Chapter Five
Octavia quivered with a unicorn’s hoof wrapped around her neck. She felt constricted, trapped in the darkness that seemed to swallow everything but her fear. A fear that felt like a caged animal, wild and rampant in her stomach, fit to burst with utter rage and deafening anxiety.
“Calm yourself, Tavi.” Vinyl whispered reassuringly, patting her back. Instinct kicked in and Octavia felt her own hoof fly up without any provocation and smack Vinyl directly in the muzzle.
“Oh my Celestia, Vinyl I’m so sorry.” She buried her face in her hooves, embarrassed. Vinyl rubbed her sore nose and gave her earth pony companion a gentler pat of affection.
“It’s all good. Just, don’t do it again.” She lightly teased. Octavia nodded.
“Try it again. I know you can do it; just look at me and don’t think about the magic.”
“I just can’t, Vinyl!” Octavia protested, holding her ears and smothering the scar on her forehead with a well-manicured hoof. She gingerly pointed it out to the unicorn, and the light blue glow from her horn erupted in brightness for a mere second; an expression of the unicorn’s surprise.
“That’s why I don’t trust your kind of help.” She snarled, feeling a burst of adrenaline running through her veins and down her spine as anger gripped her mind and clouded her judgement. She leapt to her hooves and backed away, each deliberate step echoing her maddening thoughts through the abyss. It rang in Vinyl’s ears.
“What happened?” She asked; her gravelly voice drowned by the echoes of Octavia’s angry pacing.
“You unicorns… All of you unicorns!” She muttered, throwing her head back and crying in frustration. She began to rant, all but ignoring Vinyl as she sat and listened patiently. “Unicorns, they came at me. They jumped me! A band of unicorns. With magic!” Her voice bounced off the stone concrete like a pinball machine. “Magic, Vinyl! It wasn’t fair!”
Vinyl jumped and smacked Octavia on her cheek to snap her out of her ramblings.
Oops.
“You wouldn’t understand, Vinyl Scratch. Every time I see a unicorn now, these memories come flooding back to me, like a bullet in my head. It hurts, Vinyl; it hurts so much!” She sighed as she felt her anger drip out of her words and sink into the ground. She felt empty, like a void had opened up in her chest.
She was so very empty inside.
“It’s alright, Octavia. I’m not going to hurt you.” Vinyl shrugged, rubbing her horn. “This thing can barely levitate a suitcase! That’s why I’m a DJ – I pick up vinyls and create lightshows from my magic, but that’s all I can do.”
As a demonstration, Vinyl stood up on her hindlegs and concentrated; a bright blue burst of light shone out from the top of her horn, and it sparkled so brilliantly in the darkness. Sweat poured from her brow as she changed the lightshow from blue to white, and then to purple, casting deep shadows on the concrete floor. Octavia’s jaw dropped; the lights were absolutely beautiful. To her unprotected eyes, it looked like a multicoloured sunset. Vinyl panted and her horn shut down, leaving only a faint glow of magic as she lowered back to her forelegs, and she grinned proudly at her captive audience of one.
“That was very blinding… But very pretty.” Octavia muttered, with spots of light still burned in her eyes.
“Thank you, thank you.” She snorted and bowed light-heartedly to the blinded earth pony. “Not all unicorns have the power to attack. I certainly don't.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure…” Octavia muttered again, rubbing her eyes. However this time, there was lightness in her voice that Vinyl hadn’t heard before. It made her heart leap to her throat; she was finally making progress with the fragile pony before her.
“Now, sit down Tavi, and tell Auntie Scratch about this problem of yours.” She cooed delightedly, happy she was making headway.
“Alright, Vinyl,” She agreed, ignoring the somewhat condescending tone in Vinyl's voice, “But you have to promise not to tell anypony about it. You know how these Canterlot types gossip.” She narrowed her eyes as she faintly recalled distant memories of an old, popular newspaper proclaiming Equestria’s ruler sleeps on the job, with an unflattering photo to boot. Now, that was certainly something that was on everypony’s lips.
“Of course, Octavia; I am a pony of my word.” Vinyl assured with a twitch of her ears and a smile plastered to her face. Octavia breathed a sigh, and began to tell a tale of her memories that she hadn’t divulged to another living pony for more than a decade.
-
The day began just like any other in Octavia Melody’s life. The weather pegasi had begun their cloudbursting duties in hard-hats and shiny bright safety vests, kicking clouds and clearing the skies for a new day to begin in Manehattan. Greeting the day with a wide, childlike smile, the young Octavia left her apartment and walked to the farm she worked. Prancing down the main-streets and passing many other ponies on their own commute to work, she was whistling a happy tune with a spring in her usually-cheerful step. Spotting her familiar shortcut on the way to the farm, she crossed the street and ducked through a violently green thicket of brambles to scramble through a dirt roadway. The way she chose ran straight through an abandoned hayfield before cutting short on the other side of the forest, clipping the Everfree before it ended on the main street. It cut at least twenty minutes of her walking time, and Octavia hated to be tardy. She crawled through the foliage – oh, how she hated the thorny brambles that scratched her nicely-groomed coat – and she bounded through the hayfield with the same happy-go-lucky demeanour.
Suddenly, as her hooves touched the dirt on the other side of the bramble thicket, her vision blurred and her view was bathed in a sickly green light. Her view obscured, she twitched and writhed in panic, but it was ultimately useless as she felt herself being plucked off the earth and hung in the air, gripped only by an aura of disgusting, sparkling magic, as green as the brambles below her. She shouted at the top of her lungs, demanding her freedom, but her cries were unanswered. A large heavy-set stallion with piercing eyes and a large horn, glowing with the same colour as the aura surrounding the panicking pony, stepped out from the shadows of the Everfree Forest and glared at her. His angry eyes bore into Octavia’s skull and shot chills up and down her spine in a feeling she’d never felt before – it was a feeling of complete helplessness. The stallion flicked his jet-black mane to the side of his head and brushed a stray leaf off his steel coat, not once breaking eye contact with the earth pony in his cold, hard grip. She felt her body getting warmer and warmer as invisible flames licked her flailing hooves.
“Beautiful day for breaking a pony’s legs, wouldn’t you agree?” He whispered in a dead calm, bringing the floating Octavia up to his snout and snarling at her. Octavia whimpered at the smell of decay coming from the stallion’s foul breath.
“Wh- What do you want from me?” Octavia stammered nervously, darting her eyes around the field, struggling to focus and glancing at the thick grass in a vain hope for somepony to come and help her.
“It’s very simple, really. I will let you go if you do one small thing for me…” The unicorn growled, keeping a smile stitched on his face like an old, discarded doll with thread for a mouth.
“I’ll do anything, anything you ask!” Octavia cried, big fat tears rolling down her cheeks and dampening her soft fur. She gripped her head tight as the burning sensation grew, and begged for her attacker to let her go. Suddenly, two other unicorns, one a cream-coloured mare and the other a turquoise stallion the colour of the sky, stepped out from the foliage of the Everfree border and grimaced at the sight of the earth pony.
“What’s she doing here?” The mare sneered, baring large, yellowing canine teeth that Octavia hadn’t seen before on another pony. The pony smiled devilishly at the petrified earth pony as she grabbed a rock from behind her hoof and began rubbing it on her teeth, filing them down to a point. Octavia winced at the sight. So that’s how she did it.
“You’ll see.” Promised the stallion with magic flowing through his horn, and in an instant, the colours changed from a sickly green to a piercing purple. Octavia screamed as the flames increased tenfold and pain wracked through her body like a lightning strike, piercing the top of her skull, boring through the bone like a rat in the summer in an attempt to escape the unforgiving heat of the day. Just as suddenly as it began, the stallion ceased his attack and dropped Octavia, still maintaining a tender grip on her tail. He waltzed up to the helpless earth pony and breathed in her scent. He could smell fear, and he liked it.
“Please don’t hurt me!” Octavia whimpered pitifully, her hooves clamped to the top of her head. The two unicorns behind the stallion snickered.
“I’ll let you live if you do just one thing for me…” The stallion whispered in Octavia’s ringing ears.
“Anything, just please leave me alone!” She howled in anguish as the stallion trod on the base of her tail.
“Leave the farm. Don’t return.”
“Back off our territory, useless earth pony.” The mare sneered behind the attacking stallion, and a shot of approval was cast from the ringleader in her direction. In the mare’s empty, stormy eyes, a glimpse of satisfaction rippled like a drop of rain in a lake on an overcast afternoon.
“What do you mean?” Octavia whimpered again with big, fat tears in her eyes. She could barely see her surroundings through the haze of pain in her head. She reached up to feel her forehead and a thin trickle of black liquid poured down her hoof. She grimaced in pain – could that be blood?
“You’re stealing our profit, you see,” The quiet turquoise stallion piped up at last, his steely tone caused what felt like the ground shaking to the poor Octavia. His eyes flashed dangerously like lightning. “We can’t have that, no. Even if you quit, they would want to hire your kind back. No, we won’t have that; we need to make it clear that earth ponies aren’t fit to work on the orange farm. We need you to disappear.”
The words shot through Octavia’s head like a bullet to her brain, and fear gripped her body, filling her like wildfire in her soul.
Her vision blurred, and everything went dark.
-
Octavia spoke in a hushed voice as she divulged her story to the enraptured unicorn in front of her. Her large purple eyes were wet with memories and, bathed in the glow of Vinyl’s light, she felt at peace with what happened for the first time in those years.
“When I woke up, they were gone. I never went back to the farm again.” She whispered. “It was hard; my only source of income was snatched from me. So, I travelled with my cello. That’s how I got where I am today.”
Her voice quivered as she spoke, gingerly tracing over the memories that had haunted her for so long. She shut her eyes tight, and saw a flash of the stallion, whose eyes were like lightning as they struck her very core and left white scars of hatred in her mind.
“I don’t even know where my family is, anymore. My parents left Manehattan without me and my cousin disappeared. I worry every day what those unicorns did to her.”
“I’m so sorry that happened to you, but I promise you that magic isn’t only for harming, Tavi.” Vinyl said, speaking softly in tune with Octavia’s quaking figure. The shadow cast from her glowing horn blended with the concrete floor, and it made the room feel so much bigger. She rose to her hooves again and looked up at the ceiling, to find the small hole where they had both fallen through. Suddenly, she hatched an idea - a long shot, no doubt, but worth a try.
“Trust me on this, Tavi. It’ll be okay, but I need to use magic to escape. I can't levitate myself, but I can levitate other objects... maybe I will be able to lift you up. Will that be okay?” Vinyl gently cooed, afraid of her new friends’ reaction. She was relieved when she received a faint nod from the earth pony in reply, and she once again rose to her hind legs with her horn raised in the air.
It was her time to shine.
She concentrated the magic in her, and it erupted from her horn in the form of levitation. She struggled and strained, and Octavia felt the world fall from around her as she was picked up by a gentle blue aura. She froze in fear and shut her eyes tight, curling into a small ball as she floated upwards. She felt a searing pain in her hoof, and she cradled it lightly as she rose higher. The aura twitched and faded ever so slightly and Vinyl gasped, struggling to lift the dead weight of another pony. She glanced upwards and saw the fear in Octavia's eyes, and a rush of pride drove her magic further, up to the rafters as the entire void seemed to glow. The unicorn’s horn was alight with a massive magical surge as she levitated the earth pony, and she found herself nearing the light. As she got closer, a familiar voice filled Octavia’s ears.
“OCTAVIA!” A rich voice screamed from the building atop the concrete foundations. “WE’RE ON IN FIVE!”
Oh, ponyfeathers. She had to perform! Shock rippled through her skin like electricity and twinged her injured hoof, and her breath caught in her throat; she had worked too long for this moment, to perform for the Canterlot Elite, to play her cello with the other great musicians of her time. One day, her name would be in the stars themselves to shine upon her work as she performed solo for the royal goddess Princess Celestia herself, her own personal musician. But first, she had to impress the audience tonight, regardless of the pain in her hoof. She had worked too hard to let this bring her down now.
Noteworthy wandered into the dressing room, calling out Octavia's name and getting increasingly frustrated with each one that went unanswered. Gingerly, he stepped over the hole, and was shocked at what he saw underneath his hooves.
"YOU CAN FLY?" Noteworthy's jaw dropped.
"You numbskull, Vinyl's levitating me. Help me, for pony's sake!" Octavia cried, and Noteworthy reached into the hole as far as he could to grab her. He grabbed the very end of her flailing tail and, with the tail in his teeth, he pulled with all his might. Octavia clenched her teeth through the pain and reached down for Vinyl to grab her hoof, and she very gratefully accepted it. Holding on for dear life, she gripped the extremities with every last bit of energy she had left.
Noteworthy, pulling the tail of his band member, snorted in satisfaction as Octavia reached the top and pulled her dead-weight through the crumbling floorboards, clenching her teeth through the shooting pain in her hoof, with her new unicorn friend weakly gripping her legs. Noteworthy gave a final tug and, with a crash and crumble of wood and marble, they all collapsed on the ground. Huffing and puffing, Octavia barely managed to pull herself to her three good hooves before Noteworthy grabbed her and tried to pull her towards the door.
“Wait!” Octavia protested, “I don’t have my cello!”
Vinyl smiled and gestured to the door; there, rested her prize cello. It was somewhat beaten and battered, but still in playable condition.
“I threw it out of the hole just before we tumbled in. What fell with us is anypony’s guess, but I protected your precious instrument.” She teased lightly, poking a light-pink tongue out at the earth pony. Octavia smiled and attacked Vinyl in a massive hug that went on for an eternity, as Vinyl breathed in the scent of the happy pony and Octavia nuzzled her neck.
“Thank you, Vinyl. Thank you for everything.” She uttered sincerely, staring into Vinyl’s bright magenta eyes. They held an intelligent glare of kindness, and Octavia felt her heart flutter in a feeling she’d never realised before. They smiled kindly and tenderly at the other, and their muzzles met in a gentle kiss.
“Ugh.” Noteworthy gagged with a choking motion; he was certainly not a sentimental pony. He rolled his eyes at the public display of affection and proceeded to trot out the door, dragging Octavia’s cello with him in an attempt to ignore the commotion behind him.
“What a sourpony.” Vinyl snorted in an unladylike fashion with her muzzle crinkled. Octavia laughed and nodded playfully in agreement, tugging at her purple bowtie in an attempt to calm her nerves. They hugged once more before the grey earth pony left for the stage with Noteworthy, leaving a dazed Vinyl behind them, smiling stupidly and giggling to herself.
It was her first kiss.