CHAPTER 1: A CINDER-FALL IN PARIS
The sky over Paris was a masterpiece of violent decay. The sun, a sullen, bloody ember, drowned itself in a sea of bruised purple and sickly yellow, casting long, grasping shadows that seemed to cling to the city's bones. It wasn't a sunset; it was a final, defiant curse. High above, the blinking lights of distant airplanes traced silent, indifferent arcs, their cold, man-made rhythms a stark contrast to the dying, organic chaos of the heavens. The city's iconic silhouette was a battlefield of old and new: the familiar, skeletal grace of the Eiffel Tower stood in stark opposition to the arrogant, gleaming spire of the new presidential villa—a shard of chrome and polished obsidian that seemed less like a building and more like a spear aimed at the heart of God.
At street level, the last, desperate whispers of a natural world choked by concrete and progress offered a futile protest. The frantic, last-ditch chirping of sparrows seeking a roost was swallowed by the feral hiss of a ginger cat disappearing into the sulfur-yellow glow of the Waltongate Street subway entrance. And below it all, the city itself hummed its eternal, discordant symphony—a grinding chorus of distant sirens, the percussive crush of traffic, and the sheer, psychic weight of millions of lives intersecting, clashing, and fading away in the deepening gloom.
It was a city of beautiful, haunted ghosts, and Aurelia felt like the most spectral of them all.
With a hydraulic sigh that sounded like the last, weary exhalation of a dying beast, the high-speed Maglev train, designation GT-6478, slid into the station. Its silver skin was smeared with the grime of a thousand anonymous journeys, a metallic serpent returning to its concrete den. The doors hissed open, releasing a wave of warm, compressed, and utterly recycled air that carried the indistinct, muffled chatter of passengers out into the station's rowdy atmosphere—a miasma of cheap perfume, stale sweat, ozone, and the greasy, tantalizing scent of frying fat from a nearby frites kiosk.
From the churning crowd of the central car, a solitary figure emerged. Aurelia moved with a weary deliberation that was at odds with the frantic energy around her, a still point in a turning world. Her hair was the colour of a leaden storm cloud, falling loose and lank to her shoulders, a few damp strands plastered to her pale forehead. Her eyes, a steely, piercing azure, held a weary, ancient intelligence that seemed to absorb the surrounding chaos—the shoving, the laughing, the crying—and dismiss it all in a single, sweeping, contemptuous glance. Her attire was a study in deliberate anonymity: a faded band t-shirt and a simple denim skirt. A single, worn leather bag was slung over her shoulder, its strings held so tightly in her white-knuckled fist that the leather creaked in protest. She was a portrait of profound defeat, carefully banked behind a wall of icy reserve but never fully extinguished.
At the platform's edge, a lame, blind beggar sat on a folded blanket, his body a map of hardship. His tin cup clinked a monotonous, hopeless rhythm against the stone floor. But as the train settled onto its magnetic cradle, the beggar's head tilted minutely, a predator catching a scent on the wind. He stared vacantly towards the central cars, his body tensing not with the hope of alms, but with a cold, grim expectation.
"Aurelia! Aurelia, wait! Wait for me, hope you ain't angry with me!"
The voice cut through the din like a warm knife through butter—alive, vibrant, and frustratingly familiar. It was a sound that didn't belong in this tomb.
Aurelia paused, a flicker of something soft and unwelcome breaking through the permafrost of her expression. She turned.
Hurrying towards her, a splash of vibrant colour in the monochrome station, was Gwendolyn. She was a vision of radiant warmth even in the subterranean gloom. Her long, thick auburn hair cascaded around her shoulders like a waterfall of living fire, catching the weak fluorescent light and setting it ablaze. Her bright, intelligent green eyes sparkled with a concern that seemed to generate its own luminescence, and her smile, when it came, was a thing of genuine, unforced joy.
"You run like you're being chased by a swarm of particularly judgmental bees," Aurelia said, her voice flat, a monotone deflecting the warmth being offered. The corner of her mouth twitched, a ghost of a smile she immediately assassinated.
Gwen skidded to a halt, placing a gentle, anchoring hand on Aurelia's arm. Her touch was a brand of warmth against the chill that seemed to perpetually emanate from her friend. She exhaled deeply, the pace having stolen her breath. "You… you just vanished from the awards platform. One second you were there, a monument to stoic disappointment, the next… poof. Houdini in a denim skirt."
"Stoic disappointment is my brand, Gwen. You know this. It's what I do best," Aurelia replied, her gaze drifting over Gwen's shoulder to the blind beggar, whose vacant stare seemed to be fixed on them.
"Ellie, it's not your fault," Gwen said, her voice dropping, the playful tone evaporating into something more serious, more real. "You can't honestly believe that, can you? That any of it was your failure? What happened back there... it was politics. Petty, small-minded politics. It was never about merit."
Aurelia's shoulders slumped, the weight of an invisible burden—a burden Gwen knew all too well—pressing down on her as if the very atmosphere had become leaden. "I do believe it, but I understand why you'd say that, Gwen. We both saw what happened. In the practicals, it was fair and square. You won. You always do." A melancholic smile, devoid of any real warmth, touched her lips—a ghost of an expression. "I always leave you with an interminable gap, but... this time, it felt somewhat different. More final. Like a door slamming shut."
"Don't say that," Gwen pleaded, her green eyes wide. "Don't you dare."
"I can't change it; it's fate," Aurelia continued, her voice a low, frustrated murmur. "Some coward in administration must have switched my Aptitude Question packet with the twelfth grade's advanced theoretical paper. The cruel, cosmic joke is I actually passed it, and they still said I was either disqualified for 'flagrant disregard for protocol' or I could graciously accept second place." She let out a short, sharp, bitter laugh that held no humour. "I'm one hundred percent sure my mom made them add the second option. She can't have a daughter who is a disqualification, only one who is a runner-up. And now she'll use it as another excuse to pull me out. To 'minimize disruptive influences.' Another school, another city, another set of blank faces. I don't even know why she bothers to unpack anymore. The boxes are practically part of the furniture."
Gwen's expression softened further, a silent, profound understanding passing between them. "But I thought she was in Tokyo for that biotech summit. How would she even know the details so fast?"
"You know her, Gwen. She has this... omniscient presence. It's like she's literally pulling my strings from the other side of the world, a puppeteer in a penthouse suite." Aurelia's voice dropped to a venomous whisper, meant for Gwen's ears alone. "Her presence overshadows everything in her view, be it living or nonliving. She and Noelle have a lot to elucidate to me, one of these days. Only that we rarely converse, and when we do, it's a debriefing, not a conversation. I hate it at home. It's not a home; it's a holding cell with expensive wallpaper."
Gwen rummaged in her own brightly coloured, slightly messy bag, pushing past textbooks and scrunchies with a determined focus. She produced a small, beautifully carved wooden fox, its surface polished to a warm gleam by loving hands. She pressed it into Aurelia's cold, unresponsive hand.
Aurelia stared at it, then at Gwen, her brow furrowed in genuine confusion. "What's this? A prop for a fable I'm not in? I don't recall being cast as the plucky heroine."
"A good luck charm," Gwen said with a small, almost shy shrug that was utterly endearing. "I know you don't believe in that sort of thing, I know you quite too well, but... I had this dream. A silly one. And I suppose you might need it someday. A little piece of me to keep the dark away." She folded Aurelia's stubborn fingers over the talisman, her grip firm and reassuring, a physical promise. "Think of it as… an off-switch for the existential dread. Or a very small, wooden friend who won't judge you for your spectacularly bad attitude."
"Good luck?" Aurelia muttered, pulling back and looking away, her cheeks faintly flushed with a mixture of embarrassment and something softer, but her hand clutching the fox tightly, her knuckles white. "I'm only accepting this because it's from you. You know I hate talismans. Superstition is the antithesis of logic. It's the refuge of the intellectually lazy."
"And you," Gwen said, poking her gently in the chest, "are the antithesis of fun. But I love you anyway." She then broke into a broad, mischievous grin, a masterful act of mood-shifting that Aurelia had always envied. "Well, before you go and descend into a full-blown gothic melodrama, I have a cat to let out of the bag. I'll meet you at your home this evening. We need to talk about something. Strategy. For the next one. I hope your nanny, Noelle, will let me in at least. So cheer up, pookie." She playfully pinched Aurelia's pale, drawn cheeks, forcing a semblance of life into them.
Aurelia swatted her hand away, but the gesture lacked its usual defensive sharpness. "Well, about that, I'll tell her to let you in. She likes you more than she likes me, I think. And I trust my mom on this one, for once; she'd take my side against the board. She hates losing almost as much as I do. See ya, Lerra. My nanny's waiting—"
The world did not end with a whimper, but with a roar that unmade creation...