The Prayer to Iorene

Protestors outside the Oritskaya theatre's front entrance would recognize the carriage sneaking past to deposit its ailing passenger at the stage door, since she had dared to greet them on her way in to last week's rehearsal. Gloved hand emerging from thick marmoset furs, Ascepiter assessed the field of clever signs poking defiantly out of a shivering, soldiering mass of wools against the grand opera house. Their disdain for this ballet and the high mysteries it commemorated should have alarmed her. It had when she'd been determined to show no fear last week, popping out of her carriage to order them coffee and sandwiches while inviting their young orator to discuss her concerns at the first rehearsal. But with a clawing stomachache that had lasted since that treacherous day worsening now as the carriage approached the stage door, Ascepiter could more truly empathize with their hunger to topple anachronistic deities.

"Without consistent, transparent communion," their convicted orator had inveighed to her in velvet seats "...the 'gods' invoked on stage could be any unnamed demon taking advantage."

Ascepiter knew this dissatisfaction with the silent skies threatened her as much as it did the production. It had been twenty years since she had been chosen by the protested gods on the stage inside. Yet their frustration vibrated at the same frequency as her own greedy mortal darkness, masked though it was by the beatific serenity expected of a celebrated incandescza.

"Your beauty is beyond compare," she grumbled, holding her stomach while the driver opened the stage door. The lines of the prayer had felt so stable in those first few years when they were spoken about herself, but they were a cold comfort to her spasming stomach today.

"You're avoiding us now?"

Barely into the antechamber where ballerinas and opera divas greeted their fans, Ascepiter turned to see the speaker who had joined her inside last week. She remembered the sign, depicting an auburn-haired Iorene in a worker's coat and cap with fist raised beside the words We are the Spring. She'd respected that the orator understood spring's natural violence.

"Sebastian, will you renew the order to Tsvetaeva's from last week?" she asked the security guard, feigning easy health. "Our guests would like more coffee and sandwiches."

The orator was abashed for a moment; ballets could be protested, gods questioned, but hundreds had seen Ascepiter's miracle for themselves twenty years ago. It would have been living legend while this young activist was still memorizing The Prayer to Iorene in school.

"You were about to convince me why the show must go on when you got sick last week," the young woman pressed on. "I thought you'd want to talk with us again today."

Though her heart pumped blood that she'd once signed her name in pledging herself to a divine husband, Ascepiter's deeper dissatisfaction with him had its own pulse. She didn't have to give it voice, as the protestors did, to see a self-portrait in the speaker's restless expression.

"I did," she admitted, hoping as she met the girl's gaze that her stomach pain didn't show in her face. "I apologize; please, have faith in me even if the gods are too taciturn for you."

The temperature had plunged with her own sense of faith since that first nauseating rehearsal. But squeezing the orator's mittened hand and promising another meeting, Ascepiter dreaded what the theatre's warmth might hold. This shivering girl, her followers, their momentum—they were no threat compared to the alluring, poisonous orchid Ascepiter would have to face again today.

"I saw you as the Comet in Lady Asteroid," the child confessed once she'd been assured.

Ascepiter autographed a scathing pamphlet inveighing against her own theatre while Sebastian sent a runner to the capital's most celebrated café to place the order. Faith in gods would always decay eventually, but her own mortal mystery still held the public's imagination. Hobbling to the theatre with her preternatural bridegroom vibrating immaterial between folds of matter, Ascepiter felt Arcturus' desire in her bones as deeply as she had that fateful matinee when the vaulted frescoes had split above them. Even if it now inverted towards another.