THE PLATINUM RAVEN

24 Catch you later!

24   Catch you later!

Leaning at her terrace rail on Level 152, the Chocolate Raven sees that the sun will soon appear, poking up above the Hajar Mountains' outline, far ahead. She turns her head and looks above her, up towards the Pinnacle, which shines in a light that has caught it alone as yet. While she stands and watches it, this sunlight's lower edge travels down from that point, down the metal Spire's flank, and then it slides down the building's skin of smooth brown glass, sinking fast towards her terrace right here. Soon this light-edge reaches her—and just as it does, she brings her gaze back down to see the sun push into view above the mountain-line before her.

Easing her sight down minutely from the mountain-tops, she finds once again the mad-faced tower on the rock-slopes. Underneath the tower, in between the struts and the beams, emerges Amber as she watches him, stalking through his hatch, bearing something in a sack. The pug dog descends on its rope in the gloom, spitting sand and weeping black sticky tears. Amber undoes the buckles of its pale blue strait-jacket, opens up the pug's chest and squeezes the sack inside. The pug squirms, dips its ugly muzzle to refasten it, and rises on the frame again, obedient in grief.

High above this, just below the two brown turret-windows, silver mist belches out, flows across the terrace past the pair at the parapet, billows through the balustrade, sinks in slow motion down the lethal shriek of air and carries on down, filling up the canyon of rocks to the brim and heading out across the desert on its way to the city here.

In welling up around that pair of figures on the terrace, it projects their image upward and out above the mountains. First there is Scorpio, dancing with his eyes closed, now and forever on the balustrade electrically, just as he was when she first saw him flicker up: the Armenian boy dressed in black, a Scorpio pendant at his neck; no smile, too much tension and exquisiteness and fierce vulnerability, but then the flush of light across his face for an instant, fem in black; and there he is forever now, perfection, for all time... Then the Platinum Raven's face, vast and serene in the dawn sky beyond him, just as she appeared when her devastating, desert-eyed perfection met the Chocolate Raven's gaze for the first time, electrifying: animal, expressionless, an icon of platinum and ecstasy and sweat, in wailing silence in the headlights, as dust floated round her through a siren-song behind the air... She winks at the Chocolate Raven, down across the desert with the calm of divinity, mouthing Catch you later!

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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/

For a quick synopsis of it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/synopsis-of-the-platinum-raven/

For some tasters from it, see http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/

For links to the retailers, see http://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-platinum-raven-novella-ebook/

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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.