The Girl With The Last Light

The Magic I've Been Writing... for 20 years

Hi,

Here’s the full - all in one place - preface of the novel I’ve been working on for a long time. Years. Many years.

I hope you enjoy this magical story.

Perhaps you remember over the Christmas holidays I sent out excerpts. This is a compilation of those excerpts which make up the beginning of the book. I’ve been meaning to send you this compilation for a while.

Grandmother Raven, Witch & Wise Woman

On a tree branch in the north of the Grey Isle, the raven woman opened her hand, stiff now with cold, and she dreamt a witches bone alive.  It fizzed and crackled and took form.   It had stubby wings.  It was grey-white and porous like coral.  It even had a face though Raven couldn’t make out its eyes. 

It took flight in a wobbling lurching kind of way, dust falling from its body.  Raven blew, giving it a current of wind.  Her mind was mixed with dream and night and magic that poured out of her mouth like a silent voice and she cut an opening through time - through the years to the place where it would all begin - and the little creature flew through it into the past.

The coming alive of something impossible made an imprint on the world - a silence so quick Raven didn’t notice.  But another did.

Raven saw a flurry of red and caught a tune sweeter than any she’d heard.  She felt a rush of optimism rare to her stoic heart.  And then the opening to the past closed and Raven felt the heaviness of the real night and the dark enchantments of the black slate and craggy rock of the mountain she stood upon.

Raven tried to remember the feel of the suns warmth.  The Grey Isle was winter cold - always.    She summoned the memory of spring green and crocus shoots and smiled wistfully.  How many years had it been since the last real spring?  She’d stopped counting.  She was old now, too old if she was honest with herself but she couldn’t let age catch her.  Not yet.  There were so few of her kind left.  Only three that she knew of.  And the child.  

Her hands were empty now.  She’d released all the crackling witches bones into the air that she and her sister had carried out of the mountain that night, just the same as the other nights.  

He was long dead the old king, but his followers tended his magic and kept their ears to the beat of his bones that rattled in his casket.  The sound of them rippled like a heart beat through the earth.  His reign continued in this way.    

Danger stalked her.  The old Kings followers lingered nearby and it was mostly luck they’d not discovered her.  The Listeners, people called them. 

“Don’t look at them.” She’d heard parents say to their children when the Listeners came through the villages, for even a sideways glance was enough for your heart to feel hollowed of any kindness.  

“They keep the peace.”  She’d heard them say.  

But it wasn’t true.

Too much time had past for anyone living to remember the seasons, to remember goodness and beauty.

She wondered when the oldest of the Listeners would return.  He was coming for his King.  Of that she was certain.  And he was coming for her too.  She imagined him walking, one ear on the thrum of the kings enchanted bones whose sound was his hymn, whose sound gave him life beyond his natural years.  

She hoped she had one more night to turn the pieces of bone into living creatures.  She had one more place she wanted to send a message and this one required no time travel.  

Raven thought of her friend the old Coyote.  He would be waiting for her.  She needed to get back to him, and to the child, Sophie. 

Little Bird, A Creature Of Possibility

Little Bird knew how to find possibility where others couldn’t.  She would never understand, nor try to, why people stopped believing in better things.  

Little bird was a creature of absolute magic.  She could travel to any place, any universe, anywhere she could feel the essence of what she was made of:  Possibility.  Places with glimmers of hope; places where goodness was almost abandoned.  She flew into them and beat her wings until she had stirred the hope back to life.

When the first mangled bone creature burst out of the raven woman’s hand the little bird felt hope in a place whose spirits of land and people had been broken.  She noticed the silence no one else paid heed to.  She came to the Grey Isle, landing there where the bird had flown, in the past, to the forest where the stumbling short winged animal began calling for something to help it survive.

The little bird gazed through the thick grey mist and saw there was nothing to help the creature live.  She watched until it died, disintegrating into grey ash.  

She was about to leave when something stirred through the trees and a coyote walked silently into the clearing and sniffed at the ash.  

The little birds eyes sparkled.  The coyote was magic.  The dead thing was magic too.  And both were a good kind of magic.  There was hope that went against everything else on the grey isle where heavy disenchantments were etched into the mist and wind and rain and hearts of people.

She’d heard of an old angel who could make almost anything.

He might know what to do.

She twirled and in a flurry of tiny red wings sparkling with silver she disappeared and went in search of the angel whose name was Sariel.

Sariel, An Angel

Sariel was known as a Wise One or an Inspiration.  He preferred the first.  It fit best with the work he conducted deep within his mountain, in a galaxy so far from The Grey Isle the dead kings enchantments were irrelevant. 

Sariel once fearlessly used his abilities to the outer edges of their potential. His wings were vast and his hair was like snow.  His only company was his lion, Kiniun.  

He had a capacity, common to his kind, to reach his arms into greatness, and with the handfuls of it he could carry, make beautiful things - anything he chose.  Now he used this gift sparingly.  His reclusiveness mostly made him unapproachable.  He preferred it that way.  

He spent his days at peace in his apothecary garden growing every kind of plant imaginable.  He had no intention of seeking work in the outside world.  He told himself his days of creating miracles were long gone.  His small world was studious, introspective, only gently miraculous and far away from anyone or anything.   

He would never have expected a tiny bird to find him so far away and set his life on a new course.  

Emmanuel, The Old Listener

The old Listener, Emmanuel, did not notice the first moment of silence made by the coming alive of a witches bone out of Ravens dream time magic.  

He was accustomed to listening to irregularities in the land made by the thrum of the kings enchanted skeleton.  This was something completely different.

The first time it was an absence.  The second, third and fourth it was the same.  He remembered them like pin pricks.  Moments that vanished so quickly everything sounded normal. 

It was a no-thing.  Until it was some-thing. 

Emmanuel realised that years had past since it had begun.  He shivered, not with cold, but with the hard realisation he’d failed.  He’d missed real signs that magic had returned.  

He tried to count how many silences there had been.  There were too many.

How it had started he had no idea.  But he knew every pin prick of no sound had been one dot to connect to the next and that the little girl arriving with her strangeness was very certainly a witch creature.

“Sophie.”  He hissed.  He said her name and thought also of the raven woman.  Another witch creature.  Old, like him.

He took another step towards the black slate mountains; towards the bones of the old king; Towards the biggest, darkest magic of them all.  Towards what should be, to his mind, the only magic.  

He could feel the thrum of the kings bones - their beat pulsing through his own arteries sustaining his body.    

He was the best of the Listeners and the only one who’d served the king when he was actually living.  The others were loyal, tough and hardened but they hadn’t seen the things he had.  They didn’t know what it was like when magic had been worked by normal people on the grey isle and the traces it left.  Emmanuel could only blame himself for missing the signs.  

“It’s time.”  He muttered.  “I’m coming.”  

He took another step.  Pain tore through him.  The Raven woman had nearly killed him but nearly wasn’t enough.  He should have died a thousand times.

“I’ll serve you still.”  He said bitterly.  

He would wake the old Kings spirit.  He would not fail in that.  

Sophie, The Girl With The Last Light

At the edge of the forest where the bone creature had been blown by Raven, stood a narrow farm house whose buff stone and black slate roof had withstood the weather for nearly two hundred years.  

It was where Sophie had been born.  It was where her mother had died.  It was where her father and brother stomped in and out every morning and night without kindness or care.  

Sophie waited for Raven, Grandmother Raven to her, to come back.

It had been a month since she’d left and Sophie was scared and tired.  She understood in a way a girl her age shouldn’t that she was prey.  Hunted for her strangeness.  

Before she’d even had words, Sophie had understood the mark on her chest she’d been born with, which her father called a scar - was a bad thing - a mark of her difference, and her unacceptability.  

Grandmother Raven had taught her it wasn’t a scar.  She believed that now.  But she still didn’t know what it was other than the obvious:  A thin cut of light.  

It was quite literally a gap between her skin through which light beamed.  

It glowed especially strong where the edges of it were like torn paper, frayed and ragged against the pale skin of her chest.  

Sophies existence went against the hard and sombre lives of people accustomed to living under the reign of a king long dead.  The world she was born into had been embittered and drained of all that was warm hearted and hopeful.  The land was cold and hard, almost impossible to eak out an existence from; magic was so long gone and forbidden that no-one remembered it - and to see the evidence of magic and beauty shining from the child was so contrary to what people knew they turned it into something terrible.  

“It’s a cursed birth mark” was the phrase often said to explain Sophie’s light.

Hard as she tried to keep it hidden with layers of clothes, a glint or crackle of light often escaped.  It was trickiest to cover the upper edges where it reached like a vine, and licked at her throat.  

“It strangles your breath.”  Her father often said with disdain of the rattle that came when she walked up and down stairs and into cold air.  It was hard not to believe him, she had been a sickly child.

No one knew what her thin cut of light was.  It made everyone except for Raven and Coyote afraid and uncomfortable.  Her brother enjoyed throwing other peoples loathing at her:  

“Unspeakable - don’t put your eyes to it.” 

“It burns to look at.”

“Better to keep away from my sister.” 

Sophie knew only that her mother hadn’t been a strong woman, and that having Sophie probably killed her.  She knew she was a shame to her father.  She knew her mother had been something he called ‘a dreamer’ and that this wasn’t a good thing.  And thus she understood why he managed her as he would one of his farm animals - with a rough adherence to what was needed, and no more.  

Sophie didn’t know she had been created by an old angel and a little bird who’d seen possibility on the desolate grey isle in the form of witches bones come alive.  She had no idea her life was the sliver of hope needed to break generations of cruelty.

Sophie never meant to hurt anyone with her light.  She would have given anything to be acceptable and not stand out.

The End (of the preface)

With love,

Lucy