Once darker than the night...

“Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke.”

- Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children

I was walking home from work and the sun had well and truly set. The street lights were bathing everything in honey except for the glitter of frost on the pavements. Ice only ever seems to reflect the stars, that pure blue white light that's so sharp it almost cuts. But when I looked up at the sky it was black. Like looking into a pit, like looking into an empty forever.

In the city the stars are sometimes shy. Hiding behind clouds darker than pollution and unseen by eyes too blinded by tungsten and headlights. We look up and our hearts sink without a star to guide our paths even when we know exactly where we are going.

Stars may be thousands of light years away, may even have faded into nothing long before we see their light, but they are beautiful and there is something so hopeful about them. They are magic floating in the velvet of the cosmos, impossible and glorious, ready for wishes and delight.

There are places in the world where there is so little light pollution that you can see the milky way with your naked eye. You can actually see another galaxy hanging above you like a breath frozen and scattered with diamonds.

This was not one of those places. This was not one of those nights.

There was only the city, the glow of electricity, the slow rolling tidal wash of car tyres on wet tarmac and my footsteps echoing off the houses lining the empty street.

I hadn't realised how lonely the night could be without stars.

My feet plodded on, my eyes lingering on the cold shimmer of frost beneath my shoes and I turned the last corner before home.

As I passed beneath a street light, taking one last gaze at the darkness hanging above me, one hand rummaging for a key as my feet automatically carrying me forward, the street light winked out. Fading down to nothing but an amber ember faint behind glass. And beyond, in the sky, a star winked into existence, almost as if it had been waiting for that very moment to shine.

As I watched, the night sky awoke in the space between the street lights, glistening bright and luminous, a hundred galaxies, a hundred possibilities, a hundred wishes to wish upon.

Starlight makes the soul open. Starlight nourishes hope like the sun and water nourish a seed.

Sometimes the night can seem endless and dark. But all you need to do is turn a corner and look up. The stars are always there, it's just that we don't always see them.

Above the shit and the piss...

I'm currently working on something which is set in a small city, has time-traveling witches, ghosts, vampires and mediums... You would think I wouldn't have time to miss some of the characters from the first novel and a half I wrote. But I do and so I indulged in writing a scene which I probably won't come back to for at least a year...

Lucielle and Raven almost have a thing. They are both magic users and are part of a dysfunctional magical society in a city which is pretty much London. Lucielle's only living relative, Henri, is a powerful witch, impatient and frustrated aunt and has a terminal diagnosis. Go scene...

* * * * *

Raven took the hospital stairs three at a time and wasn't even breathing hard when he reached the roof. The emergency fire exit had been propped open with a lump of concrete and he kicked it out of the way as he stepped onto the flat cigarette-butt strewn asphalt, hearing the door slam shut behind him.

She was standing on the low wall surrounding the roof, her feet bare, her dark hair drifting in the wind and half-hiding her face from the city. Beyond her the sky was bruised with storm clouds, making the street lights glow like fireflies far below them. Raven stopped, clenching and unclenching his fists, mentally calculating the distance between he and Lucielle, between the edge of the roof and the pavement. The maths were not good. He took a deep breath and took a step towards her.

“Lucielle... Get back onto the fucking roof.”

She tilted her face towards his voice, her eyes shut behind her hair.

“Fuck, Raven. I thought you'd be faster, I could have stepped off this edge a hundred times already.”

He clenched his teeth, taking a step towards her.

“So why haven't you?”

Lucielle laughed but the sound felt brittle. “I'm fairly certain that's not the kind of question you're meant to ask.”

She raised a half-empty bottle to her lips, the label frayed and torn where she'd been picking at it. Raven frowned. The alcohol complicated things, it always did with Lucielle.

“Get back onto the roof and we can talk about this.”

Lucielle turned towards him, her body stiffening, her face tight as she grimaced.

“Who said I wanted to talk? And even if I did, why the fuck would I talk to you? Christ, Raven. You could have at least sent Sophie...”

“Sophie’s in the ward. With Henri.”

The words landed like blows and for one moment Raven thought she would fall, just topple backwards like a windswept leaf and drift out of sight. Lucielle sagged and stepped forward onto the roof, her legs crumpling beneath her as she sat on the wall. The wind lifted her hair from her face and Raven could see the smudges of make up streaked down her cheeks, see the grey pain around her eyes.

“Lucielle, she needs you...”

Lucielle shook her head, distracted and then determined, the bottle returning to her lips.

“What good am I right now? How exactly can I help? It’s not like I can cure her, or even help... All I ever do is fuck up and make things harder. If I’m around she’ll just worry about me rather than actually looking after herself. This is MY FUCKING FAULT!”

She threw the bottle at Raven as she shouted. It flew wide and smashed on the tarmac near the door. Her arms dropped limply to her sides, her fingers brushing against the loose chips of gravel and bird crap. Raven took a step towards her and sank to his knees, his eyes searching for hers.

“Luce... It’s not your fault. How could this be your fault?”

The tears were running openly down her face, dripping onto her bare arms and feet. She lifted her hands to cover her face.

“If I hadn’t been fucking up, if she’d not been freaking out about Chase and Sophie... She’d have realised that there was something wrong. She’d have been...operable...”

Raven could feel his throat tightening and he tried to swallow, tried to find his voice. A growl of thunder dragged itself across the city and he waited for it to pass but Lucielle spoke before he could.

“Did you see her face, Raven? When she asked what the treatment was and the doctor, he just looked right at her and said there was no course of treatment. She looked so scared, it was like her face had slid aside to reveal her soul... I saw her, I really saw her and she was lost. I saw her hope wither, her strength crushed... She was like a child, like a lost child...”

“Luce...”

“I did that, Raven. I stopped her from realising she was ill... and now, now the Conclave are already hounding her, demanding I leave the city... What good have I been? With everything that has happened... My parents, Sophie, the fucking knife, Chase... What good am I? I just make people die. Where’s the grand fucking scheme in that?”

She stood quickly and turned back to the wall, lifting one pale foot to rest on the smooth grey concrete. The first drops of rain began to darken the stone around her foot in big coin-sized circles.

“Lucielle?” Raven asked, his voice flat and hard like the pavement way, way below.

She stepped up onto the wall and turned away from him, raising her voice so he could hear her.

“So what I really want to know is, if I’m meant to be so fucking special, from such an esteemed bloodline; if destiny and fate are bending over backwards for me to fuck them up the arse, then surely I can’t just step off this fucking wall and stop being such a total fucking fuck-up...”

Raven took a step towards her already knowing in his gut that he was too far away from her, that he wasn’t going to be fast enough. He called her name but his voice came out strangled by fear, buried beneath another rumble of thunder.

She didn’t look back, she just took a step forward into the rain and dropped out of sight like a stone.

Raven screamed her name as lightning scorched the air and for a moment he thought he’d been struck. His breath was knocked from him as he rolled across the roof, feeling the stone chips embedding themselves into his jaw and one cheek. He pushed himself to his hands and knees, feeling his heart pounding against his ribs like a punch, his whole body shaking and all the time unable to tear his eyes away from the last spot he had seen her in. That rain drenched roof edge, with the city lights beyond.

As he shuddered, his brain numb and his eyes stinging from the rain, he became aware of a sound, a buffeting of wind, like the slowed down whomp of helicopter rotors. Raven glanced around, seeing only the rain and buildings jutting up into the tomb dark sky and then movement caught his eye.

It was a flicker of black, peaking over the edge of the roof. It appeared again after a second, the sound of pushing air accompanying it and then Lucielle’s face appeared above the concrete.

She rose majestically, lifted by a pair of ebony wings which seemed larger than her small frame. Raven scrambled to his feet and approached the edge of the roof as her feet reached for the wall. She landed awkwardly, the wind tugging at her wings before she could fold them and Raven reached out to grab her hand, holding on tightly, anchoring her to the rooftop with an iron grip.

“What. The. Fuck...”

Lucielle glanced over her shoulder at the folded feathers and then met Raven’s gaze and there was steel there. Strength and conviction and what-ever else came to mind when you looked at someone who had just discovered they had the power to change the world. Lucielle squeezed Raven’s hand.

“I didn’t know I could do that...”

Raven stared at her wings. “I don’t think many people can... Probably not that fast either...”

“You know what this means?”

Raven’s eyes dropped to their clasped hands for a moment. “Destiny, fate... It seems you are fucking special after all... Maybe you have a chance of helping Henri?”

Lucielle smiled softly. Behind her the rain was easing off and shards of pink and golden light were spearing through the grey and licking at the city.

“First things first; it means we have a way off this rooftop after you kicked the door closed.”

Raven looked over the side of the building, his eyes widening.

“You can’t mean...”

Lucielle unfolded her wings with a shiver, wrapping both hands around Raven’s. Her wings dipped, the lift pulling her up onto her tiptoes. She grinned at Raven and pulled him towards her, his arm just wrapping her waist as her wings thrust down again.

“Oh hell yeah...”