Octavia woke to the chirruping of a bird stuck in one of her organ pipes. A ray of dusty light warmed her face through a chink in the velvet curtains of her joint studio.
“I'm going to make a filly cry today,” she said to herself, happily, and she lay for a while basking in the thought. Then she got up and did her stretches.
She blasted away the bird with a quick fugue, ran through her morning bowing exercises, and spent twenty minutes staring at a blank piece of manuscript paper, composing a ballade in her head.
She made herself some toast, and discovered that Vinyl, in the throes of a magical adventure into the mind, had turned all the plates in the kitchenette into an installation representing the fractured soundscapes of modern pony life.
Octavia ate the toast over Vinyl's half of the studio, spitefully dropping a crumb on the carpet as a lesson in dish etiquette. As soon as she was finished, she became stricken with guilt, and vacuumed Vinyl's floor and chair, organised her record midden, swept the dust, hair and owl pellets off her mixing desk, and mopped up the apple sauce that had somehow attached itself to the ceiling the night before.
When she tried to get in behind the doofplex, she found Vinyl wedged between it and the wall, upside down, rump in the air, with her neck at an odd angle and a look of rapture on her face.
“Oh, good morning,” said Octavia, crouching down to her eye level. “How are you feeling, dear? Can you move? Do you need a blanket?”
“Do you hear it?” Vinyl gasped. “The earth is breathing. This is it, this is the sound. I've found it. I've finally found it.”
“That's you, darling. You're breathing into the back of the speaker. Listen, you're going to hurt your spine, lying upside down like that. Would you like me to help you to bed?”
“It was me all along. It was me all along. Oh wow. Oh wow, wow, wow. I've found it.”
“Okay, well, I have a young student coming over this morning, so I'll need the back room to myself, and I'll need you to keep your creativity to a modest volume for an hour or so. Do you think you can manage that?”
“A student, eh? A student, a student. The student has become the student, the master the master.”
“Indeed,” said Octavia, and stood up. “Alrighty then. I'll leave you to your work. You take care now.” She surveyed the studio, decided she'd adequately atoned for her messiness, and went outside for some fresh air.
As she stepped into the sun, she closed her eyes and breathed in deeply, letting the warm, earthy, apple blossom scent of the Equestrian countryside fill her nostrils. A lazy early summer breeze rolled through the grass and gently buffeted her mane.
“I wonder if Diamond Tiara is more of a sobber or a smasher,” she thought. “I hope she's a smasher. Spoiled Rich would definitely rather buy us a new stereo system for the annex than let that information get out.”
She sat for a while beneath an oak tree, gazing at the rooftops of Ponyville and the snow-capped peaks that rose from emerald hills behind them, and the grandeur of it all made her reflect on the rich and fulfilling life she'd built here with her best friend, in this beautiful, vibrant, tightly knit little retreat, and how terribly, terribly lucky she was to have found such a blissful existence in a chaotic world. She thought of how much she meant to the community of students, fans and collaborators she'd gathered over the years from all over Equestria, and how much they meant to her, and she sighed and let the simple joy of living fill her up like a horn chorale.
The she stood, brushed the grass from her coat, and returned home, to remove everything irreplaceable from the teaching annex for safekeeping, whistling her new ballade as she went.
There were some ponies who might have found the renowned cellist's personal vendetta against an innocent filly to be somewhat undignified- petty, even. Those ponies had no idea. No idea whatsoever.
It had all started when Octavia and Vinyl, two city ponies of modestly comfortable means, had made the seemingly innocuous decision to buy a house in Ponyville.
Octavia and Vinyl had been prodigies together, back in the day- a duet, that had filled the concert halls of Equestria with awe and envy. Monocle Snoot of Gramopone had famously called them “the souls of Whinnyawski and Croupinstein, reborn.”
The years had taken them down different paths, of course.
Octavia had followed the path of least resistance, from prodigy to soloist to chamber musician and pedagogue. It was a path well lit by the praise of old, rich ponies with fancy hats, not that she had ever cared what they thought. Her mind had always been on the irresistible prize- the surrender of her being to the creation of music. Her dogged, relentless pursuit of that one and only sensation had sculpted her body as well as her thoughts, and, though she was still fairly young, had given her a distinguished air of venerability.
Vinyl, by contrast, would never be venerable, not if she grew wings and lived for a thousand years. The warm approval of her betters was like an oven to her, cooking her flesh with every smile and every toast. She had fed herself to a much vaster, hungrier beast, the clawing public abyss, and it had eaten her up with relish.
Octavia often listened to DJ Pon-3's fat beats, and thought of the delicacy with which Vinyl the pianist had once coaxed anguish and ecstasy from pinpricks on silence, and she would get all maudlin and superior for a while. But in her heart, Octavia knew that, though the animal at the core of every pony was a simple creature, easy to please and easy to move with sick bass and killer drops, the courage that it took to abandon centuries of safe and structured beauty, face that animal head on at its most primal, tame it, and ride it to glory, was more than she possessed.
In any case, whatever philosophical differences lay between them, their personalities snapped together like puzzle pieces. Each possessed what the other lacked, and that perhaps more than anything else was what drew them into each other's lives.
As with so many parted friends, it was in Manehattan that their paths had reconverged.
Octavia had been visiting town with her ensemble, to play at the wedding of two celebrities whose names she'd never bothered to learn. Vinyl had been three days into a creative drought, sleeping under a bridge to avoid having to look at her mixing desk. They had both been tired, sad and lonely, and when a chance encounter had thrown them back together, all it had taken was a few drinks and old stories to convince them that it was time to give up the cosmopolitan life and move to a house in the country.
They'd kept in touch after that, and two years later, they'd made good on their resolution.
After months of hunting, they'd found the perfect place, a tiny two bedroom cottage with a wide atrium built specially for the pitter patter of piano keys, in a town that was just the right distance from the clubs and conservatories of Canterlot. They had fallen in love with it the moment they'd opened the door.
It had been an investment property, belonging to the Rich estate, kept empty by draconian tenancy clauses, and it had taken a great deal of light hoofed negotiation to convince Spoiled to sell it.
But they had succeeded in securing an agreement.
All it had taken was the promise of one little performance, from Octavia's ensemble, at the cute-ceañera of Spoiled's daughter, Diamond Tiara.
The gifts Octavia had needed to purchase, to convince her fellow virtuosi to come and play, for free, at a children's party at a confectionery in Nowhereville, had not been cheap. Nor had it been easy to hold her head high and her bow steady while Spoiled and her boisterous event planner barked orders at her in a tone she'd have had a hard time taking from a princess. But she'd endured, for Vinyl and for the house.
Then Diamond Tiara had arrived, with her sycophantic sidekick, and seen the ensemble, seated between the balloons like champagne in a sippy cup, suffering through the selection of tween pop hits she'd chosen for them, carrying all the dignity of a flayed clown. She'd approached them, and listened for a few seconds, then she'd turned to her friend and said, “they're not very good, are they?”
“I'll show you good, you little snot-weevil,” Octavia had murmured.
She hadn't meant for Diamond Tiara to hear. But the violins had been loud, and her own rage had been louder, and it had just sort of burst out.
“Lose the band,” Diamond had said, to the party pony, without actually turning to address her. “Put a record on, or something. Something good.”
The sidekick had giggled, and the two of them had clopped away to terrorise the guests, while the party pony apologised over and over and booted Octavia and her ensemble out the door, with a basket of cupcakes for the road. The cupcakes had narrowly saved Octavia's life, judging by the looks she'd received from her colleagues.
A few weeks later, after a hundred or so hot showers, and a half dozen failed attempts to contact Spoiled by mail, Octavia had gone in pony to the Rich mansion to discuss the changeover. Diamond Tiara had been there as well, strutting up and down the cavernous hall where Spoiled made her visitors wait to be greeted.
She had looked at Octavia, and the paperwork she was carrying, and she'd grinned the sweet grin of a hungry parasprite.
“Mother dearest,” she had shouted, through the oak door at the end of the hall, after rapping it twice with her hoof. “May I have a word? I have a request to make.”
Spoiled had peeked her head out, looking as angry as she always did. “What is it, sweetheart? Is it a quick request? I'm in the middle of a crossword.”
“Oh, it's nothing, really. It's just... my associates and I find ourselves in need of a clubhouse, so we can meet and discuss how best to use our cutie marks to forge our names, further our family legacies, etcetera. I was wondering if you were currently using that cottage on the hill for anything important? The one with the topiary dragon out the front. I swear, we wouldn't damage the resale value. It would really help us to develop a solid brand and cement our influence in the community and all that good stuff.”
Spoiled and Diamond had both looked over Diamond's shoulder, to where Octavia was sitting, and they had smiled, and Octavia's heart had sunk.
The legal battle had been long and gruelling. Octavia and Vinyl had almost bankrupted themselves fighting the Riches' team of Manehattan solicitors.
Vinyl still to this day refused to believe that Diamond Tiara was anything but a poor, innocent little pawn in a game played high above her head.
But Octavia knew evil when she saw it, and that filly was the purest she'd ever seen.
That was all in the past, though.
They'd won the battle in the end. They'd moved into the house, renovated it, made it their own, shaped the topiary dragon into a quaver, built a nest lovely enough to spend the rest of their lives protecting.
The princess of friendship had exploded Ponyville into a famous hub of culture and communal living, and Mayor Mare's aggressive campaign to fight gentrification and urbanisation, by squashing Filthy Rich's manipulation of the real estate boom, had ended up consuming all of Spoiled's attention.
After a while, Mare's campaign, along with the influx of new blood, had weakened the Riches' hold on the town. Ponies spoke openly and with glee of the bags under Spoiled's sloppily made up eyes, and Filthy's new thousand yard stare, and Diamond Tiara's falling grades.
Octavia would have been lying if she'd said she didn't enjoy watching it happen, just a little.
Two days ago, Spoiled had come to her door, and asked for cello lessons for her daughter.
Snippets of that conversation still bounced around in Octavia's head, lifting the corners of her mouth every time they hit the wall.
“I want the best, and I hear that's you.”
And, “Diamond has been listening to some ponies of very poor character. We've decided she needs more structure in her life.”
And, “I don't care how you do it. Hit her, scream at her, whatever it takes. Just do it.”
The tables had turned. Oh, how they had turned.
Octavia tended to think of herself as a pony of strong principles. She believed with every tendon in her body that music was magic, and that ponies who grew up without it grew up missing a vital piece of their selves.
She believed that no duty she could ever perform was more sacred or beautiful than the immersion of a fresh soul into that deep and restless ocean where every wordless story crashed and broke. Guiding a foal through the first fragile years of scraping and screeching, where the tones of a lifetime were set, took velvet hooves and iron nerves. She generally left the task to better ponies than herself, preferring to hand pick her private pupils from the top ranks of top conservatories, the self propelled powerhouses whose lives she couldn't accidentally deprive of music with a harsh or careless word.
When she taught, she taught with compassion, enthusiasm, and creativity, because to do otherwise was to besmirch the very essence of music itself.
But she knew the tricks. She and Vinyl had studied under the great Maestoso at the Accademia Cadenza, where the stationery said “Perfection or Nothing,” and where students stooped and rebuilt their spirits every morning before dawn. She'd seen horses, raised from birth to wield a bow, reduced to rocking and sobbing by a single mistake. She'd watched them swear off music, sell their instruments and drink themselves to death, and she'd faced, so many times, the urge to join them.
She knew how to be cruel. It was a skill she'd always wanted to use, if only she'd been given a proper opportunity.
Now, at last, one had arrived, gift-wrapped, on her doorstep.
She was going to make the most of it.
The doorbell chimed the Dies Amor theme from Applehaven's Missa Amicitia.
Octavia opened the front door slowly, and leered down at the filly who sat panting on the doorstep, beside a black cello case that was bigger than herself.
“Diamond Tiara, I presume.”
Diamond leered back, and invited herself in, dragging the cello behind her.
She looked around, and wrinkled her snout. “Is this where you live? Mother said you were a pony of repute. This place is revolting.”
Octavia could see what she meant. Vinyl had risen at last, and made an attempt at breakfast, which now lay strewn across her floor and equipment, mostly uneaten. She was lying with her head on the mixing desk, licking the sliders up and down, humming tunelessly to herself, her leg twitching.
Her lack of awareness annoyed Octavia to no end. But Octavia knew Vinyl cared about the studio just as much as she did, and she'd be damned if she was going to let somepony else, let alone this baby she-demon, get away with comments like that.
“I'll tell you what,” she said. “You go earn a friendship medal from the princess for services to interior decorating, then you can come give me a lesson. Get through that door.”
The words came easily to her, as did the coldness with which she said them. It was almost scarily easy.
“The little one is here,” said Vinyl. “Greetings, little one. You are like us, but tiny.”
“Stay away from her, Vinyl,” said Octavia. “You're too impressionable to talk to foals right now.”
“Roger that,” said Vinyl.
Octavia ushered Diamond into the teaching annex, and closed the door behind them.
Diamond plonked her case down heavily, and wandered about the room, examining the flea market furniture with a sneer.
Octavia set the metronome on her bookshelf to 58 beats per minute and started it ticking, a trick she'd learned from Maestoso to gently fray the nerves of any pony raised around clocks.
“So, Octavia...”
“Mistress Melody, if you please.”
“Mistress Melody. If you're a cellist, how come your cutie mark is a treble clef?”
Octavia narrowed her eyes. “Who told you to say that? Was it Heartstrings? You know she can't even play the harp?”
Diamond smiled. “It's my business to know these things.”
“Well, the joke's on you,” said Octavia. “I'm not ashamed that I used to play violin. Michelle and I made peace with it years ago.”
Diamond raised an eyebrow. “Michelle?”
Octavia corrected herself.
“You know what, you're an impertinent brat. I have bottles of sauce older than you. You don't have any business, and you don't know anything.”
Diamond stifled a giggle.
This was not going well.
Octavia dropped into her tartan chair, and leaned back, putting her hooves on the coffee table.
She was acting too nice. She'd been a kind old mentor for so long, it was seeping through under the grouchiness.
She thought back to the Accademia for inspiration.
“Get your instrument out,” she said. “Play me a note. Any note.”
Diamond opened her case, and removed the half sized cello.
The instrument was one of the most beautiful Octavia had ever seen, dark spruce and maple, with a rich, layered texture and the delicate craftsmanship of a master luthier. The scroll was carved in the shape of a unicorn's head, the signature of the hermit maestro himself, Belsuono Stranaforma.
Stranaforma never made undersized instruments. The love and attention he poured into his work, in his little hut on his desolate mountain, would have been wasted on such small, shallow bellies, and on the beginners who would doubtless wring their necks.
Octavia curtailed her curiosity, and fixed a look of sour disapproval to her face.
Diamond sat on the student stool, adjusted her tail spike, and drew the bow across an open D, releasing a pure, steady tone.
This was clearly not her first lesson. Octavia gave no indication that she was impressed.
“I want you to be honest with me,” she said. “Do you think that sounded good?”
Diamond shrugged. “It's not for me to say. But yes.”
Octavia shook her head slowly. “No. No, no, no. Come on, tell me what you did wrong.”
“Isn't that your job?”
They were veering off script. No pony had ever talked back to Maestoso when he was in the kill zone. Octavia wasn't sure how to respond.
“You're never going to be a musician,” she said, falling back to the old standard. “You know that, right?”
“Okay,” said Diamond Tiara.
“I want to hear you say it.”
“I'm never going to be a musician.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don't know. Late start? Lazy teacher? Better things to do?”
Octavia looked at her. She looked right back.
She wasn't a pupil, Octavia told herself. Those weren't the eyes of a pony who could be saved by music. Diamond Tiara was the enemy, and she was winning.
The metronome waved back and forth on the shelf, ticking, winding down time.
The air in the annex clung to Octavia's coat like a swarm of seed pods.
“It's because you're weak and worthless,” she said. “A musician needs talent, strength of character, a soul full of magic, a shred of love in their life. What do you have?”
Diamond smiled, properly, for the first time since she'd arrived. She looked like a cat that had just seen a mouse emerging from its hole.
Something crashed in the studio.
“Are you alright?” Octavia shouted, leaning forwards.
“I'm fine,” came Vinyl's voice, through the door. “Just fell off my stool.”
“What a moron,” said Diamond.
Without thinking, Octavia stood up, and slapped her.
“She's a genius,” she said.
Diamond was still grinning, so Octavia slapped her again, sending her tiara flying under the table, and kicked the bow out of her hoof.
She pulled her foreleg back, but stopped herself from going for a third slap. Spoiled might have given her free rein to be violent, but the police probably wouldn't. Octavia still had a career to think about.
“Don't stop now,” Diamond said. “I could feel your talent rubbing off on me.”
Her face remained smug, but her body cowered.
A pocket of weight and noise flashed in Octavia's mind, a memory of a dream perhaps. A filly crouched into the corner of a cold practice room, while a pony who was Celestia, Maestoso and herself, flailed at her with the staff- the staff, she'd forgotten the staff- and the Accompanist, the Other, the Magic, screamed at the god pony thing, again and again, until it turned the staff on her, and the filly kept crouching, pretending not to hear, all within a single blotchy, discordant image, between two strikes of the metronome.
Octavia felt light-headed and feverish. She needed to open a window, or stop the metronome, or something.
Diamond blazed like the sun below her, a burning circle of hate too hot and bright to look at directly. It was as though every mistake, every dark thought, every pointless failure in Octavia's life, had taken shape in one monstrous, malevolent apparition.
She could sense, like a soloist sensing the mind of a composer, how important it was that she not lose this fight. A voice that sounded like her rational mind told her to calm down, to look at herself, to think about what she was doing, but every word it said was a wrong note. In her deepest bowels of knowing, where the fragments of symphonies tossed and churned, she knew that if she couldn't make the filly cry, all those mistakes and thoughts and failures would rise up and engulf her in a black sludge from which she would never escape.
She sat back down.
“Pick up your bow,” she said. “Don't drop it again, you'll damage the stick.”
Her eyes flicked to the digital clock on the stereo.
Five minutes had passed.
Only fifty-five to go.
Fifty-five minutes to make Diamond Tiara cry.
The metronome ticked. The air stagnated.
Octavia hoped she could survive that long.
Fifty-two minutes.
Fifty minutes.
Forty-nine minutes.
Forty-seven minutes.
Octavia dug up memory after memory of her time at the Accademia, sifting through the most evil forms of torment in search of the one that would bring her victory.
She made Diamond Tiara play a series of open strings, berating her technique without offering advice, demanding things like “more overlay on the accent” or “like a breeze, but without the breathiness.” Diamond ignored the demands with unconcealed amusement, and played each note exactly the same, clean and confident.
Octavia made her put the cello down, grunting that she was “obviously not ready,” and got her to practise holding the bow, suggesting exercises that required her to grow prehensile tentacles out of her hoof.
Diamond politely asked Octavia to demonstrate the exercises for her, which earned her a time out for “sheer calk-headed idiotry.”
She stood in the corner, trembling, while Octavia called her a “gaping bedsore” and a “pus-soaked disposable sponge” and waited for her to crack.
Diamond snorted, seemingly despite herself, and Octavia realised that the trembling was holding back laughter.
Her tactics weren't enough. None of it was enough.
How could Octavia expect to defeat true evil while barely skimming the surface herself? She had to go deeper, to unlock the power Maestoso had planted within her.
Again, her head filled with wrong notes, telling her to take a step back and just look at herself, and the melody soared over the top of them, driving ever onwards into madness to the beat of the metronome.
It lifted her to her hooves, and as the blood rushed from her head, the room swam into focus. All of a sudden, she was there, in the body of Celestia, Maestoso and herself, as tall as the clouds.
The filly still burned below her, but from so high up, the hate was more pity than dread, and it no longer hurt to look at.
Something glittered on the floor at Octavia's hooves. She stooped to pick it up. It was Diamond's tiara.
The words that Octavia spoke poured through her like a favourite concerto, from a composer far higher than herself, who saw the filly through unflinching eyes and knew what cadences to strike.
“Oh look,” she said. “It's a little crown. How cute, you think you're some kind of princess.”
She waved the tiara at Diamond, who kept facing the corner. As Octavia talked, she paced, and Celestia and Maestoso paced with her.
“I'll tell you right now, you're not a princess. You can't fly. You don't have a horn you can turn outwards to look for the soul of the universe, or inwards to look for your own. All you have is the earth. Dirt and rocks and dung. It's where you came from, it's where you're going. And you're never going to touch it, are you? You'll never really feel it under your hooves, because you're floating on this bubble of rules and training and... and nothing, that you call a personality, pretending to be more than you are, hoping your cutie mark will save you.”
She threw the tiara at the ground without a shred of self awareness, lost completely in the music.
“It's not going to save you. Some ponies' marks turn the world into a playground, but not yours. Yours is a prison. You'll always be locked in this mean, small, single-minded game your mother bred you to play, and you'll play it admirably, like a true one trick pony, hoping for that... that paradise of victory... where everypony around you loves you and respects you. You'll know that they never will, that you're digging for fool's gold; you'll know that every smile you ever receive will be fake, but the mark will keep driving you, because that tiara is the only life you were ever given.”
She stopped pacing, and stared at the ticking claw of the metronome, panting.
“Ponies don't change once they get their marks,” she said. “Not really. All they do is break. And nothing breaks like a diamond.”
There was silence for a while.
When Diamond turned around, her eyes were moist.
Octavia's heart jumped. She was pony sized and singular again, but at the sight of her enemy's tears, her vision swam and she glowed like a princess. The melody climaxed and resolved, and in the white applause that followed, her reason no longer clashed.
She was just a teacher. Diamond was just a student. Both were mere ponies, solid shadows of the titans that had inhabited the room moments before.
Octavia staggered, leaning on the bookshelf to keep from falling.
What had she done? What had she become?
“Thank you,” said Diamond, and her voice cracked.
Octavia closed her eyes.
How could she ever teach again, after having...
It wasn't her. Surely it wasn't her. Some powerful magic was at work here.
Was this what Vinyl saw when she turned her horn inwards?
Diamond cleared her throat.
“Thank you, for baring your soul to me like that. I'm... I'm truly honoured.”
Octavia looked up, confused. “What?”
Diamond's voice was gossamer.
“That speech wasn't about me at all, was it? It's alright, Octavia, I know it can't have been easy for you.”
The comment caught Octavia off guard, its implication even more so.
“I... what... Mistress Melody...”
“I have so many questions, Octavia. You don't have to answer, of course, I just... I'm burning with curiosity. Does Vinyl know you're jealous of her horn? Have you ever talked with her about it? Oh no, that's too personal, I'm sorry. What about your cutie mark? You obviously hate the treble clef, so much so you became a cellist to get away, but it still haunts you, doesn't it? Bad memories with the violin? No, it's music in general, isn't it, you just thought it was the violin when you were younger. Oh, that must be hard. You must just want to crawl out of your own hide. I'm sorry. Please stop me if I'm offending you.”
Octavia gaped and swallowed.
“I...”
It had happened so fast. They had switched places, the filly and the maestro, and now all Octavia wanted was for the enemy, who had calmly beaten her in her moment of triumph, to smile at her, or ruffle her mane, or give some indication that she had done a good job.
Diamond Tiara sighed.
“Well,” she said. “I think I've learned enough to be getting on with.”
She picked up her crown, blew on it, and placed it daintily on her head.
She cleared her throat.
“Vinyl!” she screamed. “Anypony! Come help! Octavia's bullying me!”
The door burst open.
Vinyl entered, with her headphones around her neck. She looked like a pony who had just seen her own ghost, caught it, and had a conversation with it about analog flangers.
“What's going on in here?” she demanded, blinking rapidly at the change in lighting.
“Get out,” said Octavia. “This doesn't concern you.”
Diamond ran to Vinyl and hid behind her legs. “She's been hitting me and calling me names. She wants to make me just like her.”
Octavia realised what was happening, and her panic increased. “Don't listen to her, Vinyl. She's trying to manipulate you. Go have a drink of water and a lie down, or go for a walk, or something.”
Vinyl laughed, and patted Diamond on the head. “How could she manipulate me? She's just a foal.”
“Right, she's just a foal. So you shouldn't listen to her.”
“But foals have a secret wisdom that grown-ups tend to forget,” said Diamond.
“That's true,” Vinyl nodded, sagely.
Diamond hugged her leg. “Octavia doesn't understand. She just wants to control everything.”
“You loathsome little worm,” Octavia spat, and she lunged forwards, banging her shin on the coffee table and swearing.
Vinyl put a hoof around Diamond to protect her, and shrank back from Octavia in horror. “What's wrong with you?” she gasped. “Your silhouette's all black and made of eyes and teeth.”
“She's a monster,” Diamond said. “She wants to steal your horn.”
“What the hell?” said Octavia.
“You want to steal Vinyl's horn. Don't deny it.”
“That's crazy,” said Vinyl, not entirely convincingly. “That's... I shouldn't...”
“She wants your magic.”
Vinyl shook her head like it was covered in flies, and pushed Diamond away. Diamond scampered past Octavia and hid behind the stereo, but Octavia was too preoccupied with Vinyl to chase her.
Vinyl put her head on the floor, and swayed side to side, moaning. “No, no, no, no, no. I don't know you, I don't know you, I don't know you.”
Octavia rested a friendly hoof on her shoulder, and her repetition of the phrase “I don't know you” became rapid and intense for a second, as her whole body clenched up.
Octavia removed the hoof. Vinyl took a deep breath, and went back to moaning and swaying.
“Aaaargh. I do know her. I know she's dead. Dead, dead, dead. Dead eyes, dead music. It's not enough, though, is it? Never enough, never enough. She has to spend her death grinding up foals and pumping them into the stomachs of dead composers, so they'll end up corpse shit like her. What a waste, what a waste. Poor little Tavia, who's gonna save ya, from your own wretched infectious behaviour? Play me a melody, Melody, milady.”
Octavia knelt beside her.
“You're in control,” she said. “I'm here. You're safe. Everything's under control.”
Vinyl made a noise like a blender overheating, and dropped onto her stomach.
“Eeeeeh! No! No, no, no! No! Get off me! I have to sink, I have to reach the bottom, find that place of authenticity.”
She sobbed, and pounded the floor. The metronome ticked on, relentless.
“You can't let me have that, can you? The thought that somepony might find a morsel of integrity in this fake, pastel world just burns at your guts, doesn't it? Every time I get close, it's like the fog turns thick and hot and I'm swimming in mud, mud all around me, warm and comforting, the hug of death. You're always there, always there. 'Shush, shush, I'm here, I'm here, I'm your friend, you're not alone. No more cold, no more pain.' Kill yourself. The pain is living, truth, wailing, throbbing, the roar. The perfect sound. Why are you always there?”
She trailed off into uncontrolled weeping, and Octavia stroked her neck, murmuring gently that everything was going to be alright.
“Well,” said Diamond. “I'm glad we've got all that out on the table.”
Octavia rounded on her. “You!”
“Help, Vinyl, she's going to kill me!”
Vinyl raised her head. “Huh?”
“I'm not going to hurt her,” said Octavia. “I just want her to leave. I want her to get out of this house and never return.”
“Think about what you're saying, Vinyl,” Diamond gabbled, ducking under Octavia's hoof. “If Octavia's friendship is holding you back from finding your perfect sound, can you really afford to have her in your life?”
Vinyl stood up, to keep Diamond from leaving the annex. “Wait a minute. I love Octavia.”
“Of course you do,” said Diamond, knocking a music stand over to slow Octavia down. “She's your best friend. That's not something you just throw away. She's not the problem.”
Octavia stopped chasing her. “What?”
She realised, all of a sudden, that Diamond was just making this up as she went along, like some insane jazz prodigy. She wondered how much work had gone into cultivating this level of smoothness, and found herself almost respecting the little filly.
Diamond put the coffee table between them, and stopped running.
“Of course you're not the problem. Vinyl, she's trying. There's life in her, I've seen it. It's not her.”
She paused, dramatically.
“It's Michelle.”
Octavia faced Vinyl, who looked dangerously close to an epiphany.
“Vinyl, don't you dare.”
“Get rid of Michelle,” said Diamond, “and the two of you can share that perfect sound together.”
“Vinyl, I swear to Applehaven and the old masters, if you lay one hoof on my cello I will wear you like a ballgown.”
Vinyl darted out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
Octavia scrambled after her.
When she got the door open, the bottle green case was already open on the floor, and Vinyl was struggling to unstrap Michelle from her safe padding.
Octavia tackled her, and pinned her to the floor. “I said, don't touch her,” she bellowed, in the voice of a mother minotaur.
“Relax, Octavia,” said Diamond, behind her. “This is what you've always wanted. You can start again, focus your life on something other than music. Show that treble clef which one of you is in control of your destiny.”
Octavia and Vinyl wrestled across the line in the carpet.
Octavia could feel Michelle watching the whole juvenile display, disapprovingly, unaware of her own vulnerability.
“How could you love that instrument more than your best friend?” Vinyl choked, as Octavia's hoof pressed against her throat.
“Yeah,” said Diamond. “How could you?”
“Vinyl!” Octavia snapped, lifting her hoof off Vinyl's neck and slapping her in the face. “You're chasing a fantasy!”
Vinyl coughed and gagged.
“There's no one perfect sound,” said Octavia. “If there was, we'd never have invented music. How many times do you have to go down this road before you learn?”
Vinyl stopped struggling.
Octavia bowed her head.
She closed her eyes. Her mind reached around the studio, touching everything she and Vinyl had gathered, and her eyes welled up against her will.
“Can you tell me what's wrong with a good sound? A good pony? A good life? Somehow we always end up back here.”
Vinyl laughed, bitterly.
“Of course she'd say that,” said Diamond. “She'll never be great in the same way you are, not with that coffin weighing her down. The hungry pony finds the most berries, as they say.”
“Don't let her in your head,” said Octavia. “Look at me. I'm real. Everything's under control.”
Vinyl screwed up her face and yelled, a bleating yell like an injured goat.
Octavia slapped her gently, and said “Vinyl, listen to me,” but it only made her yell louder.
“Vinyl Scratch,” said Diamond, with authority, and Vinyl stopped.
Octavia noticed that Diamond had her cello beside her, all packed up in its case.
Diamond caressed the air with her words. “Vinyl, you're alright, you hear me? This was all just a test of your friendship. You passed. Well done. Everything is back to normal now.”
“What?”
“You did it, whatever it is. It's over. You won.”
“I won...”
Octavia looked at Diamond, incredulously. The filly's face had the bored tranquility of a predator who has decided its belly is full enough for mercy.
“It's alright, Mistress Melody,” she said. “I'm leaving. There's just one thing we need to discuss before I go.”
Octavia twisted around, without letting Vinyl up.
She gritted her teeth. “What's that?”
Diamond Tiara sniffed.
“You don't want to teach me. I get it. That's fine. I don't want to learn from you either. Frankly, I'm doing fine so far learning from books. I'll never be a pro, but I think I've got enough basic technique to convince Mother you're doing your job, at least until this latest incident at the school blows over.”
She lowered her voice conspiratorially.
“What I need you to do is lie for me. Every week, I come here, I sit with you, I play you my scales, you put a big shiny sticker on your whiteboard under my name, I take a small step forwards. That's what you tell Mother. Do you think you can handle that? Or do you need me to come back?”
Octavia just stared at her.
“Can you handle it, yes or no?” said Diamond. “Please, all I want is one hour of freedom a week, to go and play with my new friends. If I have to spend it with you and Vinyl instead, I will, but I'll be bloody annoyed. Believe me, I'm a whole different pony when I'm annoyed.”
Octavia was too upended to argue.
She nodded blankly. “Okay,” she said.
“Swear it,” said Diamond. “On your professional reputation. Swear you'll convince Mother I'm your student.”
Octavia saw a never-ending pit of lies opening beneath her. She took a deep breath and dived in, uttering the words, “I swear,” as though they were “so be it.”
She knew it wasn't an idle oath. It couldn't be. Diamond Tiara probably had her own professional reputation to maintain.
“Brilliant,” said Diamond. “Well then. I'll see you at my first recital.”
She dragged her cello past Vinyl and Octavia, and opened the front door. As she passed outside, she turned around, and smiled.
“You're wrong, by the way,” she said. “I think you are, at least. About ponies, and cutie marks. A symbol is just a symbol. If you don't think its meaning can change, ask an old pony and a young pony what a moon symbol means.”
She closed the door behind her.
Vinyl and Octavia lay in the middle of the floor, on the border between chaos and the grave.
Michelle's case was still open beside them. Octavia reached out and closed it, just to be safe.
She put her head on Vinyl's barrel.
“There's my perfect sound,” she said. “Wow, your heart has the fattest beats. You should get that looked at, before you have a coronary.”
Vinyl didn't laugh, so Octavia laughed for her, mostly out of relief at Diamond Tiara's departure.
Her head was still spinning, trying to make sense of what had just happened, and what she had gotten herself into, and whether she was even a good pony after all, and so many other things that all sort of blurred into a calming, featureless spiral. The metronome ticked faintly from the annex, overpowered by Vinyl's pulse.
Lying there, in the stillness that was far from silent, Octavia almost understood why Vinyl did what she did.
The pulse thudded through both bodies, pumping life and marking time.
What other sound was there, besides this beat? What was a symphony but half an hour of furious noise, painstakingly formed, like a pearl, to protect a composer from this grit pounding in her chest and in every other pony's chest since creation?
Right at that moment, as two hearts beat against each other, the idea of scratching the pearl away and keeping the grit seemed like the definition of perfection.
But Octavia knew the moment would pass.
And when they separated, there would be nothing.
Perfection and nothing, they were one and the same. To chase one was to become both.
Madness, music, magic. Friendship. It all lay near the edges, in the imperfect secretions of self protection that wrapped around a jagged treble clef, the size of a grain of silt.
Vinyl shifted, and pushed Octavia off her. “I'm sorry,” she whispered.
Octavia stroked Vinyl's flank.
“It's alright,” she said. “She's gone now.”
Vinyl stood up. “I need to work. The spell's already starting to wear off.”
“Vinyl, I...”
“I have twelve new tracks due last Wednesday. I need to find the sound that connects them, you understand? I'm swearing off magic for a month after this, so I'm running out of time. Oh Cadenza, time, time! That's... no, that's fascile. That's almost as bad as a heartbeat. I wonder what sound a dragon would make if you fed it nothing but asphalt for a week.”
She wandered into the kitchenette, and poured a box of cereal onto the counter, poking the tip of her hoof in and out of the stream of falling oats while she continued talking to herself.
Octavia made to approach her, to debrief, apologise, forgive, but something held her back.
Maybe it was the distance of the world Vinyl seemed to be inhabiting. Maybe it was Diamond's empty assurance that their friendship was secure.
But Octavia got the sense that, whatever needed to be said, it could wait, forever if need be.
Nothing had changed between them. Nothing would ever change between them.
They would always be there, like warm mud, to keep each other from perfection.
The thought was a sweet and simple melody, that almost fit the chords beneath it. Octavia went into the annex, and stopped the metronome, then she let the melody play for her until it was the only truth she could hear.
