The Stallion in the Corner
Her hooves meandered across the lyre’s strings, searching blindly for the next chord. At last they struck true, ringing out a note that sang to the songstress in a way only she could understand. It was quickly added to its brothers, joining them in the song that she was endeavoring to bring into reality.
She cast a glance towards the stallion who resided in the corner of the red room, her patron in this undertaking.
“Please, continue.”
His voice was calm and pleasant, yet reverberated through the small chamber with its presence. The soft light of the room reflected off of the ceramic mask that obscured his features.
She returned to her work, playing through the unfinished composition. It was a strange piece, both haunting and exhilarating, with melodies that came and went as they pleased, harmonies that clashed and fought one another, their conflict only adding to the complex whole of the work. Before long, she had reached the abrupt end of the still incomplete piece, and she began searching once again, plucking at the strings until they yielded the next perfect chord so that it too could add its voice to the song. The task may have been a monotonous one, but it consumed her and brought her joy nonetheless, for such was the work of an artist.
A sudden noise startled her out of her concentration, a series of loud thuds that came from the room’s door. It shook under the impacts, hinges rattling with each strike, but remained sealed. The percussion was soon joined by a chorus: muffled shouting, a mare’s voice, rendered incomprehensible through the heavy wood of the room’s only egress.
She looked back to the stallion, seeking guidance.
“Please, continue.” he repeated.
And so she did, tuning the noise out and focusing only on completing the song.
Her labor stretched into infinity, time having little meaning in this place. At long last, she struck a final chord; after dozens of nights of work, the song had finally reached its conclusion. With a satisfied and somewhat melancholy sigh, she placed the instrument down on the desk.
She closed her eyes and allowed oblivion to wash over her.
--ooo000ooo--
Lyra Heartstrings awoke, squinting against the sun’s rays that had intruded upon her slumber; the final chords of an unearthly song flitted past her ears before fading away like a forgotten dream. She lay there a moment, listening. The morning birdsong sounded flat to her; what once had inspired her melodies now felt dull and hollow in comparison to that which rang in her dreams.
With purpose, she rolled out of bed, the crinkling of her sheets as off-key as the rest of the world. Her hoofbeats against the wooden floor kept poor time as she trotted past the hanging mirror, pointedly ignoring the mare with the disheveled grey mane and the unkempt green coat who appeared there.
She walked through her kitchen, paying no attention to the dirty dishes stacked in the sink and the insects that had claimed them; entering the front room, she did not notice as she walked across the broken remains of what had once been a picture frame, long shards of glass embedding themselves in her hoof. Her focus was elsewhere.
The musician numbly beheld her instrument, golden sheen dulled by a fine layer of dust. It sat upon a throne of crumpled and scratched-out sheet music, the result of hours of fruitless labor and frustration. She plucked the lyre from its nest of failed compositions, her magic tuning it as she walked to the front door; it knew the correct tones, even if to her ears they were wrong. Flinging the door open, she stood there a moment, her eyes unaccustomed to the sunlight after days spent indoors.
Lyra entered the town, not bothering to close her door behind her. Her presence did not go unnoticed, many of the townsponies calling out greetings as she passed. The discordant notes of their voices only added to the perverse cacophony that permeated the world. Hoofsteps fell on the wrong beats, the birds failed to hold a tune, even the breeze whistled off key as it blew past her ears; all of it coming together to form the disjointed and broken symphony that plagued her, had plagued her even before the masked stallion had first appeared in her dreams.
Clenching her teeth, pressing her ears against her head, Lyra did her best to endure the din as she approached her goal: the familiar park bench that had once served as her stage, her testing grounds for the melodies she had once been able to create with ease. She sat herself down in her musician’s pose, and her audience assembled before her, ponies eager to hear her play after her long absence. Lyra levitated her instrument before her, and the ponies waited with bated breath for her song.
She began to play, hooves caressing the strings of her instrument as she coaxed the music into existence. The effect on the listeners was immediate; no sooner had the first few chords reached their ears then their faces began to betray their unease, pleasant smiles fading away under the sound. Some of the younger foals began to cry, though their wails could do little against the unearthly music. The older ponies shivered, some deep and primal part of their minds responding to the music with fear. Some left, others ran; many could do nothing but listen.
Lyra began to sweat, the temperature around her suddenly climbing, quickly becoming unbearable. A stifling humidity seeped into the air, choking her; she played on. Slowly her vision began to fade, taking the image of her frozen audience with it, leaving her in darkness with the song as her only company as her hooves plucked the strings of the lyre from memory alone.
An image danced across her blackened vision, of a stagnant sea with water dark as the space between stars sprawling infinitely beneath a crimson sky. Something stirred beneath the surface, something sensed but not seen; as she played on, it began to emerge from the ocean of void, a titanous mountain of flesh and sinew that rose up as if to consume the alien heavens. Even as it grew, the waters did not stir, remaining still and unblemished even as their inky surfaces reflected perfectly the horror they were birthing.
The thing rose, higher and higher; limbs began to unfurl from the main body, arms and legs and wings and claws stretching out towards the horizons. Mouths opened and began singing, adding their blasphemous chant to her lyre’s song. She continued playing, seconds stretching into minutes stretching into eternity as her hooves called forth the profane music. At last it had risen, fully emerged from the depths of the darkness below. The creature towered above Lyra, resplendent in its monstrosity as its impossibly large eyes regarded her, waiting for her labor to end.
Finally, the last chord was struck; it hung in the air for a time before fading, devoured utterly by the absolute silence that followed. Lyra trembled before the great being that sprawled into the sky, rooted to the spot. The sea began to stir, the sound of rushing water undercut with alien screams and inequine wails as it thrashed and roiled below them. The being added its own voice to the chorus of madness, its many mouths crying in harmony with the void. A third voice joined the song, shrieking alongside the waters and their child, and it was Lyra’s own.
The sea erupted, rushing upwards to consume the sky, engulfing Lyra in its caliginous waters. Once again overtaken by darkness, she did not struggle as the void consumed her, drowned her, her senses slipping away as if stolen by the nothingness around her. Clutching her lyre to her chest, she closed her eyes.
A sudden chill brought Lyra back to her senses; opening her eyes, she beheld the park where she had begun the song. Night had fallen, for the landscape was bathed in shadows, but the moon was absent from its place in the heavens. Her audience had gone, as had everypony else; the park was still, empty, and shrouded in an absolute silence only broken by Lyra’s shallow breathing.
A rustling behind her alerted Lyra to the presence of another. She slowly turned to face the newcomer, and found herself looking into the ceramic face of the stallion from her dreams.
“We thank you for your services.”
She watched as the stars over his head began disappearing. Entire fields of suns were consumed by the darkness in mere moments, the sky quickly becoming a mirror of the tenebrous sea she had borne witness to moments ago.
“Come. There is much still to be done.” He began to trot away.
Lyra, empty as the merciless void that even now devoured the night sky, followed.
