In the corner of the broad living room of her Canterlot home, Octavia stared at a scattering of unmarked music sheets on the desk beneath her hooves with the same disdain she generally reserved for incompetent porters and the lead violinist of the Canterlot Symphony.
Not that she held any particular contempt for Zapato Rojo's skills on the violin, nor for his meteoric rise to the position he occupied -- she could more than appreciate the achievements of a master of the craft for what they were -- rather it was his infuriating habit of talking down to anypony who wasn't lead violinist.
Octavia lifted her hooves from the unwritten symphony. She turned to a folder that lay at the far end of the desk, stuffed and fat as a hibernating beast, and pulled a few sheets from it. This paper was heavy with ink and pencil marks, the music it carried almost crowded out by the notes scratched around it. She didn't need to see the staves -- the notation lived more fully in her mind and her hooves than it ever could on dead paper -- but she stared at them anyway, trying to glean whatever tiny sliver of inspiration had created her first, and so far only work, L'Amante Oscura Della Luna. A critical success, her performance of which had cemented her reputation and guaranteed her place on the CSO for as long as she wanted it. The piece had even gained Octavia a single, treasured audience with Princess Celestia, who had spoken to her of things that had seemed quite opaque at the time, but which made a great deal of sense following the restoration of her sister to the throne.
A quiet hiss of entrained magic whispered around the room, accompanied by the gentle chill of a fresh breeze falling from vents around the ceiling as the (very expensive) unicorn-crafted air conditioner drew cool air from a deep cellar below her home. Octavia tipped her head back to let the cool air caress beneath her throat and chest, before returning to her examination of L'Amante. Somehow a repeat of that success had eluded Octavia. Whatever fleeting muse had spoken to her that one time had refused to return. Perhaps it had shacked up with Rojo instead, or perhaps he had simply used the leverage of his position to get his latest scrawlings played at the Canterlot Summer Sun Festival this year. Perhaps if she had taken up the violin as her main instrument like her cousin, it might have been her in that seat.
With a frustrated sigh, Octavia set her life's work down and turned her attention back to the empty papers. She stared at them for a while, attempting to fit the notes in her head to the bars on the page, but soon found herself lost in the imagined performances of a thousand symphonic fantasies, and decided that perhaps she had spent enough of the day in her tiny tartarus.
"Perhaps, perhaps," she muttered as she turned from the desk.