The city at that time—after more than two years of conflict—had begun to tear itself apart, like a beast that hates itself with a passion born of long familiarity. Every night, the deafening thunder of bombardment, the lights in the sky—the purple, red, or green of fungal bombs—the continuous, monotonous noise, so febrile, soaking into the very ground so that even the strange new flocks of crows, come to peck at our dead, became married to it, their cries the perfect mimic of fungal mortar fire. (No one knew whether they were about to duck death or bird shit.) And in the morning: the self-inflicted wounds, buildings sliced in half or crumbled into dust, the great, slashing scars in the earth …

In the weeks before the announcement of the opera—ragged hand-lettered posters nailed to charred posts and crumbling walls—a fear had begun to overcome many of us: a fear that Ambergris, as a place or an idea, could not last, that it might fall for the first time, and fall forever. With the fear came a terror of our own mortality that we had put aside through the first years of the war. With the evidence all around us that the city itself might die, we could no longer ignore thoughts of our own individual fates. Now we all seemed to shine with a clarity that imbued our forms with a figurative kind of light, a light we had not had before. It shone out through our eyes, our mouths, our movements. It made us all noble, I suppose, this fatalism, in a disheveled, unwashed way. (Such a lovely way to put it, but all I saw was grime and dirt and blood and death. The only real beauty lay underground, and it was a deadly beauty. How strange to be caught between such extremes.)

When Hoegbotton & Sons and Frankwrithe & Lewden came together at Borges Bookstore the week before the opera to announce a ceasefire, we all relaxed a little. We all let down our guard. If they could call a ceasefire for an opera, then perhaps they might one day call a ceasefire for more important things.

It had been a hard (not to mention dangerous) two years for Duncan and me, chasing after this or that story. We needed the rest. We needed the comfort. (The opera occurred, I felt later, almost out of the collective consciousness of the city—an impulse toward a remembered harmony Ambergris had never really known. When I heard the rumors of the opera’s impending production, I thought of them as horrible lies, intended to make us hope. It never occurred to any of us that one night House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden would find themselves entangled in a temporary peace, and we would find ourselves in front of the Trillian Opera House.)