Shall We Make Beautiful Music Together? — October 2022 Challenge Winner

[Chernabog]

"It is time for my magnum opus. I only need the last instrument and everything… will finally be perfect."
​

The only name known for the man was his moniker; Maestro. No more, no less. It was fitting, as he was considered a musical genius his entire life - starting as a child prodigy. There was no instrument he couldn't play, and he was somehow flawless with them even if he had never touched one before in his life.

Yet the need for further perfection to make music and be truly challenged drove the Maestro mad over the years. He could play any instrument perfectly when it came to reading the music made by others… but not when it came to when trying to play his own. So perhaps …it was the instruments that were the problem. The male tore through the most expensive, the most historic, famous, perfectly crafted, and made from the most prestigious makers and brands. The expense and amount of time it took for pure perfection meant nothing to him. But still they weren't enough.

The descent into madness forced the virtuoso into further desperation to find instruments that could challenge him, to have a perfect tool to match the perfect musician for his perfect music. He needed conduits to play the notes that screamed within his skull and desperately needed to escape.


♩♭ ♫


How the Maestro was inspired to make his first 'human' instrument is unknown. Perhaps it was a visit to a museum in which he saw a flute made from a human femur. A drum bound with human skin. A kangling, a kind of trumpet, made from a tibia. Perhaps even a lyre fashioned from a skull.​

In any instance, his obsession shifted to the macabre, and there was no turning back. It was past the point of no return. At first, the Maestro tried to procure corpses. Fresh, rotted, skeletal, even mummified. However, the prodigy found that this was far harder than one would expect as many, the law included, are protective of the dead. Of the bodies he was able to obtain through various unscrupulous means, they also did nothing for him even though he painstakingly researched on how to create such grotesque musical abominations.

The man quickly realized… not only was it far easier to simply murder for what he considered as mere supplies - but the sound quality was… so much more beautiful when he killed them himself. Their fear, the adrenochrome that pumped through their veins as he hunted them, and their screams that peeled into the night sky… it was music to his ears.

Music that matched the music in his head.

Finally, he found the solution to his problem. With these parts, he could create the instruments he needed for his magnum opus.

The Maestro wept as he played a violin in which the fingerboard was made from parts of spinal column, its strings made from human intestines instead of animal, and the bow using the woman's hair. The sound was horrific, yet somehow perfect within his ears.

He did the same with a viola, then cello. The Maestro nearly vibrated with joy when he realized that the double bass was able to utilize an entire spine and base of skull for the fingerboard and headstock.

Next came a piano in which the entire set of keys were made from the harvested bones and teeth of his victims.

Then came the drums of various sizes and styles made from stretched human skin. His favorite drum had a beautiful rose tattooed within it, and daily he gazed upon it, running his fingertips over the flesh.

But no. His magnum opus required an instrument that wasn't just made of the parts of humans. It needed to be made… from a human.


♬♮♪​

The Maestro had attended an orchestra performance that night, and was already enraged by the sheer atrocity that normal music had become for him. But he was not there to try and enjoy the music. He was there to find a patron and lover of music, one that could appreciate that they were to be made into something no words could express, only melodies.

It was as the audience was leaving for the night, the man saw her; A beautiful young woman in a simple black dress. She was graceful and delicate, and he could see that her face was still flushed from having been brought to tears by the performance. She was perfect.

The man was like a mere shadow as he moved towards her while she walked to a street corner, waiting for a taxi. It was just before she was overwhelmed by him, that he cooed to her in a tone that made her skin break out in gooseflesh. Words he spoke to every victim before he took their life and made them into his abominations.

"Hello, Angel. Shall we make beautiful music together?"

♩♭ ♫​

The Maestro wept yet again as his fingers expertly plucked the strings of a harp. But as he leaned forward against the pillar of the instrument, his tear-lined cheek did not meet wood. It instead met the elegant bare chest of a woman's form.

The perfect instrument had been created for the perfect music.

The massive harp in his hands was not made of wood. Not all of it at least. The crown was that of a woman's neck, though her head was nowhere to be seen, blood still seeping from the stump. Her arms were also removed, and her nude, albeit blood-soaked body sloped into the harp's pillar and base. Where her knees bent, her legs were brought back and upwards elegantly, her feet at the same level of her buttocks; the pads of them facing the back of her own form. Her back was curved with grace, though the long wooden neck and shoulder of the harp jutted from between her shoulders, as if she had one single wooden wing. The wood curved down into the soundbox of the instrument, the end of it protruding out from the arches of her feet. While metal wires made the lower note strings closer to the woman's torso, her own guts had been used for the strings of the higher notes, meticulously made and sewn into her legs to hold them taut.

The woman's sanguine essence dripped down the strings as he played, each pluck flicking blood outwards from the vibrations. The sound that this human harp made was music that no living being should ever hear, but yet it was so beautiful to the Maestro that his tears continued to flow freely as finally, the music in his head was able to be expressed properly.

The softest kiss was placed against the sternum of the woman's corpse before he nuzzled against it, continuing to play what her body had become. "My Angel…"

His Magnum Opus had finally come to fruition.


The perfect musician playing the perfect music, on a perfect instrument.


♬♮♪​