Another Night

Mira tucked her feet under herself and leaned back against the couch. Valentine glanced at her and away. He seemed to find the dancers very interesting.

“Did you know what was happening to you, the first time?” Mira asked, pulling a gold cushion over her legs. She was just slightly chilly; the wind from the garden drew goosebumps on her arms and legs. It felt like summer – if this place had seasons – was fading fast.

“I didn’t,” Valentine said. The tone of his voice didn’t invite her to ask further questions. His face didn’t lend itself very much to emotion, but Mira saw his hands curl into fists on his legs.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “If you’re- if it’s all right.”

Valentine watched the dancers for several long seconds. Mira considered getting a glass of wine, but there was something distinctly disturbing about the viscosity of it. It was darker than any wine she’d ever seen, such a dark red it was nearly black, and viscous as sludge. She sipped the drink Valentine had poured for her. It left her feeling more hollow than before she’d drunk it, but it warmed her chest. She cradled it in her hand and waited for him to reply.

“Another night,” Valentine said finally. He pressed a knuckle between his straight dark brows and closed his eyes. Mira wondered if, sometimes, the noise and the sound got to him. She imagined what it was like, to live in this world of constant revelry, where the wine kept flowing and the dancing never stopped and the music was forever playing. Perhaps he did tire of it. She had the impulse to put a hand on his arm.

She didn’t. Mira let her gaze wander to the band, and the green-eyed musician. His eyes were closed right now, and she didn’t watch him too long in case he opened them and saw her staring. It wasn’t magnetism that drew her gaze to him, or the feeling that she knew him from somewhere else. It was the feeling that he was as much an outsider here as she was. That he wore this place on him like a skin that he could shuck off when he returned to the real world.

Assuming this isn’t real. The more time she spent here, the more Mira felt like the real world was less solid than she’d first thought. If real was what she could touch, taste, hear, then why was this world not as real as her own?

“Don’t let yourself be fooled by appearances,” Valentine said. She felt a draft of heat, as if someone had lit a fire nearby. “Reality is not as crude as this.”

Mira turned to the women in brocade, and the velvet drapes, and the crystal wine glasses with coloured flutes. “I don’t see anything very crude about it.”

“Then you are fortunate.”

Art by Natalia 

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Carousel Tunes

The music changed into something lilting and smooth as a lullaby. It filled Mira’s head with fog, as if she were half caught in a dream. It was familiar, it stirred a memory in the back of her mind. She saw, in a flash, like summer lightning, a face beneath a skein of murky water, tinged red like wine. She reached for the memory but it slipped away from her; she did not care. The music was too beautiful to think of horrible things.

She closed her eyes. The music blossomed behind the darkness of her eyelids, into flowers as red as fire, that darkened to a colour as rich as blood. They burst with golden polled that became dust. They whirled and whirled, spinning as if on a carousel. Among the flowers were feathers, black as ravens. There was a music box, a brass flute overgrown with vines and thorns. They spun and spun and Mira fell closer to them in the darkness. Her fingers tingled, though she could not see them. Her entire being was drawn into the music, and whirling pictures that came with it.

“I wouldn’t recommend closing your eyes,” Valentine said in a voice like black velvet.

Mira nodded. “It was the music,” she said. Her voice was wild and horse, as if she hadn’t used it in days. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Art by Anonymous

Iron-Rich

The music grew. It was a living thing, twisting and writhing, swelling, contracting, and swelling again.

When Mira glanced back to the clockwork toy, its key had stopped turning. The ivory swan was stagnant, unmoving, but the music continued, and in the crescendo Mira felt the velvety brush of fast blooming flowers on her skin, the heat of fevered skin, the kiss of a steel blade.

In the dim light the swan’s eyes, wine red, flickered. Mira stared at them as the garden, the light, the sky and the ground blurred together. The swan’s eyes were darker, murkier, red, red, red as blood, blood, blood…

Mira opened her mouth, the call for Valentine, but her breath was sucked away into some void and she staggered without it as the world pin wheeled in a gold and scarlet fury.

Mira dreamed, and what she dreamed was:

A mirage of gold swirls, parting before a mirror, and in it, her own reflection, but her eyes were black as night…

Someone was opening their wrist, splitting the sun-bronzed skin as though it were only stitched together, and blood rose and feel from it, iron-rich, and grey and metallic, then it burst with light, like liquid gold…

Green-tinted landscapes, as though the sun was eclipsed by an emerald. Then the streets flashed, and Mira blinked and the green was contained into coal-lined eyes…

Mira lay on a pile of plush cushions, languid, surrounded by candles and brassy music, like some ridiculous exequies being performed. But she was not dying, no, she was changing. Black feathers stuck to her arms. Metamorphesis, she thought, as she sunk deeper and deeper into the cushions that swayed and tossed her like a crimson sea…

Mira surfaced from the darkness like a leaf floating to the surface of a river, weak and tremulous.

The current of the river pushes her to consciousness and the realization that the green-eyed musician stood over her, watches as she blinked awaked. His gaze met hers and discarded all vestiges of sleep from her body.

“What happened?” she asked, when she noticed Valentine also stood over her, like a sentinel in black and gold.

Art by Fatima Batool 

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Descent

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, 
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” 
― Pablo Neruda

She occupied the space between heartbeats, the time between seconds. The moments in the dark when his thoughts were half coherent and dusky with sleep.

He caught her eye, a glimpse of mazarine, and saw her, saw into her. Beyond her eyes was a labyrinth, a mazelike network of thoughts and notes, and her movements were the tranquil hum of a cello, her smile like the keen of a violin.

He watched her alongside the angel, slipping from the room and back into it as smoothly as velvet, weaving around the crowds with a practiced grace. She moved lightly, was golden and rich, tinged with a heady darkness, like silver. Paradoxically enthralling.

She clearly did not belong here.

His wings shuddered when he caught her gaze again, and this time, she held it. He cast his eyes down but her eyes on him was like holding warm bronze to his skin, and he felt it like a burning.

She was gone again when he looked back, and the stirring in his blood, the sudden a consistent pump, faltered.

He felt as though he were tipping. He teetered on the edge of an abyss, filled with darkness and moonlight and whispers. And it was a longed-for descent, that ended with light and mazarine eyes.

Art by Candi

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Trust in a Masquerade

Mira moves carefully in and among the dancers. They move in buoyant masses from one room to another, swirling in gold and black and crimson taffeta. She wanders, with Valentine at her side, back to the lounge, where the gold-bedecked band has not ceased their music, despite the minutes passing. The one with startlingly green eyes afixes his gaze on Mira, and a warmth creeps up her spine, like a soft carress. Valentine raises an eyebrow when she pauses before a crowd, eyes still caught on the musician.
The green-eyed gentleman closes his eyes as the tune changes from danceable to something dischordant and eerie, with a sweet undertone, like a goodbye with the promise of a reunion too far away.
Mira turns to Valentine, stumbling back at the sight of his wings, in full light and still wide enough to span half the room, despite being tucked into his sides.
"Valentine," she says.
"Yes?"
"What's beyond the house?"
Valentine does not answer immediately. He clasps his hands behind his back as a group of women in violet garb with darkened lips glides past. "What do you mean? The gardens?"
Mira shakes her head as the music resumes its previously quick tempo. "No, I mean the world out there," she throws a hand to the black windows, the landscape beyond obscured by golden reflections and musty velvet curtains. In the wavering candlelight dust motes flicker around them like fairy dust. "Are there streets? Other houses?"
Valentine takes Mira's arm in his, resting a gloved hand on her wrist. He leans down, his chest pressed to her side as he whispers, "You are awfully inquisitive tonight."
Valentine stears Mira out of the way of a group of wayward, giggling and swaying with rainbow tinted glasses of sparkling champagne. "Do you trust me?" he asks.
Mira nods. There is no doubt in her mind. In this world trust encompasses only Valentine and herself. The others guests, however friendly, make her weary. They have cold beauty, even in the vivid amber and scarlet light of the party. They sparkle like diamonds, hard and clear-cut, though their intentions are anything but clear.
"Here," Valentine's voice brings her attention to a pretty lady in a cat mask holding an assortment of venetian masks upon a golden tray.
"For the pretty girl," she says with a nod toward Mira. Her accent is odd and lilting as she holds the tray up higher for Mira to inspect.
There are masks covered in spangles and sequins, woven with ribbons and embroidered with oriental patterns. Some have crystals, others lace or painted pieces of sheet music. One is a mosaic ceramic mask emblazoned with a sun in one corner and a moon in the other. Mira selects a mask at randon. It has a spray of jet black feathers, silky as a panther pelt that tickle her skin as she slides it over her face, securing it behind her with ribbons.
"Thank you," she tells the girl at her elbow. The mask-girl bobs a curtsey, striding away, her hungry eyes only leaving Mira when she turns into a shadowy alcove.
"What is this for?" Mira questions, turning to Valentine who remains maskless, though his hair has fallen over his eyes and she cannot see the pupil of one of them.
"It is festive, and traditional, for this night."

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Brass Clocks and Green Eyes

The ticking of the clock began in her head, echoing against her cranium. It is the ticking of something old, the sound of pounding earth and pendulums moving in empty space, huge and brass. Behind her eyes copper cogs blossom like flowers, ridges of gears as shapely as the tips of petals. As she adjusts to the darkness she realizes the ticking of the clock comes from outside her head, and the darkness is the darkness behind her eyelids. And with the ticking of the clock, there are other sounds. Glasses clinking together, voices sharp and soft, the voices of kings and lovers, laughter, rising above the noise and ebbing, and jazz that sounded like gold. The clock is loudest of the symphony of sound and its face rises behind her eyelids, ivory with honey gold stars, the frame ember coloured with the tint of the colour-treated lights in the room. Stark black hands ticking away over pearlescent numbers in roman numerals.

She opens her eyes to the clock above her. And the rest of the room comes into view. 

Little has changed. Little ever changes. Teardrop chandeliers hang from the cieling, crystals strung along bows of ivory and iron, contours dappled with refracted light. Plush black daybeds with embroidered and beaded pillows, like the one on which she rests, and covered with blankets of dark violet feathers. Velvet curtains, rich as wine, edges grey with dust that shimmers in the undulating light.

Three of the five walls lead to other rooms, into the complex of the house she has never found an end to. She recognizes the room to her right as the music room and the music drifting from there has changed, subtly, to waltz-like jazz buffeted with trumpets and celestas. 

She stands slowly, conscious of the warmth buzzing in her veins and the smoothness of her limbs, like she has drunk too much of the wine held in crystal glases in gloved hands by those mingling and whirling around. 

No one takes notice of her immediately. She does not know most of the dancers and party-goers, but she if familiar with a few, who nod as she passes and enters the music room. 

The musicians are among her closes friends here, which is why she notices immediately when someone new stands on the low stage. 

He has gold hair, the first thing she notices in his appearance as the musicians who flank him have shorter brown hair. He stands in the same black suit, gloved hands wrapped around a saxophone, eyes closed as her plays. When he opens them he looks straight at her and the vivid green of his gaze causes her to step back. Into a dancer. 

She murmers an apology and continues on, glancing back occasionally through the crowd to see his green eyes following her. Only when she reaches the patio doors do his eyes slip shut and when she turns to the outside world, takes in the flaming white wings stretching far beyond the width of the doorway and the burning eyes in the face she knows as well as her own, does she understand why. He is too brilliant and for a moment she shuts her eyes. 

When she opens them again, his wings have vanished, vanished from the air, the view of the gardens beyond his unobscured. They were there and now they simply aren't. 

It has always amazed her that he can hide a part of himself so beautiful and breathtaking, so simply. 

"Hello Mira," he greets her, and his voice is warm and spicy. And wonderfullly familiar, but dark as secrets in shadows. 

"Hi Valentine."

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Wind Up Toys

Amber light seeped from the hallway, illuminating the grass and trees. Mira hurried up the path, tredding on flowers and narrowly avoiding the empty iridescent husks left by beetles. She came to a stop, flushed and out of breath, at a golden chamber on the crest of a hill. It was filled with strange ornaments; tiny animals perched on pillars. Some were gold, some silver, and some ivory or crystal, all seated on blue silk squares. From one sweeping glance she found her favourite, it was a tiny ivory swan with a gold beak, inlaid with ruby red eyes. On the underside of the swan, she discovered when she picked it up, was a crank fittted into a niche in the pillar. She slipped her fingers into the grooves of the crank and hesitantly spun it until it halted with a satisfying clunk. Mira placed the swan gently back on it's pillar. As the crank began to turn, after the initial grind of gears and cogs, the room filled with an intoxicating sound. A familiar melody that drifted in the air and made the world around her sway, until she realized it wasn't the landscape that was swaying, but her. Slowly, then faster until all was blurred. She kept her gaze on the swan's red eyes, but they were darker... like wine, no, like blood. Nausea rushed through her stomach and she turned to find fresh grass in her face and the world on it's side.

Art by ATL Jewelers


Text by Lucie MacAulay