was, and it seemed the only way to keep it, her disjointed mind decided, was to abuse herself.
Each change in the music suddenly bothered her, panicked her. When it slowed down to a something-time riff, with its tendril-like high notes reaching towards the sky the way the flaming spires of a burning city's firestorms might, Vinyl became distraught. Tears rolled down her cheeks, frightened sobs spouted from her mouth; but the former went unnoticed by the desperate unicorn, and the latter were drowned out by the sheer noise coming from her speakers. The ultramajestic crescendo, laiden with its end-times message, returned in full force. With it came the horrifying, breathtaking vocals, which had transformed from a sickly rasp in the beginning of the CD to a shrieking, howling cacophony of hate by then.
It was truly a surreal thing for Vinyl, to be listening to this music while she touched herself with more intimacy and violence than she ever had before. She was slapping her pussy, beating it black and blue, pounding it with her hoof until it turned colours and bled. The unicorn let out a cry, rapidly bringing herself nearer and nearer to an orgasm. The march went on and on, as did Vinyl's clopping—and then, just as it reached its climax and fell down into a weakened half-repetition, she came. It was a very weak orgasm; little more than a physiological response to all the stimulation. Vinyl wasn't truly enjoying herself at all; in fact, she had never felt worse in her life. Laying on the sofa, she almost immediately started hoofing herself again in a faster, even more brutal manner.
The screaming had become even more unreal in its sheer malevolence, as had the rest of the music. it was a violent conflagration of obscure sounds and madness that sounded rather like a lumbering carnivorous animal charging after its prey. When the vocals came in, the drums adopted a galloping sort of not-so-pattern, the music infused with yet more ringing howls in the background. Vinyl had never heard anything so evil-sounding in her life; it made her pussy drip with arousal and her heart convulse with terror.
Desperate, the unicorn turned her hazy focus to the speakers and surrounded them with a field of magic. Though she was almost too out-of-it to even remember what was going on, Vinyl was still conscious enough to contract the magical grip around both speakers at the same time. With a loud crunching sound, the wood, plastic, and metal all violently imploded, completely destroying the massive ten thousand bit set. It was a terrible loss, to Vinyl, but it was worth it to stop the music.
But the music still didn't stop.
It was only then, as the wall of unfathomable noise assaulted her ears, that it began to dawn on her that there was something more than simple faulty equipment responsible for the situation she was in. Vinyl wasn't normally a superstitious pony—like most unicorns, she'd lost all the awe she could ever have had at magic after being forced to perform it repeatedly in her magical science class's labs when she was a filly.
But, in her distraught state, her logical, rational mind gave way to a more primitive and reactionary part of her brain, one that completely disregarded everything except for the music and the danger it presented. That part of her brain, at the moment, was screaming that she needed to get away from this evil noise; that she needed to run far, far away from where the music was coming from.
"But you can't get away, can't get away... not from here..." the singer hissed.
Vinyl tried to shut out the voice. She hazily rolled off the sofa and tumbled onto the floor with a heavy thump and a small grunt. After a moment, she got back to her hooves, swaying groggily, to stagger down the hallway towards her front door. The music followed her, still swirling about her like a black cloud and still molesting her with its unseen tendrils. It was filling her home—Vinyl was swimming in darkness; she could hardly bear the indescribable stench of evil that had begun to seep out of and into the walls, and the legacy of despair it put forth for her to experience in full. It had become a dance of sorts; a kind of of bizarre mutant gigue without any real key or tempo.
"Oh, my worthless paper angel—why do you run from what you can't escape?"
She stumbled towards the door, the howling emptiness of that underlying ocean rainstorm crashing against her ears. Vinyl slammed against the door just as the harpsichord returned. But it was locked; her hooves kept sliding off it, and when she unlocked it, the thing just locked itself all over again. The door thumped but held strong as Vinyl threw herself against it, screaming near-hysterically. At that point, the music one again evolved; this time it became mocking and just shy of silly. It was laughing at her, Vinyl realized; making fun of her as she pounded her hooves on the door. It didn't take long for her to run out of energy, and when she did, she simply sank down into a pitiful heap, still banging on the door with her hoof. She began yelling:
"Somepony help me! Open the door! Somepony help! Why aren't you helping me? Where is everypony?" For a moment, a sudden wave of rage at the unfairness of the situation overwhelmed her, and she pounded on the door as hard as she could and cried, "Come on! You're always—You're always whining about my music being too loud! Why can't you hear this? I need help! Why won't you h-h-help me?"
"You don't need help," said the surrounding demonic voice. "You need the darkness. You're going to go into the dark, my dear."
"Let me out!" Vinyl bawled, still slapping her hoof halfheartedly on the door. "Let me out!"
The next few minutes—or was it hours, or days, or weeks?—were spent wandering around the apartment, searching for any way she could get out of it. But the only way was through the windows, and each of those led to what seemed like a mile-high drop into the darkening streets of Canterlot. Even on the other side of the apartment, she could clearly hear, and feel, the music and the effect it had on her.
It entered her again, this time with brutal force and even less compassion. Vinyl no longer felt pleasure; there was only violation and shame. More than she'd wanted anything else in her entire life, she wanted to be free of the noise, and to be able to enjoy simple silence again. An insane plan began to form in her head; one silently encouraged and tempered to perfect madness by the music.
As the next verse roared out, and the ticking of ride cymbals filled her ears, Vinyl found herself heading in a daze for her kitchen. She shivered violently, rummaging through one of the drawer, found the perfect weapon to end the vicious rape: a long knife Octavia usually used to cut up salads. Stumbling back into her music room, as if in a torturous dream, she heard the next verse:
"Line upon line, I am always with you, dear angel! In your flesh, in your mind, in your soul!"
Vinyl stared stupidly at the knife, wondering just how it had ended up in her hooves. She wasn't even using magic to hold it; she was literally clasping it between her two hooves, pointing it at her own heart. After some fumbling while she tried to remember how to use magic, the unicorn held the knife up in her magical grip, unsure what to do with it or why she'd taken it out of the drawer. It had been so thoroughly thoroughly shined by her marefriend that she could see her own reflection in it; eyes half-closed and face stained with tears, which were still flowing even though she couldn't really feel much anymore.
If I think about other things, maybe the music will go away.
They truly affected Vinyl this time: she raised the knife and submitted to self-destruction before the awesome force of the music for the first time, for there was a voice in the back of her head telling her that distracting herself would help her throw off the total numbness that had settled over her; would help her free herself from the rape being committed against her spirit. It was frantic indeed: she slashed wildly up and down her foreleg, leaving great gashes that released torrents of blood. It hurt terribly now, but Vinyl couldn't stop. If she were to stop, something told her, she would lose herself forever. There would be nothing left to feel.
Giggling madly, Vinyl drew the knife across her foreleg again and again. Though she felt pain, it was at least a source of relief from the numbness; a sign that she was still alive. In time, she found herself subconsciously moving the weapon in time with the music's most desperate highlights. It was a terribly beautiful, inspiring sound, she realized—but it inspired her to have depraved and awful thoughts, instead of to live and party the way her preferred music did.
But the pain did nothing to fight off the music. If anything, it was growing louder and louder each time the knife touched her flesh. Soon, Vinyl's forelegs and lap were stained red, and blood was dripping down onto her hooves, thighs, and onto the sofa. The noise was thundering in her ears, utterly impossible to escape even through her power to make herself suffer.
"My angel, it's a sad life when you can't please me—so why not please me? Live happy! Die happy! Please me!"
She'd failed miserably: not only was she unable to take her mind off the cold, devastating music, but it had gotten even louder and more abusive. Vinyl began to panic, willing to try anything to get rid of it; to stop that noise from entering her ears. Putting the two pillows on either end of the sofa brought her no relief; nor did stuffing earplugs in them.
Finally, in her desperation, Vinyl reached up, placed the knife at the base of one of her ears, and pushed downward, sawing it back and forth. Pained tears streamed down her cheeks, and she sobbed hysterically, as she took from herself the most important part of her body—that which received music. But it was successful: on that side, the cacophony finally quieted to a muffled thumping that Vinyl could bear, and when she repeated this action on her other ear, she was finally free of the horrifying specifics of the music.
The unicorn picked one of her severed ears and dangled it in front of her face, giggling hysterically. An orange earplug was still stuffed into it. Though she was bleeding terribly from the spots on either side of her head where her ears had been attached, Vinyl did nothing to stop it, too busy reveling in the near silence that she'd been yearning after for ages. She leaned back and sank into the sofa, feeling an unparalleled sense of relief even though she'd just ruined her career as a musician forever.
And then she heard it: the thumping of drums, like a monster leaping down from a hole in the ceiling onto all fours, ready to strike her. This was followed by a heavy chord being thrown in front of her, diving downward on the effects bar. She only had time to draw in a half a terrified gasp before she was immersed in the darkness once again. By the time it collapsed down to its next evolution, Vinyl's mental capacity was shot. She could hardly remember her own name, much less what was going on or why the ideas flooding her mind were bad.
The music was no longer coming from in front of her, or even around her, but from inside her head—the bass pounded in her ears, shaking her very body to the core; a howling thunderstorm of noise echoed inside her skull. It was rather like waking up from a bizarre dream into an even more bizarre reality, and realizing she'd completely left the rest of her ability to think behind. The noise didn't even make sense at all anymore; it had degenerated into a senseless mass of screeching and howling, and a wild stream of blastbeats stumbling over each other at an insanely fast rate.
Soon, the vocals returned: "Hey, baby! Did ya miss me? We're gonna be together for a long time yet, so don't fucking walk away from me!"
"Get out of me!" Vinyl screamed. She could hardly even hear herself, but the music was coming in clearer than ever, rattling her jaw when she closed it.
The unicorn took the knife and cut into her foreleg again, reveling in the pain and blood as she listened to the ride cymbals shine out a complex sequence between the verses. There was true hatred in her now, too: hatred for everything alive and especially everything that was that darkness within the music she was being forced to endure. She hated it, and she was going to get it out of her, no matter what she had to do to accomplish it.
Pausing, she studied her forelegs. They had been transformed into art, the coat and skin hanging off in places where she'd forced the knife under; they hurt, too, but Vinyl felt that as if in a dream. It didn't seem real anymore, that this could be happening to her—the only thing that still seemed real was the music. That had become desperate now; desperate enough to make tears spill forth and stream down Vinyl's cheeks. It was immense, too, in a way that made her feel like an insect before a great god of evil.
Sobbing and laughing at the same time, and no longer in possession of anything resembling common sense, Vinyl slit open her own stomach with the knife. A powerful stench of blood, bile, and shit hit her, but she ignored it after gagging a few times so that she could begin searching for the music, so single-mindedly obsessed with removing it from herself that what should have been excruciating, debilitating pain failed to register.
As she pulled out loop after loop of her intestines, she muttered nonsense to herself, most of it dealing with the idea of removing the noise. But no matter how much of herself she extracted, the music only got louder and louder. Vinyl realized, after some time, that it couldn't possibly be in her torso; it had to be in her head, for that was where she was hearing it.
She stumbled to her hooves and rammed headfirst into the wall. When she'd recovered from this dizzying blow, she immediately bashed into it again, and again, and again, soon swaying from side to side. Her intestines trailed under and behind her, organs slipping out on their own from time to time and hanging there, but she paid it absolutely no mind. What happened to her body did not matter; only the music.
"Come to me, angel. Come to me, come to me, come to me... I'll show you all I've seen. Oh, the things I'm going to show you... You'll wish you were dead for all time."
"Get out of my head!" Vinyl shrieked, throwing herself against the wall one last time. "Leave me alone! Get out!"
"No."
Vinyl looked down at the slimy, bloody hole in her stomach in horror, realizing as she did that the darkness was no longer all around her, but truly inside her. It had done more than just take root; it had blossomed within, grown into a need for self-destruction. And it would never leave her now, because they were one.
One last solution presented itself to Vinyl. The music was never going to go away, but she could. She still had the power to control her body, at least for the moment; she could still escape the darkness if she went away altogether. She knew it would be terrible for a few brief moments, but there was a promise of peace after, and that was what mattered.
"It's the only way out, and you know it!" the voice in her head roared. "Do it! End yourself! Submit to self-destruction!"
Sobbing, Vinyl made her way out to the open window in her bedroom, leaving a trail of red behind her. She climbed halfway through it, and experienced a dizzying sense of vertigo as she looked down at the ground. Somehow, she'd never really considered how high up she was. But now, listening to the screeching horror in her head, she was glad that she'd chosen to live so high up in the apartment building, because it offered her a way out.
The white mare sat on the window sill, detachedly pulled her intestines up after her, and stared at the street below and the dots she knew were ponies. There was only one way to get the music out of her head now, and it was to take the plunge. Vinyl thought of Octavia, whom she'd loved since she met, and her budding career as a musician, which was just beginning to get exposure outside of Canterlot. She did not want to die—not when she had so much to live for—but she needed the music to be gone.
"Vinyl...?"
It would only take a short time for her to fall all the way to the ground, and then she would be free. Vinyl turned her head to look at Octavia, who was standing in the doorway and staring at her with wide, horrified eyes. She could hardly hear the other mare, and had to cup place her hooves against the hole in one side of her head to make out what she was saying. Even then, she could only understand a few words.
"...Vinyl... what... doing? What've... done to yourself...? Vinyl!"
Here, Vinyl realized that she could escape if she wanted to now—the door was open, and she could run away... She could survive, get over the ordeal, go back to living her life as she had before; perhaps with a little more wariness...
"I'll never let you go," her tormentor hissed. "You're mine, cunt! Mine!"
...But she didn't want to survive anymore. There was no desire to leave now, no desire to see her lover again, or to go back to being a tenth rate musician. There was only the evil; the claws of perition; something that resided in such utter darkness that it could only rarely peer out into the light, and perhaps snatch up an innocent to tear apart forever...
"Vinyl..." said Octavia in a small, frightened voice that, for some reason, Vinyl could hear perfectly fine, "please... back inside..."
With an empty smile, Vinyl waved at Octavia. She had nothing to say, really, but the little that remained of her didn't want to let her go without a goodbye of some sort.
"Vinyl, please... I love you..."
"Do it, cunt! Do it!"
"I'm sorry, Tavi," Vinyl whispered hoarsely. "It's just too much. The music, I mean. I hope you never hear it."
"Don't!"
Ignoring Octavia's pleas, Vinyl pushed herself off the ledge, and then for a few moments she was flying.
The whole fall took just a few seconds, and Vinyl was too far gone for it to expand into minutes or hours. It was rather like a dream; one of those horrid dreams where she would fall a thousand miles, except that it didn't end with her waking up. She simply watched the ground and the ponies on it draw closer, and closer, and closer...
It didn't end when she hit the ground, either.
She fell through the ground, and into a dark abyss that quickly swallowed up the light from above. Vinyl tried to scream, but her mouth was fused shut. In that darkness, she was suspended and silent, unable to move or speak a single word in protest. There was only her and the cold, and the dark, and a distant but oddly familiar series of low, dark chords on an instrument Vinyl didn't know the name of. Wrapped in her cocoon of evil, she tried to struggle against it, but it was to no avail.
Time plodded on and on, and still Vinyl could not move or speak, nor could she flee. She had a feeling deep inside that something was watching her, that something was moving in the dark just beyond where her eyes could see—but all she could do was wait and wait for something to happen.
Down where she was, it was very, very cold, she realized. There were muffled sounds in the distance; sounds of torture and torment, and laughter as well. Even without ears, Vinyl could hear them quite clearly. Confused and frightened, she tried in vain to call out for Octavia, for her friends, for her mother, to come save her. There was absolutely nothing in the darkness to hear her cries except evil.
And, eventually, evil answered.
After what could have been a legitimate eternity of silence, the unicorn heard a distnct rustling sound in the dark; a dangerous growl; a voice of evil. She saw a set of sharp predator's teeth and a million red eyes, and a face crinkled slightly in a jagged and unpleasant smile. Ten thousand claws snapped on either side of its body, and its screams echoed in the bitter darkness behind.
"Dear my beautiful angel..." it said, in a cruel hiss that promised unspeakable agony for all the rest of time. "I'm sopleased to have you here at last."
It moved forward into the dark light.
Vinyl would have screamed, if she only could.
