Author: Jason Davies-Redgrave

 Alaw burped, They’ve changed brands again, she thought. Cheapskates, how hard is it to stick to the good barbeque sauce? Not like they don’t make enough bloody profit here; this place is always full. There’re enough sad sacks in this town to keep this dump going till the judgement day. She was happy enough though, nestled in her favourite spot next to the gurgling, dust covered radiator. Sat on a comfy but worn blue and yellow striped chair, under a couple of faded music hall posters. She shuffled around in the pockets of her patched and oversized greatcoat and pulled out a very old handkerchief.

This pub also afforded her a certain level of anonymity, amongst the waifs and strays Alaw blended in here despite her singular appearance, which had proved very useful in her line of work. She blew her nose loudly, and flashed a saccharine smile at the, not hiding her disgust at all while trying to enjoy a large glass of cheap white and having a loud but painfully private conversation on speaker phone, young woman sat just across from Alaw.

Here are three short scenes I wrote between Christmas and New Year – they might be part of the Circle of Fifths story, they might not…

One: A Conversation

“Of course, you know everything fails, eventually. In time this Circle will fail. Like all the others. It must. It will.”

“They will try though, won’t they?”

“Oh yes, yes, they will try! They will expend a great deal of energy but they will falter.

“What happens then?”

“They can embrace the other or they can fall into darkness.”

“They still get to choose?”

“Yes, my child! Everything in the universe gets to choose, even to the very last. There is always a choice. The universe is filled with choices. What most beings don’t understand is that the universe is also filled with consequences. Point and counterpoint. The five are fallible and ultimately, they will be unable to sustain the universal orchestras. The music will cease and this will all fall back into nothing.

Then, for a perfect moment, before it all begins anew, we will have beautiful, uninterrupted silence.”

The turkeys had all died.

I mean all of them, across the entire world, they ALL died. Taken by a particularly virulent variant of bird flu, which also took chaffinches and parakeets and a host of other species with it¹. This was made sadder and even more depressing by the fact that the very last turkey in the world, Sven, died on Christmas Eve that year. A fact that devastated much of western culture and dominated the Christmas news feeds, but failed to really register in other parts of the world, especially during the brutal monsoon season of that year which had barrelled in after the worst droughts in living memory.

            Vegans didn’t really give a fuck.

With a sigh, Julie put down her shopping bags. In all her years she couldn’t remember seeing weather like it. An old newspaper streaked past and whacked into the side of a rubbish bin, pinned against the dirty metal for a moment before being pulled down the street. Julie turned to the elderly woman stood next to her. With a nod to the wildness on the street she said, “Have you ever seen the like?”

Emyr is a boy alone, cast adrift, a lone figure facing…

Energies rotate and build, turning and folding around themselves, a twist of melody here a spiral of incandescence there. The Harmonicus Universalis moves in stately time crystal sphere pushing itself over crystal sphere, sparks rain down from the heavens. Galaxies parade and dance, planets spin into eternity, the pulsars and quasars and magnetars burst with penetrating radiation, pushing life into the void like a virus. 

*Scene: The Youngling joining with the Artefact*

The sun’s light was pale and thin, it flattened the cityscape, smudging any hint of definition in to bland greyness. From their vantage point above the scant, bitter clouds The Brother and The Sister rode the icy winds. They both welcomed the peace that the strong, clean currents brought, and a sweet calm took refuge in their hearts. To be any closer to the ground would have meant exposure to the fetid air, the dirt and the noise. They would have been drenched in the overlapping, syncopated beats of the myriad people and their squawking, filling The Fang with taught, prickly anxiety. From this vantage point they could survey the whole city with peaceful and a watchful eye.

A flock of gulls wheeled and circled below the Sister, rising up from one of the back alleys where the birds had screeched and argued with each other over discarded scraps. The Sister watched her brother drinking in the clean air, for the first time since this hunt had begun, he looked at ease; more like his old self, from the time before hope had turned sour. She recalled their earlier days surfing the massive, curling gravity swells, surrounded by their kin. Feeling the adagio of the cosmic rhythms unfurl around them like a series of great waves breaking over them, one after another. She smiled and rolled over in the cleansing winds.

Join me?

Like a bewildered shoal, the words emanating from the Artefact swam round and round in her head.

When the Youngling had first reached out and touched the alien object, she had experienced everything. In a single second, she saw the majestic wash of space and time, it was as if she were watching the motion of an atom from inside the atom. Dizzying. Infinite. Incomprehensible. Terrifying in its beauty and complexity. A vast endless ocean, with new and stranger tides, chaos and maelstroms, reefs and shallows and storms and uncharted depths. It sparkled like fresh stardust and raged like a clamour of broken harpies.

These first two extra scenes will be inserted into the story at the ends of chapters 1: Megan and 5: the Clock Shop. The aim with these scenes is to establish the Sirens a little earlier – I do reference them in other scenes but it feels like they are plonked in out of nowhere with the “Aunty Carol” chapter and I wanted to show them as part of the story sooner. The last bit “Tea and Biscuits” is a new scene that will come much later in the story but I had the idea to write it this week and couldn’t resist it! J x

“Like fuck you will!” the tall woman cracked the knuckles on both her hands and looked directly at the being in front of her.

“Aunty Carol, please,” Emyr stepped in front of the Herald. “It’s the only way.”

“Sweetheart,” Aunty Carol’s lips curled into a smile but her gaze retained its cold steeliness. She held Emyr’s shoulders in a firm grip and looked him squarely in the eye. “This twat has been a thorn in my side since before you were born love. As far as I’m concerned, he can do one!”

“If I may explain,” as the Herald started to speak the line of women standing behind Aunty Carol bristled and a chill wind moaned and rattled the warehouse windows. The Herald held up its hands and took a step backward.