THE PLATINUM RAVEN, a novella by Rohan Quine
http://www.rohanquine.com/the-platinum-raven
The Platinum Raven by Rohan Quine is a triple convulsion whereby our heroine
Raven escalates herself into the Chocolate Raven and then the Platinum Raven,
from London to Dubai to the tower in the hills in the desert – then back down
again, forever changed.
In her
cubicle high in the Shard in London, a sweet-natured, raven-haired receptionist
named Raven is even more rudely mistreated than usual for a Monday morning. Recovering
from this, her daydreams propel her into the fantasy life of a richer and more
glamorous version of herself, who lives higher up in the world’s tallest skyscraper
– the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai. Raven thinks of this woman as the Chocolate
Raven, owing to her chocolate-coloured hair, which frames a face that’s just
like her own; and straightaway, Raven cannot get enough of watching this
glamorous creature.
The
Chocolate Raven is a party girl whose lifestyle has a certain flash, albeit a
certain flatness too. Standing on the vertiginous 152nd-Level
terrace of the Burj Khalifa, she gazes across the desert at dusk, to the rock-slopes
of the Hajar Mountains – and a mad-faced nightclub tower of shadow sprouts up,
there on those slopes, from her gaze. This tower is run by a woman with a face
just like the Chocolate Raven’s, but with platinum-blonde instead of
chocolate-coloured hair, who lives a yet more empowered and intensely-coloured
life: for she is the Platinum Raven, no less. And tonight she will preside over
the launch of a revolutionary new club drug called mirror mist.
Between
this uber-glamorous Platinum Raven and her companions Scorpio and Amber, there unfolds
a sequence of events whose fusion of extraordinary beauty and violence and
sensuality so bewitches the watching Chocolate Raven, that she is miserably
desolate as soon as these events finish at dawn when the rising desert sun destroys
that nocturnal tower on the rock-slopes. She therefore sets out on a mission to
regain the voltage of the vanished building and the allure of its exotic denizens
… whereupon a stark piece of evidence of the Platinum Raven’s realm is
channelled through the Chocolate Raven and is pulled right back down to earth
in the original daydreamer Raven herself.