The blood-red moon hung in the shattered dome overhead, framed by blackened beams. I stepped forward, but each footfall echoed like the tolling of a bell.
The air thickened. My vision fractured—one moment I stood on the cracked marble, the next I was in the same place decades earlier, my hands clad in silk gloves, a jeweled mask upon my face. The opera swelled around me.
A soprano's voice rose high and impossible, a sound like glass under strain. Every note sent fissures through the painted ceiling, and from those cracks, pale hands reached down, grasping, writhing.
I tried to turn away, but my masked reflection in the fractured floor grabbed me by the wrist. "Don't forget the cue," it whispered, though I hadn't yet learned my part.
When the note finally broke, the moon blinked.