Chapter 1 - the weight of velvet
Victorian London, the smog tasted like crispy charcoal, thick enough to coat the back of Luan’s throat.
He was running.
The cobblestone beneath his boots were smooth and cold with freezing rain and puddles reflecting the gas lamps that shone brightly through the fog guiding him down a narrow alleyway. He could hear the deafing, dangerous crowd getting louder and louder as the air behind him vibrated with a terrifying and hollow hum. It was the sound of the crowd - frightened and relentless.
Luan’s heart hammered against ribs frantically.
His foot caught the edge of an uneven stone.
For a single agonizing second, gravity dissolved. He tilted forward, suddenly falling into and unexpected dark abyss. He braced for the hard impact of stone, his eyes squeezing shut.
But the crash never came.
Instead, Luan sank into something soft and anchored. It was a dense, heavy substance as it caught him with a slow and comforting resistance. He opened his eyes to see what broke his fall. He wasn’t hurt. He was suspended in a massive pool of thick, deep purple goo. It held him securely, molding to his shaking frame, it was perfectly stable and strangely warm. The terrifying hum of the crowd faded, replaced by a rhythmic, echoing heartbeat that resonated through the purple pool. The sound was calming.
It wasn’t an enemy.
It was a shield.
Then, the heartbeat turned into a jolt.
Luan snapped awake, sitting bolt upright in his bed. He gasped, his lungs were burning as if he swallowed a cloud of smoke. He was a short 16 year old boy with fluffy hazel coloured hair, he often wore a royal purple turtleneck with some gentle brown dungarees. His gold rimmed glasses beaming in the morning sunlight as beams cut through the curtains of his room, casting golden beams onto his cluttered desk nearby. His desk was full of materials, half finished projects and a chemical cleaning towel. He pressed the palms of his hands to his forehead, trying to shake the vivid remnants of the charcoal smog from his mind. “Just a dream,” he muttered to himself, his voice raspy. “Just reading too late again.” But as he swung his legs out of bed, before his brain could process the movement, his feet stopped right above the floor. He peered down toward the floor. A split second before his bare feet touched the hardwood. There, pooled on the floor right where his feet should have landed, was a perfectly stable swirling deep purple goo.
Luan froze, his breath catching.
It looked exactly like the substance from his nightmare.
Uncertain, he reached a hand out toward it. The moment his fingertip almost touched it, the goo dissolved into thin air leaving the floor completely dry and spotless. He stared at his trembling hands as a cold sweat broke out across his neck; he grabbed the chemical cleaning towel from his desk and started frantically scrubbing where the strange substance once was. As his brain desperately tried to explain it as a rare chemical leak from his workbench. After scrubbing for hours he finally gave up, putting the towel in the chemical discard bin he caught himself in the mirror. The bottom of a small strand of his hair was now this dark amethyst colour. “must be the poor lighting” he thought “we really ought to get that fixed...a potential job for Lyra.” Something inside him had changed and he knew it...whether it was physical or not he would just have to find out. It was the first time in his life a change had happened and he had no logical explanation for it.
