Chapter Text
In King’s Landing, there is an opera house, abandoned, and in ruin. The seats, once pristine and upholstered with the finest velvet, and filled every night with eager audiences now sat empty, torn, and fraying. Feathers spilled from tears, and drafts blow them gently to the ground, where the once lush, expensive carpet is dusty, and covered with debris. Smoke still clings to everything, the smell mingling with the stink of mildew and dust. Everything is silent. No one has set foot in this building for the better part of three decades, untouched after the famous disaster that destroyed it.
In the middle of the great room, lies a crystal chandelier. It’s shattered, bits of crystal broken and scattered all across the seats and carpet, untouched after it fell on the audience that fateful night. Some say it was the falling of this very chandelier that sunk the opera house for good. For many who were there that night swear a ghost had made the chandelier fall.
And ghosts who try to kill patrons with lighting fixtures are terribly bad for business.
If there is such a thing as ghosts, this would be the place for them. There is something cold and lonely about this place now. Perhaps it had always been cold and lonely. Perhaps that is what drew the ghost to these halls in the first place. There is an eerie stillness in the air, the only movement comes from the dust motes milling around aimlessly in the draft from holes in the ceiling, cracks in the walls.
Something terrible did happen here, anyone can sense it. Maybe that’s why, even after all these years, even though no one can bring themselves to enter, the owners refuse to tear it down. For fear of incurring the wrath of whatever phantom had haunted them so many years ago.
So there the old ruin sits, untouched, unwanted, and if a ghost really did exist, it certainly doesn’t seem to be in residence now.
There was a time, however, when the opera house was the crown jewel in King’s Landing. There was a time when music, beautiful, rapturous music, rang through the halls. When the stage was free of cobwebs and dust, and lit up at all sides. The wooden accents decorating the stage would have been shining, buffed and polished before every performance. The bronze sconces both practical and decorative would have gleamed in the candle light.
The seats, in their former glory, had been delightfully comfortable things, all the better to enjoy a lengthy production. Maids worked tirelessly to ensure that not a speck of dust settled on any piece of furniture in the opera house, and, as a result it was nothing less than a sparkling wonderland in its heyday.
The chandelier would have hung, resplendent, over the whole theater, the centerpiece of all its finery.
This is the home the so called Opera Ghost would have known. And this is where the story begins.