The beginning of my prospective novel. Uploading of other chapters is subject to my whim. You may just have to wait until it gets published (if).

This was it.

The disused passage had been unlit until this point. Now a point of dazzling red light steeped it in red, casting infinitely long shadows past anything before it. It was the crystal. Someone had got there first, though.

“Get out of my way.”

The stranger grinned ghoulishly in reply. Rocio grinned back. He lifted up his fingertips and shot a point of white-hot fire.

The man rolled sideways, seeing the fireball pass centimetres from his eyes. He jumped aside in a different direction, trying to use his own magic. A fireball hit the wall where he had just been, leaving behind a patch of red-hot concrete. He dodged aside again.

Another hit the ground by his feet as he landed in a crouch. He snarled. Rocio lined up his shot carefully.

Suddenly he fell towards the ceiling.

Rocio reoriented himself just quickly enough to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling and to fall into an awkward roll. He span around and glared furiously at his opponent, who was crouching upside down to his view, his brow bunched up in concentration. Rocio shoved his hand forward to shoot again. Gravity changed again, a moment too soon; his shot went wide. Rocio landed on the floor, then gravity changed again. This time he reoriented himself faster and loosed a fireball even as he fell. His enemy leapt aside desperately. Teeth gritted, he changed gravity again and again, wildly and in random directions, anything to keep Rocio too occupied to fire.

The stranger could spare no concentration on anything other than the fight, but something on the periphery of his vision had been nagging on him. As unease built up more and more, he finally looked down. With a cry of shock he realised that he had been standing on a red-hot patch of concrete where a fireball had hit. He jumped aside. It took him an instant to realise the importance of the fact that his feet had not been burnt at all.

A fireball hit him in the chest in an explosion of blood and gore. He felt nothing. He looked at Rocio. Rocio gaped. And vanished.

Behind him, the man heard the sound of running footsteps on concrete. “ILLUSIONIST!” he roared, pivoting one hundred and eighty degrees and grabbing a piece of crystal in his belt-box. The light source went out as Rocio stashed away the prize, sprinting as hard as he could. All the stranger could see were the stars in a square area where the passage ended.

“That doesn’t lead anywhere!” he growled, pulling out his revolver. Drawing power from the crystal piece, he lit up the passage, and forced Rocio to become visible. He flickered as their magics struggled against each other. The stranger lined up his gun. Rocio had almost reached the end of the passage. The crystal piece burnt out. Rocio blurred then became invisible again. He vaulted the balcony. A cacophony of gunshots sounded behind him.

Bullets flashed through the air all around as he vaulted into the empty air. One grazed impossibly close, leaving a stinging gash on his cheek; but by the time he had fallen past the balcony, Rocio was pleasantly surprised to realise he was still alive.

He took a breath of fresh air and smiled. Then he looked down.

Half a mile below him, lost somewhere in the dark, and the haze, and the red mana that crackled and arcked between the buildings, was the ground. Windows and balconies flew past, getting faster and faster.

A bolt of mana tore across the building even as he looked, writhing and sizzling for less than a second before vanishing again with a booming noise that made his eardrums ring. It left behind a bright green after-image on his retinas.

Rocio's cloak flapped wildly in the turbulence. He gritted his teeth.

He leant forward to lie flat against the rushing air and tried to manipulate gravity. He was nowhere near as good at it as his recent opponent had been; several seconds passed in which nothing happened at all, then, agonisingly slowly, the wall started to angle towards him; ten degrees; twenty degrees. His feet kicked off the rapidly moving surface. Thirty degrees. It was becoming harder and harder. His brow bunched up in fierce concentration. His brain throbbed. Fourty degrees… a little more… a little more… his feet skipped off the wall once. A fraction more. His feet touched the wall again, then he was leaping along a fourty degree slope in massive bounds. Balance was almost impossible. It was all he could do to stop himself from stumbling.

Seconds passed and he hadn’t improved the situation at all. Hopeless. He decided to use the crystal. If it was that or his life…

He took it out of the box and focused as hard as he could.

Suddenly a ledge loomed into view. A huge ledge, Rocio realised, occupied by a crowd of people. It seemed to be housing an open-air party. The obstacle grew larger frighteningly quickly. In a panic, he swung the angle of his gravity manipulation right around and had it fling himself out into the open air. He missed the ledge by centimetres. He thought he saw some interesting expressions as he passed.

Rocio sighed. The wall was now running past about fifty metres away. He cleared his mind and tried to think. Bolts of mana slashed the walls in quick succession and leapt through the air around him and repeated eching booms battered his ears; he was getting near to the ground. He didn’t have much time.

An angel’s head appeared upside down in his field of view, grinning. “Need a wing?”

She wore nothing but a pair of black jeans. Her huge wings were pure black, tucked in close to speed her dive. Her messy hair and cunning eyes were black.

“About bloody time!” yelled Rocio.

Noré caught Rocio in he arms and pulled him close to her chest. Then she teleported.


*


Noré glanced at the gash on Rocio's cheek. “That will be a nice scar when it heals. They can mention it on the wanted posters,” she said slyly.

Rocio laughed. “I can illusion it over anyway,” he said, shrugging.

“So… the hunt was a success, I take it?”

“Yeah. I used a bit of it, but a profit nonetheless.” Rocio patted the heavy black box on his belt. When a crystal was spawned, a person with the right equipment could detect it a hundred miles away. Once in the black box, though, it was invisible.

The two sat at the top of some small tower of Romanova’s suburbs, watching the mana storm. Red bolts ran up the sides of the massive cloud-high buildings of the Core of the city, leapt between them and eventually dissipated into the air, making an erratic rumbling sound which had been echoed many times by the time they heard it. The clouds above flashed red.

Rocio unscrewed his flask of vodka and raised it to his lips before passing it to his friend. "Happy Midwinter's Eve."

"The same to you," said Noré. She took a swallow, and coughed slightly.

"Too strong for a skinny girl like you?" Rocio teased, grinning.

"Yeah right," she countered lazily, grinning back.

Rocio took back the flask and sipped thoughtfully. They watched a while in silence, completely comfortable in each other's presence.

"How long's it been, Noré?"

"Been? How long have we been working together, you mean? Must be five years now."

"Long time."

"Yeah," Noré said quietly. After a moment she let out an exaggerated sigh, grinning again. "And you're still not attracted to me."

"Let me see." Rocio made a show of looking her over. To be true, her body was strange; her arms, legs and hips were thin and delicate, while her chest and shoulders were extremely broad in order to accomodate the huge muscles needed to flap her massive wings. Her pectorals were huge and almost pure muscle, making it look like she was perpetually puffing her chest out in pride. Although it was common to make jokes about male angels having breasts, they really didn't look that womanly on either sex. Overall, her body put him in mind of a bird more than anything. "Nope." She punched him in play, and they both laughed. Rocio shifted closer and put his arm around her shoulder, and she draped a wing around him in response, smiling.

“We should get back, the storm’s not over yet," Rocio said quietly after a long while.

“It’s almost noon, let’s wait for the fireworks… forget the storm, we only give ourselves two holidays a year…”

Rocio shrugged and nodded in acceptance.

Already the windows of the towers all around were beggining to be lit up in fanciful colours. Just before the sun rose at noon on Midwinter's eve, people turned their lights on as bright as they would go, each in a different colour of their choosing, so that the buildings shone in thousands of colours and the metropolis became an incredible glittering jewel.

"Round about now," said Rocio, looking at his timepiece. They looked south. Out, past the dwindling edges of Romanova, past the snowline where the artificial heating of the city stopped and the land became empty and white, the sky was lightening a little to a deep blue. Over a couple of minutes the sky became purplish, the stars became less distinct, and, painting the clouds over the horizon, a touch of red could be seen.

"Now." The timepiece showed 12:00 noon. They turned their heads to watch the first fireworks climbing silently into the sky around the Core. They burst into blossoms of golden light so bright that you couldn't see the stars. Several seconds later the bang reached their ears. Then suddenly everywhere there were the trails of climbing rockets, and the sky became laced with thousands of colours. The deafening cascade went on for a full five minutes; then the horizon on the north was fully dark again.

Now began the longest night of the year. The celebrations would go on for fourty-eight hours, until the sun came up again. The fireworks had mostly laid off now, and most of the lights in the buildings were down to normal brightness, or close to. The mana storm raged on.

They each took a last swig of vodka, then Noré teleported them to Headquarters.


*


Kale had been doing magic for almost as long as he could remember. As a very young child, staring in fascination at a slit of sunlight picking out motes of dust floating in the air, he realised that the particles would seem to pick up energy and dance more rapidly under the intensity of his gaze. He tried staring harder and softer, then telling the motes what to do under his breath, and found that he could control their dance to some small extent. He experimented, imagining things happening with his mind, and found that he had a small but noticeable effect on the world through his thoughts.

From then on it had been his habit to spend every spare moment playing with magic. His parents were never so bothered with what he did, so it went unnoticed that he spent all his time locked up in his room on his own. By the time he was five he could make dust motes swirl around in a microscopic cyclone, objects glow in the dark, and paperclips stick together in chains.

When he was six his mother finally noticed. Kale had been trying to freeze a drop of water. He didn’t know that it was wrong, so when she asked what he was doing, he replied honestly. She went white and ran off calling Kale’s father’s name. Shortly he came over and beat him.

“A little peace in this household, is that too much to ask?!”

Kale was left there, crying wretched.

It wasn’t until he got into school that he learnt that magic was illegal, and only after some time. Luckily, the adults didn’t take him seriously when he claimed to be able to do spells. The rest of the children took his lead, and soon “magic” was the most played game in the playcentre, and he didn’t stand out at all.

After his first year he had become very popular and had made a lot of friends. In particular, Rowan and he were inseparable. Rowan was the only one who had seen Kale do magic. After this, Rowan had begged Kale to teach him.

“Well… what can you do?” Kale replied, hesitantly.

“Nothing yet.”

Kale pointed at a beam of lamplight. “Try and make the dust in the air dance.”

Rowan tried. “I can’t.”

“I’m not sure if you can do magic then. When I started, I could already do that. If you can’t do anything how can you practise to get better?”

But he tried to explain how he felt when he did magic, and told Rowan to try and practise. He didn’t expect anything to happen, but a month later, when Kale had forgotten entirely, Rowan came to him and proudly demonstrated a slight swirling in some particles of flour he dropped on a table. Kale had to look very close to see it at all.

Every day after that, they stayed together after school until Rowan’s music lessons and played with magic. Typically Kale would sit in a corner and focus on his own magic while Rowan watched him or struggled with his, but sometimes Kale would watch Rowan and fruitlessly try to explain what to do.

*

There was a girl called Jane, with glasses and messy black hair, who had no friends and never talked to anyone. She sat in the same corner every break with her head in her hands staring at nothing. Most of them had tried to ask her what was wrong at least once, but she always brushed them off or even ignored them completely. She would often break into long tears at break, and sometimes in class, and at those times she wouldn’t respond to any word that was said to her. No one knew what was wrong.

One day Kale had dropped exhausted onto a bench after a long ecstatic chase. Rowan had gone off elsewhere for a while. To be honest he hadn’t noticed Jane; she was like a part of the scenery now.

“You do real magic.”

Kale started and looked around at her. Her voice sounded strange, very grave and monotone; in fact he didn’t think he’d ever actually heard it before.

“Not like play magic, you do actual magic. I’ve seen you after school.”

“Oh!... You… haven’t told anyone, have you?”

“No. I do magic too. But you’re better than me. I want to learn from you.”

“I don’t think…”

“Can I come to your room after school too?”

Kale didn’t know how to refuse. “…Okay,” he conceded.

After school that day, Jane came into the room where they were staying and dropped an ant onto the table in front of Kale. It started to run around skittishly, trying to get away.

“This is what I do.” Her brow furrowed in concentration. The ant halted in its run and started walking in perfect circles.

For a moment Kale wasn’t sure what he was meant to be seeing. Then, “wait, are you controlling the ant?”

“Yes.”

Kale looked in wonder as she moved it back, forwards and sideways, in loops, and even tried to get it to rear onto its hind feet and walk on two legs. “I wish I could do that.”

“It’s stupid.” She reached down and squashed the insect angrily. “Who cares about controlling ants?”

That day was like any other day, except that now Kale explained and demonstrated to two people instead of one. Jane showed some natural promise in other sorts of magic as well, and at the end of the lesson, when Rowan was packing up for music class, Kale suggested some practise exercises for her to do at home.

Rowan said goodbye and left the room. As soon as he had gone Jane burst into tears.

“Jane!” Distressed, Kale had no idea what to say. She just sobbed brokenly. She did every other break, of course, yet now it felt a lot more personal. He wished there was something he could do to make her stop.

Jane put her hands over her eyes and cried harder. Kale moved closer, and tentatively put his arm around her. At first she didn’t react, then she turned and held him back as hard as she could, sobbing into his shoulder.

After that it became a strange sort of routine. They would play with magic together every day after school. Much to Rowan’s annoyance Jane quickly surpassed him and it seemed she might be as good as Kale eventually. Kale learnt to control insects from her; he also found that Jane’s strange magic could let you feel other people’s emotions and tell when they were lying. After an hour Rowan would leave, and then Jane would spend ten minutes clinging to Kale and crying wordlessly. Kale quietly accepted his role.

Sometimes he would feel a dull ache in his deep in his chest as he hugged her shaking body. He wondered bemusedly if this was what love was supposed to be like.

Years passed like this. They all grew better and better at magic. Kale could make electric sparks jump between his fingers, make small objects float in the air, heat glasses of water to boiling point, and make miniature cyclones, flashes of light, and even little hazy illusions.

Jane said that sometimes she could hear people’s thoughts now, and occasionally she would enter someone else’s dream when she was sleeping and talk to them, and they would look at her funny the day after.

She had entered Kale’s dream once in fact, a long time after she’d told him that, and they kissed then, although it never happened in real life; not even afterwards.

Rowan kept working at it, although he was outshone by both of them. After a while he seemed to get a little frustrated and stopped going every single day, and often spent longer watching the others than practising himself, but he never gave up.

Jane still cried afterwards. Not every time anymore, and usually not for as long. Sometimes they just hugged sadly. After almost a year he’d asked her once again what the trouble was.

“It doesn’t matter. I… hate things. Doesn’t matter.”

Kale supposed that maybe it didn’t.

*

They were thirteen years old now. Today was a normal day, the day before the midwinter’s night holiday, except that Rowan and Jane both hadn’t come to school. A bit of a coincidence, Kale thought, but it didn’t occur to him to be worried. He found another good friend to sit next to in class.

“Today we’re going to talk about the extracentral communities. Can anyone tell me what ‘extracentral’ means?”

Hands went up. “Food-eaters, miss!”

“Yes, food-eaters; but from now on we are going to call them ‘extracentrals’. Food-eaters is a bad term. The fact that they eat food is not their defining feature.

“Can you give these sheets out please Heidi? Okay. Now, there are two sorts of extracentrals; the colonies and the tribes.” She wrote on the blackboard. ‘Tribe’ means that they survive on their own in small groups or villages, hunting animals to eat or growing plant-food. Colonies are usually what remains of the cities of the Old World since the exodus to Romanova, and they trade with Romanova the things we can’t make ourselves. What things can’t we make ourselves?”

“Graphite miss!”

“Good! I believe you were learning about carbon circuits with miss Lefleur?”

“Yes miss, you make a circle of graphite and the mana runs through it and that makes lights glow and stuff,” a girl said excitedly.

“Very good. We can’t make graphite ourselves because it has to be dug out of the ground in certain places in the world.

“What else?...”

Just then the door opened and a man in uniform opened the door and strode in briskly. The teacher turned a little pale. “What can I do for you officer?” she asked uncertainly.

“Kale Gomez.”

She pointed. “That’s Kale. May I ask, has he done something wrong?”

The man ignored her. He approached Kale rapidly and purposefully. He grabbed Kale’s head with one hand and shoved his face into a tab of chloroform. Kale blacked out.

*

A bright light was glaring at Kale. He fitfully tried to avoid it and remain in the comfortable blackness, but he was steadily waking up.

He opened his eyes slowly. The light was white and intense. It made him blink. He was in a hard chair. He couldn’t move his arms or legs.

“What… why…”

“I will ask the questions. These are the facts. You are Kale Gomez. During your school years you practised magic and organized an illegal group to train your classmates in magic. You intended to use your group to cause distress to the populace and challenge the government’s rightful rule.”

“…No…”

“Do you understand the penalty for practise of magic? In case you wish to play ignorant, the penalty is death. The law is no different for minors. Do you want to live, little boy? …I said, DO YOU WANT TO LIVE! You will answer when a question is directed at you!”

“Where’s Jane and Rowan?”

“I WILL ASK THE QUESTIONS HERE!” Kale’s entire consciousness suddenly became pain. He tried to pull his wrists away from the source, but they were immobile. The pain was impossible. He had to get away. He couldn’t get away.

It ended, and his head lolled as he passed in and out of consciousness. He was only half aware of them talking.

“Sir. I can’t believe we’re doing this to a little kid.”

“Orders are orders, Private. And these buggers are like creeping mould. You gotta kill ‘em before they get too big to handle. A hundred murdered policemen in the future would thank us for neutralising a kid now rather than let him become a hunter. Back to work now. Aw, he’s sleeping.”

The sound of water falling. With a burst of cold white shock Kale was jarred into full consciousness. He gasped and panted, shaking the water from his hair.

“The reason you are alive, little boy, is that you may have information we want. Now, I personally hate the idea of letting you hang about to cause trouble, but if you can help us apprehend any other members of your little playgroup I am to let you live.”

Kale started crying.

The pain happened again. He blacked out. The water again.

There was a bell ringing somewhere. An alarm, it must be. Because of the light he couldn’t see more than silhouettes of the policemen, so he didn’t know what their reaction to it was. Just a drill probably.

“I will tell you a little story now. Once upon a time, a colleague of mine had another kid like you in here. He gave him the pain fifty times a day, and the kid wouldn’t talk. It was like that every day. Kid wanted to die. My colleague wouldn’t let him. In the end all he’d need to do was open the door and the kid would be crying and begging to be allowed to die. Oh, but he couldn’t die. It took him two weeks, but he cracked. He gave away the names of all his friends and family who did magic. His sister, his brother, his parents, everyone. He said he only wished he did it sooner. You see, you can’t die until we let you. You will crack. It’s impossible not to. There’s no hope for you little boy...”

The policeman broke off his monologue. There was the sound of shouting outside the room. Gunshots.

The door smashed off its hinges. Light burst into the room suddenly. It hit the floor with a huge bang. Kale squinted. The policemen were drawing their guns.

One fell upwards. His skull broke on the ceiling with an audible crack.

Something bright white hit the other in the face. He went flying backwards and hit the far wall. Blood poured out of the blackened, mangled remains of his head.

The lamp went off. Kale saw a short muscular man with ginger hair and an angel – but unlike the angels he knew, this one had black hair, wings and eyes. They moved over to stand in front of him. The man grinned.

“How would you like to become a crystal hunter, kid?”

Kale gaped. “Yes,” he managed eventually. The angel slapped a hand on kale’s shoulder and that of the man, and suddenly the scenery changed completely.

<-------- Back to Stories and Poems <-------- Back to Index

Buttercat.Apocalypse@Gmail.com