Venice

Venice, The Second Stage of Blood

In the waning years of the 15th century, Venice stands on black water and older debts, a gleaming republic of merchants that has quietly sold its reflection to the night. The Serenissima’s gilded façades hide canals that run deeper than the sea, for the city’s greatest patrons no longer breathe, yet their coffers and choirs still swell with life.​

Venice is the humming ledger of Europe: shipyards scream with iron and oak, scribes tally fortunes in cramped script, and ambassadors whisper in frescoed halls about wars decided far to the east. At the same time still, its masks slip over mortal faces as easily as over immortal ones, and every opera house becomes a hunting ground where applause and heartbeat blend into one long, trembling note.​

A City of Mirrors and Masks

Venice studies Constantinople the way a rival singer studies a lead: covetous, entranced, and determined to steal the aria. Where Constantinople stands at the crossroads of empires, Venice rules the invisible routes between them, turning trade into leverage and rumor into currency.​

The city is built upon drowned forests and forgotten bones; some say the oldest pilings were driven through the hearts of things that should never wake. Lantern‑lit canals mirror palaces that never seem to decay, their beauty preserved by patrons who sign contracts in blood and refuse to let their investments crumble with time.​

Masks are not merely fashion but armament. Glassworkers and artisans whisper of commissions that require no eye slits, no mouth, only sigils on the inner surface that tighten around the wearer like a promise.​

Night Courts and Silent Choirs

Officially, Venice is a republic, governed by councils, doges, and elaborate rituals meant to prevent any single mortal from ruling alone. Unofficially, the city’s true continuity lies with the invisible patrons who never leave their boxes in the opera houses, watching generations of senators age and fall while they continue to applaud.​

These patrons sponsor what Venetians politely call the Night Courts: gatherings of masked nobles, financiers, and foreign envoys who meet after the final curtain. There, bargains are made for trade monopolies, anti‑piracy pacts, and crusades no pope has yet announced, all sealed in darkened side chapels with a sip from a shared chalice.​

Beneath the theaters, in chambers carved into ancient stone and newer brick, dwell the Silent Choirs—singers whose voices were “purchased” by unseen maestros. Their songs are never heard above the waterline, yet storms shift, fleets alter course, and distant hearts falter mid‑speech when the Choirs perform a new piece.​

Rivalry with Constantinople

Venice’s relationship with Constantinople is a duet sung in harmony and threat. Venetian merchants depend on eastern routes and relics, while its hidden masters hunger for the ancient bloodlines and arcane choirs rumored to reside in the city’s cathedrals and palaces.​

To the public, embassies exchange gifts, operas are commissioned in honor of foreign dignitaries, and Venetian envoys praise the grandeur of the Bosphorus in florid verse. In hidden loggias along the Grand Canal, however, maps of Constantinople are inked and re‑inked with new annotations: choir houses marked as “acquisition targets,” monasteries as “potential competitors,” and certain family names circled in dark red.​

Some in Venice whisper that the city is composing its own Grand Opera, one which will end with Constantinople’s choirs singing from Venetian scores. Others fear the reverse—that Venice is already being conducted from afar, its notes arranged by an older, unseen maestro seated across the sea.