I found out about my new sheet of invisibility the hard way. I woke up very early to try and catch the sunrise without being seen, so I stayed close to the cottage and looked out over the meadow, over Ponyville, and off to the East. I was absorbed in my own thoughts, not really minding my surroundings, when golden eyes and a green face appeared out of nowhere right next to my face. “BOO!” I just about jumped ten feet in the air!
“Sweet!..Lyra!”
“Ah, thanks Adam!”
I let my breathing settle down a little. “Don’t ever, ever do that again!” then I paused. “How did you do that to begin with?”
Lyra unwrapped the large shoal from around herself. With her size it looked like a large tarp. “This is an invisibility cloak that Twilight gave to me for you! You can finally get out and around now, so you don’t have to just keep bothering me and Bon Bon,” she smiled as she spoke.
“That was really thoughtful of her. Now I can go out beyond the area around the just cottage!” I sighed with satisfaction. “It’s going to be good to finally be able to move around again; even being with you and Bon Bon, I was starting to get a little stir-crazy.”
Lyra chuckled a little. “Oh, I know that feeling! Not being able to do something when you really want to can drive you right out of your mind.”
We both looked out as the first shades of red and yellow appeared on the horizon, which didn’t expel the purple and blue of the early morning and night sky, but rather mixed with them and brightened them; like the colors of the dawn and the night were two harmonizing musical pieces.
As I was thinking this, I looked over at Lyra. I quickly realized I had never asked her about her Cutie Mark.
“Lyra?”
“Yeah?”
“Why is your Cutie Mark a harp?”
“Actually, it’s called a lyre, which is kinduva coincidence given my name is ‘Lyra’.”
“Ok, semantics aside, why have you never talked about it?” Her casual smile had faded a little, and her eyes misted over with memory. I knew that look; it was the look of someone who had a melancholy past. “I’m sorry. Do you not want to talk about it?”
“No, I want to talk,” she paused, her mouth half open as she searched for the correct words. “It’s just..hard sometimes. Wait a second; I need to get something.”
She left the cloak beside me and trotted back into the cottage. I began to worry about her a little as I waited. What could have possibly happened to her that made her sad thinking about the one thing that showed her true individuality? I heard the cottage door close softly, and as she came around to me, I noticed that she was carrying a satchel case on her back. She sat down, lowered the case off of her back, and then opened it with her emerald colored magic. The bag produced a lyre; a pure, golden colored lyre. She strummed a chord with her magic, and then strummed a full scale before she began her tale.
“I was one of the last of the fillies I knew who got a Cutie Mark.” As she spoke she strummed on her lyre, producing a sad, but beautiful piece. “My parents were rich, and they had wanted me to live the cultured life, so they taught me all of the social niceties in the hopes that I could get an aristocratic talent.”
The pace of the piece began to increase as her tempo and intensity grew.
“One day, our class went to a music shop, and they had a display full of instruments of every kind.” Her music slowed and became more graceful and flowing. “I felt a tug on my soul when I first laid eyes on the lyre. It was even at my eye level.” Her music grew with a sense of anticipation. “I reached for it, and as soon as I laid hooves on it, music just seemed to flow out of me, like I was a river channeling water.”
Her music had become beautiful, and, without a better word to describe it: elemental. The music she was making now seemed to be as natural and necessary as eating, breathing, and simply being alive. “When I came home with a Cutie Mark, my parents were not impressed. They were disappointed.” Her notes began to ooze with a growing anger. “Finally, after I perfected my art, I left. I had been fed up with how they had been trying to make me their little doll for years. I’m not something you can put on a shelf and look at!”
Her words and music burned with passion, and sorrowful frustration. She stopped. She then put her instrument away, and sat down beside me. “I may have left them, but I still love them, even if they have practically disowned me. I still send them a card every Heartwarming’s Eve. Through the good and the bad of my life they’ve never responded. I make some modest money from my performances, and I have a small group of ponies who really like my music. But the music I make isn’t my own.” She paused again, looked for more words. “It feels like..like the music I make is already written, and I’m just copying it down so everypony else can hear it. You see, to me, music is not just notes lined up on paper. Music is the sound of eternity ringing in our hearts and minds. Music is the language of the soul.” The sun had just crested the horizon, and it was glowing a golden hue, which reflected off of Lyra’s lyre, and made it appear as if it were alive with the colors of gold, yellow, and white. I could swear I saw a small rainbow as well.
I leaned over and gave Lyra a hug. “Thank you for your soul-talk. Thanks for your story.”
She embraced me too, and I began to feel small wet spots forming on my shoulders. “Thanks for listening.”