Introduction:
Unforunately, we do not today have a complete transcript of the seminal ven opera The Six Ineffable Lessons of the Hidden Moon. What we do have is a number of manuscript fragments, some of them overlapping, many of them contradictory. Other works quote from Six Lessons or recount one of the many plot threads that run through the work. Putting these disparate sources together, we have reconstructed most, but not all, of the opera referred to by its contemporaries as “the Apotheosis of All Art.”
This is what is certain: six nobles, one from each unveiled House, come to Davfanna Aldrena for the autumn session of the Senate. Four are barons; two are roadmen. As such, they do not possess their own castles in the capitol, and are assigned rooms at a quarterhouse — the Hidden Moon House of the title. This provides the conceit upon which the entire opera rests. Each noble comes to the Hidden Moon House with a desperate agenda, and their web of interconnections serves to entangle their agendas and spur those agendas forward to their inevitable conclusions.
But what we do not have are those conclusions. We do not know how the opera ends — outside, of course, the assumption of terrible tragedy. The vast majority of the surviving fragments and extratextual references are to the opera’s first movement. While the scheming, scandal, and blood of the other movements are heavily foreshadowed (and lauded in other works), the specifics are lost to history.