The concert was a success, but an imperfect, uncertain one. Curiosity more than anything lured ponies in, filling the hall only three-quarters with discounted tickets at the gate. Some were awed by the performance, though most were merely satisfied.
The stern, prestigious critics of Canterlot spent the whole time frowning and taking notes. They could make or break Octavia, and did neither. Praise was consistent, but not effusive. Back-hoofed compliments found their way into magazines and newspapers: “Excellent, for a newcomer to the field,” and “Not badly impeded by her lack of experience.”
At the very least, Octavia had become accepted as a composer. It would do. The concert launched her patron orchestra into a small tour around Canterlot and nearby cities, and these few months proved one long moment of truth. If they failed, the orchestra would be bankrupt and no one would ever gamble on her again.
So she traveled with them. The managers were happy enough for an extra hoof. She fine-tuned the music in shared hotel rooms and helped coach the musicians. Dispensing with pride, she bought a copper ear-horn and leaned in when the violinists played. There were squabbles and arguments – musicians tended to be an acerbic bunch, and many happily counter-punched Octavia’s sharp critiques. Frustrated and salty, desperate to prove the other wrong, both parties redoubled their efforts and thus improved. Both needed the other, after all.
Like the concert itself, the tour was a mild success. Such was a good norm, and the managers rented out a tavern for their wrap party. Octavia accepted her toast with dignity, then was left utterly alone save for a few congratulations spoken loudly into her ear.
The party went on around her, reduced in her hearing to a dull and distant roar. Cellists laughing with trombone players, while the flutists played a drunken game of stacking mugs.
No one gave her a second look. She was not their peer, their friend. Merely part of the terrain, a new composer who saw them paid for next few months.
Octavia retired early to the hotel, pulled a new notebook from her suitcase, and began to write.
That was the question, of course. For those few critics and potential patrons who saw fit to ask: could she do it again? Composing an entire symphony for an entire orchestra was a Celestia-like burden even at its most mundane level: ensuring the rainbow of different instruments rang out with both harmony and distinction, lacing their sounds together like the most complex spiderweb which could ever be imagined. Then one had to take that mere mathematical intelligence and bend it to fickle emotion, pouring out one’s own soul to stir the universal consistencies within all living beings, plucking their chords of sadness, pride, or joy so they might feel the barest hint of what the composer endured to bring it to their ears. Thence, hopefully, to recommend their friends and family buy tickets for the next performance.
To be a composer was not merely to wrestle with this impossible formula, merging the absurdly complex with the silent, desperate voice of heart. But to do it again, and again.
Octavia wrote on the train to Canterlot, and the carriage to her apartment. Next morning she walked down the street to purchase bread and good root vegetables with long shelf lives, carrots and turnips. Then to the clerk’s store two doors down for paper, ink, and lamp oil. She spoke to no one but the shopkeepers, and did not leave her apartment again all the next week.
A bare trickle of money began to come in. A few orchestras licensed individual songs in her symphony, and two bands bought permission to convert them to quartets or solos. Every bit was saved, best as she could.
Months passed in monotony, at least to an outsider. Write, eat, sleep.
“Were you stupid?” Discord asked abruptly.
The old Octavia gave him a half-lidded glare.
“Okay, so here you’re like a year away from your next real payday. I get that part. But if frugality is the idea, maybe don’t stay in the most famously expensive city in Equestria?”
“Where else would I go?” Octavia grumbled.
Discord raised an eyebrow and said nothing.
Octavia turned away. “I told you before. It’s not just Canterlot, it’s ‘Canterlot.’ Golden roofs, and so on. It is where I belong.”
An envelope with a pair of sunglasses doodled on crossed her young’s self’s desk. It sat there for a few days before she swept it to the waste-tin, unopened.
“That sounds like an excuse,” Discord said.
Octavia did not answer. They watched in silence as her young self continued her labor. Write, eat. The isolation, the deafness, all this was simply her life now.
Her second symphony came – more refined than the first, with lessons learned. Mere curiosity in the music world turned to serious interest. A run from a prestigious Canterlot orchestra solidified its reputation, while a Las Pegasus one invited her to serve as conductor for their own tour. Octavia agreed, hungry for any paying work, and purchased a new black suit though it caused another fight with her landlord.
She saw herself, erect and stern on two legs with the baton in hoof. The very image of an up-and-coming composer, standing at the very center of a hundred instruments bringing her laborious vision at last to life. She needed the money, yes. But more than that, she so badly wanted to hear.
The brass rolled like a low and distant ocean. The rest was all silent.
Octavia could see tears in her own eyes. She watched herself collapse on the floor of her hotel, weeping in the darkness, remaining there for a full day until she emerged – prim and dignified, the maestro once more raising her baton before the hushed crowd.
Growing fame meant contracts with agencies, new clothes for both serious meetings and meetings disguised as parties. Her cash barely improved over the short term, while her expenses multiplied. Her third symphony was written in a new apartment not unlike where she grew up, with a toilet down the hall and shards of glass bottles in the stairwell. She spent that winter in a knit hat, crouched next to the cheaply fed stove, writing with quill held in chattering teeth.
“You didn’t send Vinyl your new address,” Discord said mildly.
No answer.
“I said–”
“I heard you,” Octavia snapped. “What do you want from me?”
“An answer,” he replied with a cheeky smirk. “Call it curiosity.”
“Curiosity killed the cat.”
“Good thing I’m only twelve-percent cat. And that’s only if lions count.”
“There’s nothing to say,” Octavia groaned. “I checked for Vinyl in the magazines, her career had skyrocketed. Giant tours through Equestria and beyond. ‘Wubstep’ and all that. We lived in different worlds, now. Different careers which could never again intersect. It was always inevitable that we would go our separate ways.”
The Third Symphony was her first true masterpiece, dwarfing those which came before, written so close to the stove the original copies smelled of smoke. The critics were overawed, the concert halls packed as stodgy aristocrats convinced each other it was embarrassing to not see The Third in performance. Octavia moved to a little townhouse with nice big windows – a minor opulence in chilly Canterlot.
“It seems the ‘separating’ was entirely on your side.”
Octavia felt a low snarl of anger build in her throat. “Why must you keep poking this?”
“I genuinely want to know why you ditched her,” Discord said, half-shrugging his mismatched arms.
“Teeth of Tirek!” Octavia swore out loud. She stomped both hooves, raised her head up to Discord’s, and brayed for all she was worth.
Discord opened his mouth, but Octavia spoke first. “How can you not know by now, you idiot? Music was our language. We shared it, lived it, breathed it. And I couldn’t share it anymore.”
She looked down and away, anger fading to exhaustion. “I couldn’t let her see me like this. What do you imagine? For us to meet and awkwardly pass notes for three dates before she mercifully moved on? ‘Octi, tell me about your music OH WAIT SORRY.’ ‘Vinyl, play that techno-jazz on your keyboard! I am deaf but I will match my head-bobbing to yours.’”
Octavia swallowed, steeled herself. She gave a firm nod, still looking down. “It’s not like she made an effort to come find me. A painless, peaceful separation, like most other childhood friends. It’s better this way, isn’t it?”
The young Octavia was now closer to death than birth. Yet she composed upon an oak desk in a warm parlor, with drawers and cabinets available for sorting. Not that she ever used them. The floors and sofa were littered with papers. Octavia worked hunched over her desk, heedless of the idyllic snowfall just outside her window.
Struck by the long silence, the old Octavia raised her head, gazing to her companion. “Isn’t it, Discord?”
The look which served as his reply was alien, almost the strangest thing which had occurred this night. His mockery, his questions, even the vague expressions of sympathy had not been terribly out of place in their moments.
Discord smiled, but it was a warm, dead thing. His lips trembled, his red eyes were full, and a thin line of silver ran down one cheek before he turned away.
A window rattled sharply as something hard knocked against it three times. The old Octavia saw white and blue in the corner of her eye.
She turned – gasped and stumbled backwards, catching herself at the very desk where her younger self toiled.
Octavia stared into the burgundy eyes of Vinyl Scratch. The mare looked right at her with one hoof pushed to the window.
“She can see me!?” Octavia stepped forward, calling out loud. “Vinyl, I… I didn’t know! I’ll come right out.”
She moved, but Vinyl’s eyes didn’t track her. Vinyl rapped on the glass again, staring at the young Octavia. Whose head remained bent and facing away, and her quill continued to write.
“Come on, Octi.” Vinyl’s words came muffled through the window. “I know you can hear me.”
Octavia sped right for the wall. With desperate trust she passed through it like a ghost, running out into the snowy streets.
“Vinyl!” she called urgently. “She’s deaf. Try the door, or break in!”
Looking to her from the side, Octavia could see Vinyl had changed in the years since they last met. Her blue hair was cut a little shorter, her frame bony and slimmed. They were both almost forty now, and Vinyl’s own lifestyle had taken its toll – late nights, frequent travel, and every sin which could be imagined.
She was beautiful.
Vinyl tapped again on the window, softer than before. Her voice emerged a pathetic mewl. “Come on. Don’t shut me out.”
Octavia ran back inside. Her younger self remained at the desk, still and silent, writing with the same focused intensity she had for all these past years.
The vision blurred. Hot tears ran down Octavia’s face as she screamed into her past self’s ear. “Turn your head! Look up, you self-pitying idiot! Vinyl’s here! She...”
Octavia hissed in her breath. Her eyes cascaded, and her face twisted as every terrible emotion at once poured through her. “Even after your callow, cold silence to her letters, she loves you! She found you!”
The mare did not react. Not just deafness, but two full decades severed the words from the moment.
Vinyl stepped away from the window. Octavia gasped and pursued, emerging just as Vinyl squared her courage to knock once again.
“Octi, please. I know something’s wrong with you. Although I’m not one to talk… heh…”
Vinyl drew back, retreating for the last time. “She’s ignoring me.”
“She’s deaf!” Octavia shrieked, unheard. “Break it open! Embrace her!”
Vinyl stared inside a moment longer, seeing nothing but the back of Octavia’s head, then slowly lowered her own.
“It’s alright,” Vinyl muttered. A wan smile found her lips as she cast her gaze over the building. “Nice place you got, here. A house right in the middle of Canterlot. A big-name composer, with all those fancy ponies eating out of your hoof. Just what you always wanted.”
She turned away.
“NO!”
Vinyl sniffed wetly, still trying valiantly to smile. “It’s fine.”
“NO IT ISN’T!”
“Maybe… maybe nothing’s wrong. She’s doing pretty good. It’s not like I could help her if she wasn’t. I never could get anything right.”
Vinyl began walking away, whispering the last words. “Not even love.”
Octavia tore back into the house. “SHE’S LEAVING! TURN YOUR HEAD! CHASE HER, YOU FOOL!”
No answer came but the scratching of the quill. Octavia threw her head back, unleashing a mournful neigh as long as her withered lungs could hold. She fell to dry coughing at the end of it, sinking to the floor, pounding it and weeping and babbling like an infant.
Many long moments passed. The crying ceased, and with one slow motion after the other, Octavia rose to a stand.
She dried her face with her fetlock, restoring dignity as best as she could. Then she closed her eyes, counted slowly to five, and spoke.
“Discord.”
“Right behind you, my dear.”
Her eyes opened, staring rigidly ahead. “You said I could only hear my own memories. But I never heard her outside.”
“You think I have no control at all?” Discord asked with mock indignation. “Please, Octi, don’t forget who’s the reason you’re here in the first place. I just… ah… hm. I suppose I thought you should know. Help you make an informed decision and all.”
Octavia gave a nod. “Thank you.”
“Pardon?”
Slow, disciplined steps turned her to face him. “Let’s change it.”
Octavia swallowed. “She loved me. She would have kept loving me, deafness or no. That look on her face… I was so blind.”
Despite the words, a touch of doubt remained in her heart. Vinyl would love her through the deafness, but what could still bind them in five or ten years? Would they not surely grow apart, perhaps to remain friends and nothing more?
“Show me,” Octavia said. “This is the last chance, isn’t it?”
Discord said nothing. Gold glowed at his horns, and his talon snapped.
The magic took them all the way back to the train station. Octavia missed her ride, instead fearfully telling Vinyl the truth and speeding with her to the doctor. Deafness was falling – cruel and silent as death.
Octavia wept in Vinyl’s embrace. Her career, her whole life, all gone. Even her friendship with Vinyl would surely end, for what did they share except music?
“I’ll show you what,” Vinyl scribbled on a candy wrapper, then kissed Octavia upon the lips.
The darkness proved not so dark with a friend, then a wife. The silence, not so quiet with Vinyl always leaving little notes around the house. Octavia would join Vinyl on her tours, learning to fix electronics and drive a bus, anything to keep herself busy and useful. They set up extra days to relax together, to wander whatever city Vinyl was performing in, rarely eating at the same restaurant twice. The money was often rocky, but they never starved, and always made their way home to rest in pastoral stillness. The well-known paths and quiet parks of Ponyville were novelties when coming from the great cities, and there was plenty of time to nap and recharge on the cool grass or in their own bed. And one day the cities were left behind for good, and two happy old mares picnicked in the same spot as when they first came to town.
There was emptiness, yes. Frustration and tantrums and longing for music now forever lost, though always Vinyl was there to kiss away her tears. Octavia jotted notes now and then on the rocking bus, but she never had time to finish or organize them. Songs and grand symphonies remained in her heart, yes. There they stayed, and they died with her when the time came.
It was a quaint Ponyville funeral. The mayor herself officiated, and it was attended by the many close friends they made living in that small village.
Octavia watched silently as they lowered her coffin to the earth, and as the last mourner finally departed.
Hot rage burst suddenly in her chest.
“And!?” she yelled. “Why not?”
Discord lounged against another of the tombstones with his eyes closed. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?”
“I could be happy,” Octavia said. “Marital bliss – a strange thought, but why not? She loved me, and I was too dull to see it. The wrong can be righted, for both of us.”
“And your music?”
“Damn the music.”
But Octavia’s voice wavered as she said it. “Composing doesn’t give me joy. It never will. It never did. I can’t even hear the music for myself. Why not give it up?”
Discord opened one eye to look at her. “Do you really want to know?”
The question took her aback. Octavia blinked downwards, tracing the fresh-packed dirt with her gaze.
Her words came out slow and uncertain. “I want to know… why this feels wrong. It’s so good. So why is that mare just as much a stranger as the others?”
“I suppose this makes it my turn to point out something you obviously should have learned by now.” Discord stood, cracking his back with a noise like a rubber duck. “Change things for the better and yes, of course they get better! You didn’t compose because things went well, you did it because they were terrible. It was your solace, your only friend, your last remaining link to precious music.”
“Other composers had spouses,” Octavia said. “And their hearing.”
“Other composers didn’t write ten full symphonies, each greater than the last.”
Octavia sighed out slowly. “So if I asked you to compromise and simply turn my head at that window...”
“You would have staggered to a fourth symphony, but no more.” Discord approached, extending a lion’s paw with his familiar smirk in place. “Let’s not get too far off topic, though. I asked you a question.”
“I’m more than half-tempted to take this and be done, stranger or no.” Octavia turned from the grave, meeting Discord’s eyes. “Damn the music, though it is so much to give up.”
“You can see the rest, and then decide.”
“What is left?” Octavia asked. There was no more bitterness in her words, merely exhaustion. “What comes next is all the same. Compose, conduct. Until the cancer takes my teeth and my strength, leaving me to rot until you two arrived.”
‘Not all the same, no.” Discord had grown close now, his paw still extended.
“Fine,” Octavia sighed. “Show me, then.”
She placed her hoof in the paw, and they were once more back at her nice Canterlot home.
Octavia didn’t keep the townhouse for long. A market crash swallowed her meager savings, then it was back to another cold apartment until Concerto’s family invited her to stay at their estate. It was prestige rather than charity, of course – her Fourth Symphony proved another triumph, and she became a handsome trophy to present at dinners.
The arrangement proved amicable enough until she fired Concerto in the middle of the Fifth’s tour. A mediocre, spoiled musician who would rather argue than improve. His replacement was better, and Octavia’s next apartment proved warm enough.
The scenery changed, year to year – studios, houses, villas. So did the sound. Murmurs became whispers, then vanished without a trace. She fought the gathering dark, writing music ever louder, ever more dynamic to tug her feeble senses, much to the consternation of her musicians.
“Our trumpets cannot play this loud,” one of them irately scribbled for her.
“Trumpets?” Octavia laughed acidly. “Your trumpets aren’t the problem. Hooves, lungs, lips, those are what fail you. Work on it!”
Each instrument and each musician was taxed to their utmost. One of the last things she heard was the trumpeter curse her out, but then his months of frustrated practice came through to so barely brush her greedy sensation…
And then even that was gone. Octavia became guest of honor at a Grand Galloping Gala, toasted and lauded without hearing one single word. Princess Celestia penned her a very nice note of greeting, but of course could not bother with more than a few words. No one ever could.
The years passed. The Sixth came. It was not so bad, now. She was used to it all. There were parties, salutes, invitations. A painfully awkward luncheon with Princess Cadence. Golden Canterlot had swung its doors wide, just as she always craved.
“Why must I see all this?” the old Octavia asked.
Her companion held his silence, and they went on. Bright Canterlot, gilded parties… in the end, they were the exception. Always she would return to lamp-lit darkness. Always, she would raise the pen and write.
The old Octavia watched. The velvet black hair of her younger self faded implacably to a dull grey specked with white. The invitations became less frequent – she was old, unpleasant, no longer very interesting except when a new symphony came. That was good, for it meant more time to write, to compose, to conduct. She had lost patience with parties.
Octavia could remember those days – it was strange, but she never felt alone. It was like the silence breathed, somehow within and around her. She could hear the music, at least in her heart. Each of the thousand, thousand notes she put to paper sang out in her mind. The flutes, the violas, the clarinets, the horns. She could hear it all so clearly as she inked the notes, then as she waved her baton before the orchestra. How it should sound… how it must.
Her fits of depression returned: deeper, darker, longer. Each work was more beautiful, more refined, more perfected with ever-growing skill and passion. Each utterly denied to her own ears.
Yet in the dark, quill to paper, she could somehow hear.
She still could. Octavia closed her eyes – yes, she still could. The soaring triumph of the Fifth, the mysterious subtly of the Sixth, the gentle Seventh like a robin’s egg held delicately in the hoof. So carefully crafted, every note. To change even one would sever the whole song.
“And so it is with life,” Octavia said. She bowed her head, for the revelation brought no comfort.
She opened her eyes to find herself in front-row seats with Discord. Her young self – now just a few years younger – conducted the performance with her back turned. Her Ninth Symphony, the last one the world had yet heard.
Perhaps Tirek would… give her five minutes to mail the Tenth to her publisher. Before he claimed her forever.
“Why must I see this?” she asked again.
Discord turned his head to her. Octavia gestured to the stage without strength or anger. “Nothing else happens. I sit in my last house and write until you appeared. There is nothing more to regret or change.”
“What makes you think those are the only options?” Discord said, as cheeky as ever.
“I’m so tired.” Octavia’s voice broke with the words. “All this and I’m right back where I started. My music, or my soul? It is impossible. And yet I cannot trade places with those strangers, those other Octavias. Their lives are not mine.”
“No one likes it when people talk during the orchestra, Octi.”
A spark of fading energy put a snarl on her face, yet her retort halted in uncertainty. On stage, her younger self swept the baton this way and that, eyes closed, desperately imagining how the music must sound. Yet the audience was standing, stomping their hooves in riotous applause. The musicians laid their instruments to the side and were glancing to each other in confusion.
“What?”
“You don’t remember?” Discord asked.
“I never really learned what happened,” Octavia confessed.
“You lost track. In your head they were on the second refrain, but they had in fact finished the last.”
The baton continued to swing like a hard-put fencer. The audience obliviously kept clapping, but after some seconds one of the musicians stood upright.
Octavia did not recognize her at the time. Beauty Brass had brown hair, not grey. Nor did Octavia ever see her again after the insult, so long ago.
But the ghostly Octavia could see. Beauty Brass had aged, just like Octavia. Others joined as she picked her way forward – Parish Nandermane, looking so odd with his dashing mane now balding. And Frederic Horseshoepin, now an old stallion.
They stopped her flailing, taking hold with gentle hooves. Octavia’s eyes flew open, beholding three aged strangers with calm smiles and tears in their eyes as they turned her around to see the applause.
It went on, on. The clapping, shouting, whistles. The young Octavia almost fainted, staggering at the sight.
The applause… Octavia could hear it. So loud in her ears, like she was really here in this front-row seat.
It took a mountain of willpower to look away from her three old friends. But she did, returning her gaze to Discord.
“You know what?” Discord began, and Octavia was too stunned to interrupt. “I’m really bad at this. It’s not my thing, what can I say? These serious life-and-death decisions, I can’t help you very much. I certainly can’t tell you which to choose.”
He twirled his beard with a claw, arching his neck to peer back at the clapping audience. A coy smile worked its way to his face.
“But between us, I think we have the brains of a reasonably intelligent pony. You’re missing something.”
“What else is there?” Octavia asked.
Discord extended his claw to her, bending one talon in preparation to snap.
“We have a little time left,” he said. “Not much, but some. Time enough, I think, for a last illusion.”
“Of what?”
“What you’re missing.”
She looked to him guardedly, and he gave her a broad grin. “My dear Octi, would you believe that after all this you have less than a tenth of a hundredth of the full story? I will show you, if you will allow me, just a brief glimpse of what you have done, and shall yet do long after this night has passed.”
“What can you possibly mean?” Octavia pressed.
Discord said nothing. He waggled his eyebrows at her, and yellow magic glowed in his claw.
Octavia sighed, yet nodded with the same motion. The talon snapped, and the concert hall fell away in a blur of color. Then came starry darkness, with the echo of Discord’s voice.
“It is high time, Octi, that you learned just what it is you gave to this world. More than music – oh my, so much more!”