Rohan Quine, “The Platinum Raven”, 9 The squirly brown windows in the turret

Next day, the Chocolate Raven is back where she should be: in Dubai, on Level 152. She leans at the far left-hand end of the railing once again and grows attentive.

High upon the turret of the mad-faced tower there are two round windows, tinted with swirls of brown inside the glass itself. In one of these the Platinum Raven stands, looking down from the hills and out across the desert plains. She shuts her eyes a moment, and a smile pulls the corners of her mouth apart and upwards. She’s excited, for tonight in the tower is a special night indeed: a brand-new, much-vaunted drug called mirror mist will infiltrate the air, gently filling up the club through the air-conditioning system. News of it has filtered underground around the world, bringing stories of a new and most sophisticated high—a high, so it’s said, with the power and the beauty of a trip, but where the tripper runs the show. Everyone who breathes in mirror mist, it’s said, is shown a magic mirror view of his or her self, intensified. So everyone is bringing their own goods to the party; self-knowledge and escapism, rolled into one. […]

The floor of this conical attic shakes already, with a beat as from a giant heart down in the building…

[…]

She puts her phone away and returns to the circular window, where she stretches up her arms, leans her head back and lets her long body squirm. She gazes through the deep squirly brown of the glass, out across the desert, to the city and the ocean. She eases her feet further forward on the wide sill, onward through the thickness of the high turret’s walls, and extends her limbs to touch the round embrasure’s edges all at once: planted there in Renaissance diameter, her arms telling ten past ten and legs twenty-five to five, she purrs in measured harmony and scans the view ahead.

Dusk is falling. Over on her right rise the neighbouring hills, pink and brown in the sidelight. Far ahead, the island in the Gulf is silhouetted on the baggy blooded orange of the sun above the water’s curve. Through the rich brown swirls in the thickness of the glass, she lets her gaze wander down: from the stillness of the Gulf between the island and the shore, to the city on the coast many miles away, spreading inland in a grid of twinkly lights. As her gaze sinks further, it runs across the darkened dunes, across the stony miles of scrub and up through this canyon, whose nearest tracts are hidden by the coping of a balustrade around the rooftop here below her. Just beyond the balustrade a slope of boulders funnels to a precipice of weeds in half a circle like a lip, around a lethal shriek of air a hundred metres sheer and twenty wide, making of this present site a small hanging valley. Planted one each side upon their tails on this coping, a pair of carved seahorses rise up majestically, blank stone eyes flecked with moss and reddish lichen scales, fixed on the clouds over seas out of sight.

As the orange orb widens, it shrinks around the island, which cuts it then in half—two slopes across the disc now chords moving outward to kiss its upper curve on either side and so extinguish it.

The dance and the flicker of the city grow alive, transfixed by the Burj Khalifa’s spike at its centre: darkness of energy and pulsing of violence, flickered out shaft-wise up through the air, over pink, over mauve, through to indigo and black.

As the sun rolls away around the globe to the west, the higher black weighs heavy, pushing down the lighter colours, so she sees her own reflection growing clearer against it: blonde hair platinum, splashed over brown eyes, cheekbones top-lit, lips curving up together, sensual as lovers.

Of a sudden round her torso from above her snakes a tendril, the first wisp of mirror mist. She grins. Condensing on the window, it diffuses her reflection. She brings down her left hand, and on the glass with her finger she writes out her name across the sky above Dubai—THE PLATINUM RAVEN.

For a moment then, she splits her attention into three: first the panorama, a-flicker in the distance; secondly her name squirling through the condensation (independent of the squirls in the brown itself); and thirdly the slivers of her eyes in the glass, clear again within the newly-wiped width of the letters.

What a night it will be—the mad-faced tower’s very first night of mirror mist!

For more about "The Platinum Raven" by Rohan Quine, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven/

For some great reviews of it, see

https://www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media/

And to pick it up from whichever retailer you may prefer, the retailers’ links for the audiobook are at

https://www.rohanquine.com/buy/the-platinum-raven-novella-audiobook/

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