THE PLATINUM RAVEN

13 Black and rust and ochre over the plain

13   Black and rust and ochre over the plain        

While he's been gone, the Platinum Raven has been resisting the effect of the mirror mist herself, as she wants to see the effect it's having on the punters. She wanders in amongst a scattered group of folks she doesn't know, and leans by herself against a wall, incognito. She peers through the din of dark music and the shimmer of the mirror mist, and scans the growing crowds, who are numerous and fabulous beyond her expectations. The club has filled fast. The hall swirls; flashing light dances knives off the billow of the silver mist. All now affected by it, people dance or float around or lose themselves in talk or in affection. Surprise and delight ripple subtly through the air in all directions. A girl in purple leather with a ring through her nose, very beautiful and high already, stretches up to breathe a jet of mist dipping in from a vent on the wall nearby. Coming down from this and turning, she lights on the Platinum Raven and stares at her. A smile spreads rich across her features: "You did this, I know you did!" she laughs aloud.

"Brighter people than me invented mirror mist," the Platinum Raven tells her.

The girl swoops up and kisses her. "From now on I'm going to live here!" she promises.

"I hope you do!"

"See you later!" calls the girl and scuds away through the crowd.

The Platinum Raven glances up at the podium across the room, and smiles with a burst of love and pride at what she sees. High above the dance-floor, Scorpio dances among the silver mirror mist, lurid in the lights—every movement so electric, so mesmerically divine, that a crowd has stopped below him, just to wonder—as with perfect unawareness and control he taps an energy that ought to make him vaporise...

Then she bends her gaze to the DJ booth and grins with a different love. Demonic in that black-wired den up there, working both the music and the lights in the hall, Amber's making love with destruction and violence, radiant in damage, spinning heaven on a sound-flight destined for hell. "And we're just getting started," she reflects.

OK, the night's a bull's-eye—so now it's time to have some fun herself. She settles back upon a flight of steps above the dance floor, and lets her eyes wander, unfocused. Mirror mist billows at the edges of the hall, across the floor and the ceiling, so the bodies and the music in the middle might be any size. Rust-coloured spotlights burn through the gas, cutting in between the billows in a twitching of shafts, as the sun-spokes flicker through the boiling of the clouds in a speeded-up video. Denser billows split the rays, letting through a little light and bouncing out the rest into sprays so weakened that they glance off every other cloud, are split and then diffuse.

The scene has grown more lurid and her seeing self-reflexive, though she's not yet lost the knowledge why this is: bit by bit, her seeing is informing the scene. She watches her perception participate in what it sees; sees that interaction bouncing back from the billows; sees it modify them further in the course of bouncing back.

So here is the gift she gives the world tonight! To every self, a mirror of its own upon the vapour, every mirror made from the self it reflects. This, for example, is herself to the tenth power, carried on the music through the lens of the gas, liberated from the grind of the dragging of a body through the heaviness of weight and fatigue and breakability: her own sound, dark in a flexing of planes coloured black and rust and ochre; dry heat, unnatural as the heat within a russet-coloured light-bulb (day or night unclear, as in a dream or a painting); hellfire, lazy with the sureness of power unqualified...

The music draws her up above a vast plain, whipping at the sky and digging down through the clouds. Line, space and colour lean together with its pull. From its underside it fires down a shaft that descends with the slowness of enormity to hit the plain and carry up the engines of a town of sound. Hardly has the shaft reached the ground than another drops ahead to tread the plain a moment later, then another and another at a constant rate... One layer upward, the middle notes stroll, growing creamy in their freedom not to fall but climbing further with their own strength. Out from their hide clicks a dry articulation, quick as arm-bones. Below them then, a skyscraper pile drives down, of a size that dwarfs every shaft so far, falling slower, with a force of inertia unrelenting and terrifying. Dust falls ahead of it, the plain too has fallen, so the pile seems to linger; then it hits the ground. Before any crash can travel up to her, the pile has pierced the plain like a nail through sand; another shaft is even dropping too, by the time there returns, on the beat, from the pit, the explosion of the first monster nail—sight and sound on a scale that leaves expressionless attention as the only response. Triggered by the shock, a jagged buzz from the cockpit of the music shoots ahead across the sky, to be lost at its edges. Every sixteenth shaft, another pile drops, to sink through the plain: thus enslaved, she gears her mind to awaiting its explosion, with a hunger for the sight—then the silence—then the crash—then the hunger for the next one...

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For some nice reviews and interviews about The Platinum Raven, see http://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/

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The Platinum Raven is triple convulsion whereby our heroine Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven, from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert – then back down again, forever changed. A lot of its action happens in my favourite building, the fabulously flashy Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world's tallest skyscraper.