The Grand Opera
Anno Draculæ X — The Tenth Year of Night
Hagia Sophia was never taken by force.
It was repurposed.
Before the Forever Night, it was already a structure that absorbed contradiction. Church, mosque, monument, museum—each authority laid claim without fully erasing the last. Its dome gathered sound. Its stone remembered prayer. It was built to hold attention, to quiet crowds, to make scale feel intentional. Long before Dracula, Hagia Sophia had learned how to turn belief into order.
That is why it survived intact when the city fell.
When the sun died in 1477 and Constantinople was converted rather than conquered, the Ascendancy did not debate what to do with Hagia Sophia. They understood immediately what it was: a machine disguised as sanctity. All it required was recalibration.
The first changes were invisible. Access routes were restricted. Galleries were sealed. Acoustic surveys were conducted at night while the city slept. Engineers—human, vampiric, and something in between—mapped resonance patterns through the stone. They discovered what the original architects had known instinctively: sound inside the building could be directed, multiplied, and carried outward with precision.
Then the work began.
The altar spaces were cleared. The floor was lifted in sections and never fully replaced. Beneath the marble, engines were installed—not in a single chamber, but distributed through the foundation like organs. These were the first Haemotic Engines: crude at first, temperamental, fed by blood siphoned from nearby clinics. Their purpose was simple—to power the building independently of the city around it.
The dome was sealed from above. Not reinforced, but insulated. Light no longer entered naturally. What illumination remained was controlled, projected, and timed. Sound no longer dissipated upward. It returned.
When Hagia Sophia reopened, it was no longer a place you entered freely. Attendance became conditional. Invitations replaced prayers. Silence was enforced not by guards, but by architecture. Voices dropped without conscious effort. People felt watched even when the galleries were empty.
This was not fear. It was alignment.
As the years passed, the building’s function expanded. Performances replaced sermons. Trials replaced confessions. Executions replaced absolution. None of this was announced as sacrilege. It was framed as continuity. The Ascendancy did not claim to destroy faith. They claimed to improve its efficiency.
Dracula’s throne was installed last.
It sits not at the center of the floor, but slightly offset, where attention naturally gathers without obvious symmetry. The throne is fused directly into the Opera’s primary engine column. When occupied, the building responds. Pressure stabilizes. Resonance deepens. Sound carries farther than it should. The city listens, whether it intends to or not.
The Diva conducts from the galleries. Her voice does not echo. It propagates.
Most of Constantinople’s public blood rituals occur here, not because Hagia Sophia is sacred, but because it is auditable. Emotions register cleanly. Panic can be measured. Compliance can be felt in the stone. The building is used to calibrate the city’s mood before major actions—purges, conscriptions, industrial expansions.
What remains beneath the machinery is not destroyed.
The mosaics still exist, sealed behind layers of metal and projection. The old prayer niches are intact behind panels no one opens. Some engineers claim the building behaves differently at certain hours, that sound distorts near sealed chambers, that instruments occasionally register anomalies during executions. These reports are logged and ignored.
Hagia Sophia is not haunted.
It is overwritten.
By the tenth year of the Forever Night, the Grand Opera is no longer a symbol. It is an interface. Policy becomes performance. Performance becomes law. The city does not argue with it. The city synchronizes.
To dismantle Hagia Sophia would not be an act of rebellion.
It would be a systemic failure.
And that is why every serious resistance plan in Constantinople, no matter how small, begins with the same impossible question:
What happens to the city when the Opera goes silent?