Octavia's chest rose and fell as she took deep breaths. Not for any nervousness, simply to let go of any excess tension and make sure her body was in tune like her strings. She gave herself a final examination in the mirror. Her makeup was perfect, as was her mane. Her dress was really a beautiful thing, a dark dusky purple that even her gray coat shone against.
Vinyl whistled. "Lookin' good."
She nodded. She wished Vinyl would word her assessment of her beauty in a more sophisticated way, but Vinyl was a prickly sort of friend. One whose companionship she was glad for, but which she was never quite comfortable with.
Oh she had been cruel to that mare. Vinyl wanted her. She tried to write those affections off as lust, but no matter how much muck she imagined the mare to be covered in, a sliver of love always shone through. Worse still, she was too much of a coward to rebuke her directly. At least she had so far resisted the temptation to accept the mare's offerings.
So, she was beautiful. That was good. But this beauty was only an accent. She was vain enough to enjoy it, but it was not really about her appearance. It was simply necessary that she be beautiful to make beautiful music; a beautiful thing is beautiful in all its parts.
Octavia stood up without a word when the clock marked the time for her to go out. Vinyl offered some friendly words of encouragement.
She went onto the stage and took her seat in the spotlight. Octavia sang. The sound was from the strings of her cello rather than her vocal cords, but between the two, it was her true voice. It was the sound of her soul. Somewhere in the distance, there was a concert house full of enraptured ponies. Their applause would come like thunder at the end, but this the music was the lightning.
Her bow rose and fell as steadily as the breaths in her chest. To play music, to Octavia, was to be alive. She was an artist, and to be a true artist, it was not enough merely to make art, one had to live it. One had to make themselves one with the art. Too few ponies she saw considered what happened, then, when the song ended.
She loved the piece she was playing, it was a brilliant one. On the surface it seemed sorrowful. It was in F minor, a gloomy key if ever there was one, and a cursory reading of the score did nothing to contradict that. Yet, properly played, it was quite the opposite. It defied its apparent nature to celebrate life instead. The finer details were lost on most of the audience, as they always were, but it was reliably inspiring.
When she was a filly, her parents had had a notion that she was going to be a mathematician, or an engineer, or some silly thing like that. Those plans had not lasted long once she showed her aptitude for music, but he had insisted on her taking some lessons in those subjects nonetheless.
She thought of those lessons mostly to scoff at the mathematicians' crude description of her instrument as vibrating strings and frequencies. She had no use for inert symbols on dead paper. Even music was nothing until it was played.
But there was one thing that had stayed with her: the principle of the parabola, that what went up must come down, inevitably come down, always come down. It lurked in music too. No matter what excursions it made every song returned eventually to where it began, else it was not a song.
This was Octavia's most perfect masterpiece. Not one note was out of place. Not one beat a thousandth too long. She could hear how it resonated in the hearts of all her listeners as strongly as it did in hers. It was her peak. And after her peak, the Law of the Parabola said, there was only falling. The cruelest thing was that all this had been laid out before her in advance. For years she had known this day would come, if not exactly when. But the sense of cresting was unmistakable.
She had climbed all her life, honed herself. She had practiced and played until her cello strings had worn grooves in her shoes. But if she achieved perfection, what more was there to do? Every song had a proper place to end. To continue it past then made a lesser song.
Her heart beat faster, but her hooves kept their same steady pace. She knew the music too well to slip. A deliberate flaw remained an unthinkable act of violence. If she maimed one work of art to save another, what had she gained but an even guiltier conscience?
It was harder than one would think to make a mistake. Octavia spent days and weeks practicing, driving herself toward perfection. Music was a divine thing that demanded the utmost from a pony. Committing the music to memory is not only an exercise of the mind; the whole body remembers it, and the spirit. Wood and strings and bone and flesh all vibrated as one.
Octavia had traced the path down the other side many times, she knew what her destiny was. She was determined to use it, to make it part of her art. She would not resist the fall, she would jump.
She could hang herself with a cello string. There would be a unity there, the expression of her life enclosing its end. But those strings were thin enough they were liable to cut her neck and make a bloody mess she did not want. And in her more fantastical moments, she imagined that the strings of her cello were already so deeply braided with the thread of her life that they, recognizing one of their own, would do her no harm. She thought, often, of throwing herself off the mountain like a despairing lover. A quiet plunge into the night. It would be night, of course. There was something improper about killing oneself during the day.
She had been to the city's edge on nights like this one, rehearsing. Though she was a musician, she could appreciate the spacial aspect of it. Behind her, in life, was the city. Canterlot was a work of art in itself, and had inspired a thousand more. Ahead of her was a world flooded in darkness, an emptiness that swallowed all creation. In a word, death. Behind and ahead accorded with past and future.
Her hooves moved as if mechanically, oblivious to the rising fear in her soul. The music was joyous, triumphant, in defiance of its key; death called to her in its strains. As she bowed the final chords, a dissonance jarred her heart. Not from a wrong note, but a right one. She played as she had practiced, to bring out the joy in the music, but the soul that played it now was darkened and twisted with despair, she was disgusted with her own lack of resolve. In short, she had no business playing this piece.
The audience erupted in cheers and applause. That had never been the reason Octavia played, it was that space of time when their hearts beat with hers as she shared herself with them. The noise intensified, as did her failure. They had only heard a pretty noise, not her soul.
She walked back to her dressing room in silence. She put her cello, who had done nothing wrong, back into its case. There was no chance to stare into the mirror and brood on her failure as she would have liked. Vinyl burst in singing her praises.
"Nice job, Tavi. That was great!"
"Of course," Octavia muttered. "But was it perfect?"
Vinyl shrugged. "I dunno. I didn't hear anything I'd change, but eh. I know your standards are a lot higher than mine."
No, in other words.
She resigned herself to live another day.