The Song in the Mountain

by Raging Mouse

A collection of notes, compiled into a manuscript

Series of notes retrieved from the guest cottage in Windy Village

Octy,

If you’re reading this note then I’ve had to step outside for a while. Just lie back and relax. You’ve been through Tartarus and took a bad hit to the head, and the doctor says you likely have memory loss. You sleep a lot, and that’s apparently normal. The brief moments you’ve been awake, you haven’t been particularly aware yet, but here’s hoping! Just take it easy; she says you’ll recover as long as you get some rest. There’s fresh water in the lidded mug with the funny straw. If you’re hungry, have the granola bar that is next to the glass. At least, there should be one there, and if there isn’t then you can find more in the drawer. Just throw the wrappers on the floor. I will pick them up.

You are in the guest cottage of Windy Village. Don’t worry about costs or anything; the villagers and I have an agreement and you’re our guest.

You shouldn (Editor’s note: There was more written, but the words have been heavily crossed out and rendered illegible.)

I really (E: This sentence was left unfinished.)

Just lie back and take it easy, okay?

VS

---

October 16th,

Vinyl claims that is the date and though I dearly wish she were wrong, I have no reason to doubt her. She is not always here when I am awake so I have not asked much.

This note will be brief as I am weary and my body not only aches, but is sluggish to respond. V tells me I was grievously injured about a week ago, and my state is evidence enough to support that, but I have not discovered any wound, nor bandages of any kind. I suppose it could be on the back of my head, beneath my mane, where reaching it would be difficult. The incessant ringing tone I hear does indicate some form of concussion at the very least. When I next am lucid, I should ask for a mirror. And maybe to crack open a window; the air in here is stifling.

---

October 18th,

Octy,

You sure know how to scare a pony. When I came to see you, the bed was empty and you were nowhere to be found. The villagers were kind enough to help me look, even in the snowstorm - I’ve mentioned the snowstorm, right? And you were soon found, collapsed in a snowdrift. I got nothing coherent out of you, and it wasn’t as important as getting you back to bed, but I am curious to know why you’d go do something so stu (AN: several lines have been blotted out.)

Sorry. I’m just really worried for you. Please; just rest, okay? You can crack open a window if you need more air, though make sure the fire in the stove doesn’t go out.

Whatever you do, don’t go outside. It’s dangerous. The tone you hear is most likely just the song of the mountains here; they tend to produce whistling sounds when the wind is right.

Vinyl

---

October (the number 19 has been struck through) 20th

I don’t remember going out. I must’ve been delirious, from what you wrote. Maybe I was trying to escape the heat? It really is stifling, especially under the blanket. My head hurts, and my body is still so clumsy and slow to obey. There is also this incessant ringing sound. Vinyl, it frightens me to think I might have damaged my hearing. I am a star cellist. If I develop tinnitus my career is ending. I hope it’s just the wind, as you say. I really do. But what wind can produce a tone this clear and steady? At times, I think I hear additional notes in beautiful harmony. Please, you’ve mentioned a doctor. Can you beg her to examine me again, or at least relay my worries?

I am sorry for rambling, Vinyl, but I am afraid and confused. This heat is making me drowsy. I sleep in fits. At least, time seems to have shifted whenever I close my eyes. I look around for you, but you are here so seldom. What is it you do, Vinyl?

Octavia

---

October 21st

Octavia,

You are sleeping as I write this. I didn’t want to wake you. Sorry about that, but you need your rest.

You went outside again. You were stumbling away from the village when we found you. I believe you, when you say that you don’t remember going out the first time, and I would bet you won’t remember this time either. I believe it wasn’t really you that fought us as we tried to turn you around and bring you back inside.

I didn’t want to distress you with what had happened to you until you yourself remembered, but it seems like I have no choice; you have to understand just how DANGEROUS going outside is. There’s more than just a snowstorm out there, Octy. We think the storm’s made by an entity. It’s some kind of ice spirit. Maybe a windigo, like in the hearths’ warming tales, but those are supposed to be ghost-like, I think. This one is huge, furry, smelly and terrifying. And I’m so sorry, but it attacked you and your fellow traveler, just on the outskirts of the village. You were so wounded I was afraid you wouldn’t make it. He didn’t.

He was the third pony the entity has killed. We don’t know what foul, forbidden magic it knows, but we learned to cremate the dead after the first victim, laid out in the village chapel - a small open structure so cold that frost had formed on the fur - shambled to its hooves and attacked the mourners.

I’m so sorry for getting you into this, Octy. I really am. But we need to make sure you aren't tainted by some kind of black magic.

If that sound becomes too distracting, let me know immediately.

Please, rest.
V

---

Celestia preserve us, Vinyl.

I believe you. I wish I could scoff at your words and claim you were playing a prank in bad taste, or even that you are insane and delusional, but I write this with all haste for I greatly fear it is my own mind which is cracking. Or worse.

It must have torn at your heart to even consider, but I am deeply touched you’d care enough to try to shackle me to the bed. But as I watch blooms of frost grow on the dark iron links, and as I listen to the metal grow brittle and crack from the cold, I fear it will not matter.

Vinyl, I am burning up. I feel as if I am in the middle of a furnace. And yet the storm is blowing through the open window, depositing snow onto my limbs and barrel. It does not melt. The fire in the iron stove you so carefully fed with wood went out not long after you left. I suspect the air in here is too cold to maintain the fire.

It is almost peaceful, were I not burning up inside. The tone is ever so much stronger and clearer now. It is almost beautiful. I think I can hear words? You wrote to let you know, but I suspect you already do. You hear it too, don’t you?

I think I will seek out the source of this sound. What claim I still have to rationality rebels against the very idea, so I will resist the allure of the song and stay here for as long as possible. And yet I know with an immovable certainty that if I remain here for too long I will either lose my mind or perish. Whichever comes first.

Were you here, Vinyl, by my side, what would you have me do? Should I stay here and wait for you, and hope that you hold the keys to my salvation? Or, and I feel increasingly like this is the true path, will I find you at the source of this infernal tone that resonates through me? I wish you were here, so I could ask.

But you are almost constantly away when I am lucid. Doing valiant battle against the entity I suspect.

This bottle of ink is about to freeze over despite my best efforts, so these are my last words to you: Thank you, Vinyl, for trying. I forgive you for everything. And I am, in turn, so sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused.

Octavia

---

Author’s note: These preceding letters and notes are in mostly unaltered state, save for some notes by me, added for clarity. They should provide sufficient context to this following attempt at reconstructing the final moments of Octavia Melody.

Windy Village in the summertime is a charming collection of about twenty houses set upon the north-eastern slope of Windy Valley, in a rough cluster. The uneven slope sports hardy grasses, mountain flowers and jagged boulders in various phases of being covered by lichen and moss. Wintertime, the village hibernates under a thick blanket of snow.

On the morning Octavia left the guest cabin in full use of the dregs of her sanity, almost none of this was visible. Snow and hail raged, and had long since buried all but the chimneys of the single-story houses, leaving only the windows and roofs of three two-story houses potentially visible, yet the windows were dark and visibility was non-existent.

A pony not protected against the elements, ideally with both clothing and enchantment, would last only minutes in the violent conditions, yet the only thing bothering Octavia was the wind, threatening to push her off her hooves. She found, in fact, that she was gaining strength as she left the cabin behind. Her staggering steps gained stability and her breathing evened out.

Octavia did not pause to wonder at her seemingly improving condition; her attention was fixed on the distant tone. That it had a direction was obvious to her, as was the irresistible attraction it held. She moved almost in a straight line, away from the village and further up the valley.

Progress in the thick blanket of snow on the floor of the valley was laborious and time-consuming. Visibility was slightly improved, though, which allowed Octavia to notice the row of shapes ahead of her before she literally stumbled into them. A row of ponies stood evenly spaced in a line in front of her, with Vinyl Scratch the closest.

Vinyl was clad only in a light green parka and her ever-present glasses and she nodded in greeting to Octavia. They tried to exchange words, but the storm immediately swallowed whatever sounds passed their lips. Vinyl eventually shrugged, gave a lopsided smile and gestured further up the valley, to where it ended at the foot of a steep cliff face. That was, Octavia realised, the exact direction from where the song seemed to emerge.

Passing the line of villagers with but a nod to Vinyl, Octavia let her plodding hooves carry her through the snow. She had not walked for more than a minute when a tremendous shock jolted the snow and rock beneath her hooves, staggering her. In confusion, she looked around and back. The sight she saw there made her keenly aware that, though her grip on sanity was already tenuous at best, mortal terror still had its claws hooked into her flesh.

The blizzard seemed to have let up, momentarily, for Octavia could see all the way to the row of villagers behind her, seemingly not having moved. Beyond them, Octavia beheld the entity, as it had set down in the valley. It would have been invisible in the darkness, a mere giant suggestion of a shape, were it not for the arcane flames that flickered with a putrid blueness around, and inside, its form.

At first glance it appeared to be a gargantuan pony skeleton, missing its back half. The stump of its spine rested on the valley floor, but it held itself aloft with two huge front hooves. Its grinning skull, with an orb of hateful blue shining in each eye socket, towered easily at least fifteen metres tall. But this general impression belied a much more terrible detail; this entity’s skull, bones and hooves were made of countless smaller shapes, all equine but twisted and mangled. Hundreds of pony corpses in various stages of dissolution together built this monstrous whole.

As Octavia stared, numb with terror, the great entity opened its giant maw, but the sound it produced still emanated from the multitude of smaller throats that made up its body; a dirge that promised death and violence, that served as counterpoint to the song Octavia was drawn to.

And yet, despite the enormity of danger ahead of them, the line of villagers did not break and run. Instead, they raised makeshift weapons that Octavia had previously failed to notice, in direct challenge to the entity in front of them. At the same time, Octavia became aware of a change in the melody in her head; a clear note that finally spoke words she could comprehend:

Come. Hurry.

Thus encouraged, the fear of the monster relented enough for Octavia to gather her remaining wits, turn around and make what haste she could over the thick and treacherous snow. Behind her, she heard the clear sounds of deadly spells being loosed, but she ran on without again glancing behind her.

She could not say how long she ran; likely not too long, as the valley was small and she had started past its midpoint, but fear made her lose track of time until she spied a warm light ahead of her.

At the end of the valley, beneath an almost vertical cliff face, there was a small cave opening. A small stream of water flowed out from it even now, but by Octavia’s reasoning the entire mouth of the cave should have been buried beneath the snow long before now. But in the light issuing from it Octavia could also see shovels and spades. Clearly a great effort had been made to keep this cave open. Thus encouraged, she ran towards the entrance, towards light and song and harmony, when from behind came a second great keening of the beast - this time much closer.

Hurry!

She scrambled over the loose stones and shallow snow at the mouth of the cave. The tunnel, she could see, was lit by lanterns hanging from pitons driven into the rock of the ceiling. The floor of the cavern was almost level, except for a slight dip where the stream rushed in the middle. There were small naturally formed alcoves interspersed along the side of the tunnel, and Octavia glanced inside them as she ran by and saw that these were filled with small kegs. Kegs trailing copper wire further into the cave.

Following the wires, she ran on, until a second massive crash behind her sent a tremor through the rock that nearly threw her off her hooves. Now she looked back, and saw the head and forelegs of the entity try to push itself into the cave, while its eyes stared at her. It was too big to enter, and for a moment she let herself feel relief.

Then the entity disintegrated into its component corpses, lit by the same baleful blue flame as they rose to their hooves and shambled towards Octavia, hissing, snarling or shouting their hate ahead of them.

Octavia turned and ran once more, until a hurried change in the music bade her stop. She had pulled alongside the end of the copper wires, where they all gathered together into two bunches, each tied to a metal stud on top of a wooden box that stood about as tall as Octavia’s knees. Beside the two metal studs placed near two adjacent corners, the top of the box had an obvious trigger handle. The oncoming shambling dead almost overpowered the song in Octavia’s ears, but enough of it still filtered through to translate into urgent, desperate pleading. So Octavia Melody reared up, placed her forehooves on the handle, and pushed down with all her might.

There was a tremendously violent confusion of fire, noise and motion.

Octavia became aware of standing at the same time she registered the absence of any sound. After so long with the song echoing in her ears, its absence almost ached. The entity was directly in front of her. It gazed down at her, its jaw almost close enough to touch. There was a feeling of dark amusement, as if the beast wanted to tell Octavia that, in spite of her impressive efforts, she was merely delaying the inevitable; Octavia had lost long before now. She looked down at her hooves, and saw them burning with a sickly, blue flame, completely without sound.

The return to consciousness was heralded by the return of the Song. Octavia opened her eyes and saw she was lying on a cavern floor, looking up at something she at first failed to comprehend. She appeared to be inside a colossal geode chamber, filled with crystals thicker than a pony stood tall. In the middle of the chamber stood a truly enormous multicoloured crystal that resembled a rainbow tree, and Octavia had been flung almost to its roots. Stunned, Octavia peered at the multitudes of ever-finer branching crystals that emerged from its trunk, and she eventually realised the branches were moving.

With a sound like the greatest string orchestra combined with the greatest choir in the universe, playing the richest, most complex harmonic, the crystal tree-like entity gently picked up Octavia with its branches.

Some of the finest crystals prodded her right shoulder, whereupon she became aware that both her right legs were missing - ripped off at the shoulder and hip by the blast she had triggered. But there was no blood. No grisly mess of flesh and bone. Nor was there even any pain, or any feeling at all. There was only a stump of jagged crystal that, as Octavia watched, was prodded into growth and renewal by the finest, needle-thin branchings of crystal from the tree-thing. In what seemed like no time at all, to Octavia’s thoroughly shocked senses, she was whole again. Or, at least, this crystal mimicry of her body was whole.

As if the crystal tree heard her thoughts, which it likely could, it lifted her higher, close to the large crystals emerging from the wall of the chamber. There, completely embedded in the closest crystal, she saw Vinyl Scratch.

Vinyl Scratch was singing. Her voice, usually so unruly and gravelly, aided and amplified by the crystal, rose to join the Song surrounding Octavia. It sung,

We are Harmony.

Embraced by the Song, Octavia was moved to other crystals, as if to introduce her to the ponies encased within. Some, she recognised as villagers she’d met. Others she did not recall seeing before. There were about forty ponies overall, young and old, male and female, earth pony, pegasus and unicorn alike. And then the next crystal held what was left of Berry Oats. The crystal was silent, no doubt because Oats was unmistakably dead, missing half his skull and the lower part of his torso.

We will salvage what we can, now that the emergency is over.

And then Octavia was faced with her own crystal, already occupied. There was no doubt it was a flesh and blood pony she saw in front of her, an earth pony mare with grey coat and raven hair, sporting a pink bow tie around her neck. There was also a very nasty wound travelling from the forehead to the top of the head.

We express sorrow that your own shell is unsalvageable. It has been tainted by Chaos.

As Octavia looked at her own body in front of her, she became aware that she - it - was not singing, but growling.

Once a shell is planted with a windigo seed, nothing will prevent the hatching of a new thrall.

The form in the crystal seemed to snarl. Spidery traces of frost formed on the crystal’s surface.

As a compromise, we have transcribed all your essence that it had yet to touch into this shell we spun for you, and extrapolated the rest.

The Song rose into a crescendo - and the crystal in front of Octavia, holding her own body, burst into actinic fire. And as Octavia screamed, in witness of her own passing, the Song picked up her grief and loss, and wove her into itself.