At The Threshold

by MisterGunpowder

Rating: teen
Tags: Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Octavia, Tragedy, Horror
Length: 3006

Most musicians gained their understanding of music from a teacher; Octavia Melody is no different. But her teacher had a secret to hide, and one that now draws her into its fold as well.

There are many things which hide behind the veil; terrible things, monstrous things. Things which may or may not care about us, and our only hope, our only safety, is that they do not. Octavia Melody was completely unaware of these things, and that was, perhaps, for the best. Now, it seems she will not be unaware of them for much longer, and it may all be because of her choice in teachers and the secret he possesses.

Written in honor of H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories taught me what horror truly means, and his story The Music of Erich Zann, of which much of this story draws its ideas from.

Published 2015-06-29 13:00:01 UTC
Last updated 2015-06-29 13:00:01 UTC

Music

I have but a moment's rest now. I must record the things I have seen, and the things that are now of responsibility to me and me alone. These things are vast and terrible, things which, to minds of those wholly unprepared for them, would surely send them spiraling without control into madness. Do not weep for me or heap useless pity upon my misfortune, as the duty thrust upon me in total desperation is of great importance, and was absolutely as much taken willingly as placed into my trembling hooves. This tale of mine, of these horrors, needs much explanation, explanation I cannot honestly say I have, but the effort must be made. Allow me to start from the beginning.

My name is, or perhaps was, depending on when this is read, Octavia Melody. At one point in the past, I played the cello in a musical ensemble in Canterlot; we played at the Grand Galloping Gala. However, prior to my time as a cellist in my ensemble, I had lived in and about Trottingham, where I was trained as a cellist by one Eternal Sonata. Sonata was a legend amongst musicians and cellists especially, and remembered most fondly for his often discordant and chaotic pieces that left many the average listener uncomfortable, urging unfamiliar and often grotesque feelings and thoughts forward. Only a select few found his pieces to be of great merit, and it was through these connoisseurs of cello pieces that his music was elevated to the place it deserved, though well after my time as when I was called his pupil.

I'd found myself listening with great interest as my father played his music after a day's work as, despite his strangeness, my father held a fondness for him; this fondness, which I soon shared with him, led to my decision to become a cellist. It was by sheer chance that I gained the opportunity to speak with him, in a well-to-do cafe in Trottingham. Sonata was a very quiet stallion, often bordering so much on mute that I'd almost taken him as one. His way of speaking was very careful and quiet, articulated so as to speak as efficiently as possible. I had noticed him writing on a piece of sheet music, making notes and alterations and, having just finished the basic lessons of the cello, noticed they were composed for it. I struck up a conversation and, to my surprise, he was the pony who had so thoroughly inspired me.

After the initial shock and excitement I had felt, and then expressed in not as many words as I would have preferred, my dignity was utterly reduced to a mere suggestion upon realizing I had met him. The conversation proceeded into my own studies, and, to my surprise, he began criticizing several of the principles I had been taught. It was to this effect that he had decided that the mare who had taught me, who was well known to him as such a teacher, had failed in several major places in my training with the cello. Therefore, he elected, such an injustice to music would not go unrighted.

It was then that he took me on as a pupil, much to my joy, and began teaching me in the way he himself had been taught. It was during this time that I learned why his music was so utterly full of discord and chaos: Eternal Sonata was quite utterly mad, though not to the extent I had initially believed and, following my own discoveries, not unwarranted in his madness. The way he heard music was so completely different from the norm, in that he considered Beethooven's greatest work to be his Great Fugue, and he absolutely despised the Moonlight Sonata. However, maybe in that respect he was not quite mad, as soon following his becoming my mentor I adopted his ear for music with a speed I had not thought I would. Old favourites like Mozare's Eine klein Nachtmusik were soon replaced by Flanch's Little Fugue in G Minor, which I had little fondness for prior. If that made him mad, then certainly his madness was contagious. The epitome of the madness, as it seemed to me at the time, was that he had insisted that I stay with him so that my learning was not contaminated, and upon retrospection, I do not believe he was not wrong to do so. Trottingham was inherently a musical city with diverse schools of thought on the matter. Soon, I gained an immense respect for the stallion.

The strangest part, however, is how on every night when the moon was at it darkest and the stars at their brightest, he would play. The music he played was the most chaotic and, to the normal ear, a great affront to euphonic sanity. To my unadjusted ear when I first began staying with him, the music was a shrill cacophony of psychotic notes, held together only by their proximity on whatever insane sheet of music he had before him when he played. However, as my ears and tastes adjusted further, I soon gained great fondness for it and found myself waiting eagerly for the dark nights. Sometimes, an urge would strike him from what I believed at the time to be nowhere to play this music as though he were possessed by a greater force to do so, and he quickly locked me out of his study whenever such urges took him. He would play for hours on end, to the point of exhaustion. When I asked him what caused him to play so fervently, he either outright denied that he had or said that what I heard was merely a recording of younger days.

I spent about five years as his pupil in the continuous sense. I was wont to consider myself his pupil until such time as I felt I had surpassed him, a feat which I felt was impossible as, to me, that meant matching the cacophonic uniqueness of the music he played during the dark moons. Thus, I considered myself his pupil still even long after leaving his tutelage. When I left his tutelage for Canterlot, he made me promise to come visit him for a week every year to make sure I was keeping good practice. I agreed on principle, as the request was not a particularly hard considering Trottingham's relative proximity to Canterlot by train.

These visits persisted over quite a few years, as I returned with newly developed music. Sonata was usually dubious about the new music at first, worried I had strayed from his teachings too much, though he inevitably found that I remembered his principles and kept them close at hoof to my way of playing. Sonata himself had presented little difficulty; it was Canterlot that gave me the greatest challenge as I had arrived in a city where the classical principles, the ones Sonata so fervently despised, were held in highest regard. As such, the methods of Sonata and the inherent chaotic tones they created were treated with great disdain by many of the upper crust. I had trouble finding work and drifted to and from orchestras and ensembles, though a few ponies had given me great praise for it despite.

As the years passed, I found myself elevated higher and higher, and eventually found a permanent ensemble. However, as those years passed, so too did Eternal Sonata's mind and body. Each visit was marked by a stark increase in his lunacy, and an ever increasing frequency of his lunatic playings that he denied ever doing. And with each visit, this music became more and more insane, to the point where even the tastes of mine he had modified found it disturbingly mad. Towards the end, the music began to outright defy sane description, and to attempt to describe it would inevitably underplay its lunacy to a degree that, unfortunately, would not convey its purpose.

However, it was in the final visit that I found more about his mad playing than I probably, sanely, should have. Sonata had frequently sent letters, asking when I had planned to come next. At this point in time his music had been elevated to the legendary status it deserved, and I had reached the absolute height of my career. In my responses, I assured him I would be coming soon. Eventually, he began pleading with me to come earlier, as he was not sure how much longer he would remain. Startled by this development, I cancelled all further performances for that month as, if Sonata was to die soon, I intended to be with him until he passed. My ensemble protested, of course, however as I explained the situation they relented if not understood. I left immediately for Trottingham, with far more luggage than I usually brought.

When I arrived, I found Sonata merely a shell; his once well-kept white mane was messy, as though he had been shaking his head vigourously for days at a time. His brown coat had been matted and dirty, and his fine clothes ruined with stains and sweat. He had lost an extreme amount of weight, and the stallion that had been there before me when I arrived had so closely resembled a skeleton I had thought for a minute I had been too late.

Even so, when he spoke to me and I found that I was not, and he became ecstatic that I had come, and even more so when I told him that I intended to stay until he passed on. When I asked what had become of him, he said that it was merely a disease which had taken hold of him. Thinking back now, I believe that this was technically correct, though still slightly inaccurate. Whatever the case, he still played his mad music in the study, much to my confusion considering his condition. When I confronted him on this, he said that it had to be done, and went no further.

A few weeks following my arrival, and several musical sessions in his study, I elected to enter his study during one of his private performances, and at the very least watch him. In those weeks, his condition had deteriorated significantly, and his hair had begun falling out. On top of my by no mean inconsiderable concern was my own curiosity which had remained since my time as his pupil, and added to my determination to discover what drove him to these manic performances.

When the urge overtook him next, however, his eyes had been wide, his teeth set to grind against themselves, and his nostrils had flared. He fled into his study far more urgently than he had before, and I followed after him trying to understand what took him. When I got to the door, I found that his urgency had made him rush to an extent that he had forgotten to properly lock the door. Thus I entered the study and found him sitting in his chair, playing that manic sound and facing the window.

To whomever may read this, of which I am uncertain there ever will be such a pony, I implore you, no, beg you to forgive my difficulty in describing what appeared in the window. That window, which had once contained a fantastic view of Trottingham as it overlooked the hill upon which his house stood, contained no such thing upon my entrance, only a total overwhelming darkness. It had been day when I entered, and so I assure you that it was not the night that this window showed. Indeed, as my eyes adjusted, it was not merely black, but also white with colors spread throughout, of which the black was somehow so much darker than even the most pure night could muster, and the white so much brighter than the most brilliant light. The colors it had cannot be described, as I find myself trying to describe them to myself as bluish-oranges and greenish-reds and greenish-yellow purple, whereas neither of those are in any way true colors.

Then there was Sonata, sitting there and playing his cello. His movements were as erratic and sudden as his music would suggest. His breathing was ragged, as though the strain of playing such music was taking its toll on him. His music played despite, Sonata pushing ever onward. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and all around him on the floor were dark spots where his sweat had dropped off. As he played his cello bounced and dragged across the floor and, listening to the music, it would appear that this was not unintentional. I took a step back into the hallway, too shocked and terrified to even let out a gasp.

From what manner of place the thing outside the window came from, if it was even a window at that point, I do not know. I do not believe I shall ever have the cursed blessing or, probably as the case may be, blessed curse to know. What was certain, however, is that after minutes passed of brutal playing, Sonata's right leg, the one he used to play that psychotic melody, seized as if from extreme pain. In a single moment, the music that had filled the room ceased. Sonata let out a cry of anguish and desperately tried to scrape away at the cello but his leg refused to cooperate. He lurched forward, the cello and bow falling to the ground with a hollow thud and pointed clatter respectively, and he collapsed on top of them.

My concern, love, and respect for the stallion overwhelmed my fear of the thing in the window, and I rushed into the room to his side. I knelt down next to him and rolled him over onto his back so that I could hold him, and he stared up at me, unspeaking. His eyes were dull, but from them I could divine the fear that had been in his mind through this ordeal and, as recognition set into him, I could see the fear he had for me. His lips moved, but I could not understand his intended message, though urgent. Suddenly, the glass of the window began to slowly crack, the noise filling both of our minds.

Eternal Sonata stared up to me, his eyes filling with pure anguish. He mouthed some faint message to me, but though I suspect it to have been an apology of sorts for having led me here, I can never be sure. Staring at the window, I wrapped him in an embrace, the last time I would do so whilst he still remained in this world. I know not how he reacted, but I do know what happened next greatly surprised him. As I released him from my embrace, I set him upon the floor and stood up, at which point I trotted over to the seat that he had vacated and retrieved his discarded bow and cello. That look of utmost shock and sorrow he fixated upon me then will, on my soul, exist in my mind for endless eternities, and he squeaked out something I can only recognize as another apology. Even now, even though they were inaudible squeaks, I can hear the dread and pain that had been infused into them. Mere moments later, his body fell limp, and those eyes which had once contained the spark of true mad genius gave nothing more to me, and would never give anything to anyone again.

Thus, as I sat down in that chair, I began to try to replicate the music Sonata had played to the best of my ability, as he had taught me. It began with a simple song and the glass kept forming those little cracks, but as the sanity of my performance dwindled, so too did the cracks in the glass. Soon, I abandoned all manner of sanity I had held on to for my performances in Canterlot and as I reached the apex of this insanity, the cracks in the glass began to inexplicably reverse. As they did, I heard a sound fill up the room. To myself, I hold it was a shout of anger that whatever existed inside the window gave, enraged that it had been defied again. However, writing this down, it occurs that it could have just as easily been an amused chortle. For the sake of my own mind, I must hold to the former.

I sit in that same room now as I write this, the thing in the window having seemed to dissipated for now. I do not know how long I have been sitting here playing. I do not know if I have truly succeeded in driving it off. However, what I do know is that my will is no longer entirely my own. I do not believe that, had I the wish to stop playing that mad music and leave, I would have been to stop. In my mind there no longer exists a desire to hold to those few sane principles of music that Sonata had allowed, and instead, there only exists the crazed non-harmonies that had played within this room. The most important thing in this matter, I'm sure, is that I do not know how long I have until it returns, if it indeed ever does.

To whomever may read this, if indeed there is such a pony despite my doubts on the matter, do not hold pity for me, for I chose to pick up that cello and bow. I am certain that I am doomed to have my mind and body dwindle like that of Eternal Sonata's, but remember always that I chose that. Beside me now sits the corpse of Sonata, looking at the very least peaceful after so long of being broken, tired, and anxious. If, indeed, that is where I am heading, then I have to hope that peace awaits me. It will be my only solace now.