My friend’s kid gave me pinkeye and I have been on a particularly fuckt up sleep schedule about it and dreamed an entire Italian Opera on the themes of heaven and hell and the power of love and recognition of the self in other and the tragedy of loving the idea of something rather than the thing itself and the dream ended with the phrase “-And then it was banned EVERYWHERE.”
The plot starts off with a hybrid of Cinderella and the Taming Of The Shrew where a woman with her own daughter marries a Duke who has an older daughter, and then the Duke dies under “Mysterious circumstances”.
But he leaves in his will that his fortune won’t be disbursed until his daughter (the elder one) marries.
The elder daughter (like, 20ish?) is refusing to get married because her step-mother is trying to set her step-sister (age 12) with IDK A Medieval Italian supreme court judge?? (Age 65) , but the marriage can’t go through until the Duke’s fortune disburses and the mother can pay the dowry.
Other thing about the Eldest Daughter: She Always Speaks The Truth. Not only does she refuse to lie, but kind of like a retroactive Cassandra, everything she says is True. As you can imagine, this is not terribly popular In Fantasy Medieval Italian High Society.
The mother, big mad about being stuck with this stubborn, awkward girl, gets a Lawyer and a Bishop and a bunch of other authority figures to modify the will so that “Should the plague take my eldest, we will not be bereft *wink*” AKA if the eldest just dies or disappears without getting married, the mother will get the money anyway. (They all know she’s going to kill the girl, but they’re getting a cut.) The Step-Mother then, in true operatic fashion of Going Way Too Hard tortures the Elder daughter, and locks her in the basement to bleed out and die.
There, in the darkness, abandoned by God and the Law and Family etc. the daughter turns to the last thing she has left.
BLACK MAGIC
(Come on, it’s Opera. Everybody knows Black Magic)
