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3 comments · 2 likes Chapter 1 — Updated Dec 07, 2012 — 14,975 characters

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Allegra stood on the stage surrounded by a dead silence that shouldn't have been there. This was to be the opening night of the new opera that told the tale of the return of the last king's general and the final battle to defeat the dark magicians. This very moment should have been filled with the sounds of the symphony, singers adding their voices to the story, but there was only this silence. The music had been stolen.

In the muted lights Allegra walked over and stood on the mark where she would have been at the rise of the curtains.

The first night of previews had gone flawlessly as was the expectation for the City-Along-The-Lake opera company. Each note and lyric had flowed over the audience with precision. The standing ovation had continued until Herman, the artistic director, came on stage and begged the audience to go home.

It was a magnificent opera, filled with larger than life characters and grand arias. Every singer and every musician had worked slavishly to bring the production to perfection.

Then the second night happened.

Allegra moved across the stage, tracing the path to each of her marks in the first act.

The second night of previews had sold out. This wasn't a rarity for the city's famed opera company, but the size of the disappointed crowd that had to be turned away was worth much discussion in the dressing rooms two floors beneath the stage. The first act on the second night of previews had been as perfect as the first night. Everyone was animated with excitement. Many of them felt that this would be the production performers a hundred years from now would still be talking about, the one that all future productions would be measure against and found wanting.

Then things began to go wrong. At first it was just few dropped notes and a forgotten word or two. These could easily be dismissed as pre-opening night jitters. But then one of the principal singers stepped up to sing the pivotal aria of the act. Allegra could still see him standing at the edge of the stage. Several of the instruments in the symphony had gone surprisingly silent. The symphony suddenly stumbled over a jumble of notes and then there was nothing.

The performer, Klaus, had looked around, confused. He staggered back and looked helplessly to the rest of the cast. At that moment they all realized the same thing: none of them could recall a single line from the opera.

It was almost as if the opera had never existed. Allegra could still recall the story of the general and his defeat of the magicians' armies, but she was unable to connect to any of the lyrics. Even the motif of the opera evaded her attempts to recall it.

The performers, the orchestra, the audience, all were silent. Everyone was waiting and nothing was happening.

Herman had broken all the rules of performance and rushed onto the stage and had a whispered conversation with Klaus. Though their words were indecipherable, the anger and fear in them were not.

Herman hurried to all the other performers and had whispered conversations with each, including Allegra.

“Your lines?”

She'd taken a second to respond, trying one last time to find the melody, the words, motif, any of it. “I don't understand.”

“No one does,” said Herman. His voice was a whispered growl.

Behind him they could hear the audience beginning to grow restless.

“How does this happen?”

“I don't know,” Allegra said. “But it's been happening everywhere.”

“So I heard. An illness someone said. But none of you are ill. Are you ill?”

“Just suddenly sick to my stomach.”

“You aren't alone.”

Herman turned and walked to the edge of the stage. Allegra could see him looking down at the conductor of the orchestra who had turned pale, wiping at his brow with a now damp handkerchief. He shook his head to a whispered question from Herman. Herman turned around and waved all the performers off the stage. People in the audience shouted out questions and demands.

Allegra and several other performers stopped just off stage and watched Herman with concern.

“My dear guests,” Herman said. He turned to face the audience, his face blooming with a pleasant smile. “I do apologize. There has developed a problem with the mechanisms for the scenes. They are stuck. This as you understand, is why we have previews, to catch problems and fix them. Unfortunately, we will not be able to fix this problem in mere moments, it will take much longer than that. However, in good faith, I will be returning to you the price of your admission as you leave the theatre.”

Several of the performers gasped behind Allegra. Herman was tightfisted when it came to money. To even hear him speak of giving it back to anyone was surely a sign of how bad things were.

The musicians and singers retreated to the rooms below the auditorium, hiding until everyone in the audience had grudgingly taken their refund and left for home or other entertainment. Only then did the musicians and singers leave to their own homes to wait further instructions from Herman, once he figured out what to do.

But Allegra could not stay away, even if there wasn't a performance. In normal times she would have hidden herself in one of her disguises and performed at one of the music halls or gone to the university and joined one of the random performance that often took place in the halls and classrooms before moving out to one of the taverns or someone's apartments nearby. But all of that was gone, too.

The music halls had shuttered their doors weeks ago, being some of the first places to be struck dumb by what was happening. Most of the university classes were canceled until further notice.

Many called it a sickness and had taken to distancing themselves from others even though that didn't keep the music from disappearing.

What made it worse for Allegra was that she was alone in the city. She had traveled from the Great Steppes further east by way of a conservatory near the South Sea where she'd studied music for many years. Her family had died in a sleeping plague that had wiped out her entire clan, leaving her alone in the world.

Music was all that she had. Music was the solace and companion that kept her company through the days. As long as she was able to keep the music around her she was able to avoid facing the pain that was the memories of her childhood and their direct connection to her lost family. So while other members of City-Along-The-Lake's opera company hid in their homes, in the company of their families, Allegra came to the one place that felt like home to her.

“Hello?”

Someone was coming onto the stage from the wings. Allegra could tell by his breathing and heavy footfall that it was Herman. She could here him pause behind her. The light crystals at the front of the stage and in the chandeliers over the auditorium had been dimmed to conserve their energy. Enough light remained to safely walk without tripping but the gloom was such that discerning a person's identity from a distance was unlikely.

“Who's there?”

“Allegra,” she said, not turning.

“Allegra?”

She felt the stage floor vibrate with his steps until he paused next to her.

“Why are you here? Why aren't you at home?”

“This is home.”

He did not answer right away. His silence acknowledged her feelings. She was sure he felt the same way, but for different reasons. Herman had been a part of the opera since his prepubescent days when he'd sung soprano. Allegra knew he had a wife and children but she also knew that he always seemed to be at the theatre even when she wasn't.

“We've canceled the entire performance. No choice.”

“I know.” She wiped her hands along the top of her dress skirt, a nervous habit. “I just wanted to come and stand here.”

They stood in silence some more before Herman spoke again.

“It's bad, isn't it? I hear it's bad. I don't really get around much and I've only heard.” His voice trailed off uncomfortably.

“There some song. In the taverns mostly, but rare.”

“Used to be that you could walk down the street and hear a song or tune being whistled or ditty being shared from every house and business you passed by.”

Allegra nodded in agreement. It was the one thing that stuck most with her when she'd come to City-Along-The-Lake, that everyone seemed to be singing or playing an instrument at any time in the city. From the minstrels on the ships that crossed the lake past the sirens on the Necklace Islands to the workers in the textile factories as they turned the wool and cotton into great rolls of cloth. Any reason was good enough to break into a song in this city. She liked being surrounded by music. Music kept the memories at bay.

“I told my wife that I had some paperwork to finish up. Though not really.” Herman paused and looked out at the empty auditorium. “It just seemed so unreal I had to come to the theatre just to see it empty once more. I hate seeing it empty, but it is. And I feel quite helpless.”

Allegra nodded but remained silence. She hadn't come to see it empty. That's not what she wanted. She wanted the music and the performance.

“There was a moment, last week, when I finally began to believe this horror was coming our way. I'd been walking home, after one of our wonderful rehearsals, humming an old aria. At least I think it was an aria. See, that's the strange part, one moment I was fully engrossed in this song and then suddenly I'm spraying spittle because I can't remember a single note. I remembered the idea of the piece I'd been humming, a man searching for the meaning of life, but I couldn't latch onto a single note.

“Now, I have the score of the opera on a shelf at home. So when I got home I went into my study and pulled out the score and flipped it open. Do you know what I saw?”

The same thing I've been seeing for weeks, Allegra thought. “It looked blank.”

“So true,” said Herman. He nodded slowly. “Looked. Because if I wasn't paying attention to the score, maybe looking at it sideways, I could see there was something there. But the moment I tried to focus on it, it just sort of melted or faded or ran away. Whatever was happening, the music wasn't readable.

“I'd heard there were problems but it had always been distant problems. At that moment I realized it was coming closer.”

Allegra had heard the stories, too, experienced them herself. She'd also seen the music halls shutter their doors and watched as fewer and fewer minstrel's stepped up onto the stages of the inns and taverns. A city that once vibrated with music as its life's blood was close to being completely silenced.

There were rumors, suggestions, but no one really knew what or why or how this was happening.

“Anyway,” Herman said and slapped his palms together. “There's nothing I can do here. There's nothing I can do at home, either, but at least I can be miserable in the company of my wife and children.”

“All right,” said Allegra. She would have to go home too, but there would be no one there, just stacks of empty music sheets and lifeless song crystals. And she would have to face it alone.

“I'm going to turn off the crystals. No need to waste the energy if they aren't needed. Maybe soon we'll get our music back. One can hope. Coming?”

Herman was walking to the side of the stage were the crystal controls were set. Allegra turned and followed him.

Herman walked into the left wing of the stage. On the far wall were the rows of levers that controlled the crystals. Pulling or pushing on a lever cause a rod in the lights to rise or lower, breaking contact or allowing contact between three crystals. The closer the crystals were to each other, the brighter the light. Herman pulled all the stage levers down as far as they would go and the stage slowly faded away into blackness. He looked into the space of the darkened stage and then sighed.

“This way,” he said. “We'll go out the front.”

A small curtained doorway, hidden by an armor dressed golem that stepped aside as they pulled the curtain away, opened onto the auditorium. Golems had been an infrequent site in years past, something reserved for the magicians who once controlled all the magic. The new magic was changing all that, bringing magic to places like the opera house and even to the average laborer's home.

The carpeted aisle muffled their footsteps as they walked to the front of the building. Allegra looked back to the stage. She was distracted by the golem resetting itself before the small passage they'd just come through, but then her attention drifted back to the darkened stage. The curtains were pulled to the sides, the settings were either up in the fly or stuffed into the wings leaving a giant mouth gaping in silence. She shivered with an undefinable fear and turned away to hurry and catch up with Herman.

Through another discreet doorway hidden by a curtain were the controls to the crystals in the chandeliers over the auditorium. Herman pulled down the levers, washing the large and empty room in darkness.

“We'll go through the ticket booth,” he said and moved without waiting.

They walked across a silent and dim foyer to the ticket booth. Inside were controls for the foyer lights and the ticket booth lights. The glass windows of the ticket booth allowed light from Grande Avenue to enter, allowing for some illumination as Herman fumbled the booth door open and ushered Allegra through.

Herman turned to Allegra after he locked the ticket office door. “Do you want me to walk with you until you find a cab?”

Allegra looked at the avenue, hauntingly empty. “I think I'm going to walk," she said. "You're to the east, yes?”

“I am.” Herman lived in a newer home built near the park, north of the opera house. Allegra lived in one of the older buildings that had once been someone's grand home but later was converted into apartments. She could have afforded better, but it put her near the center of the city, near the music halls and the college of music.

“You'll be safe?” he asked.

“I will. Thank you, Herman.”

“Of course." He looked like he wanted to say something more. She watched him struggle with it before shrugging and making a small wave with his hand. "Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

Herman turned and trudged down the stairs and then onto the sidewalk towards home.

Allegra stood for a few more minutes and watched him leave. Her gaze then drifted across the grand avenue to the city park – once the private property of the last king – and then back to the grand avenue itself where she would walk to get home. She breathed in deeply then let it out with a long, mournful sigh and started walking.

