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That lands harder than anyone expects, and Felix, to his credit, doesn’t have a comeback ready for it at all.

I feel something cold settle low in my stomach, nothing to do with Dark this time. Just plain old dread, the kind that comes from knowing, somewhere underneath all my determined cheer, that Magdalene’s batting average on these things has been considerably better than zero lately.

Adam glances between us. “I mean, it probably can’t hurt to just check. If something’s coming.”

“It absolutely can hurt,” Felix says. “It can hurt in the specific way of losing an entire afternoon’s takings. But that’s a hit we are going to have to take.”

“I’d rather lose an afternoon’s takings than ignore something and regret it,” Adam says, quietly.

Felix nods sharply in agreement.

“Fine,” I say. “Let’s go. And I’ll cover the till deficit myself.”

“You’d better,” Felix mutters. But I know he won’t hold me to it. From the moment I met Felix, it was obvious his bark was worse than his bite, and he’s never once proved me wrong.

I flip the sign to closed, apologising profusely to the three customers who look fairly outraged about it, and lock up behind us.

The walk up to Brandon Hill leaves all three of us baristas properly out of breath by the time we reach the base of the tower. Magdalene is somehow unbothered by the climb despite being decades older than the rest of us combined. She strides along, robes swishing, entirely undeterred.

The spiral staircase inside is worse than the hill, narrow and endless, tourists squeezing past us in both directions. By the time we emerge onto the viewing platform at the top, I’ve got a stitch in my side, and Adam’s gone very pink.

The view is properly stunning, Bristol spread out gold and grey in the afternoon light, the harbour glinting. The whole city is laid out like it hasn’t got the faintest idea anything strange might be about to happen to it. Somewhere down there is Coffeelicious, closed and dark. Somewhere further out, past the edge of everything I can actually see, is a whole other realm I’ve never once laid eyes on, where Dark is.

High Priestess Magdalene plants herself at the centre of the platform, arms flung wide, kaftan billowing in the wind.

“BEHOLD!”

Nothing happens.

She stands there, arms raised, waiting for a portent that hasn’t shown up. It’s only now, watching her like this, that it’s hard not to notice something. She looks exactly like somebody’s favourite West Country granny who’s simply had enough with the weather and said so. Round and rosy-cheeked, sensible flat sandals poking out beneath all that swishing purple. The exact sort of woman who’d press a slice of homemade cake into your hands the second you looked peaky. Not remotely the sort of person you’d expect to be demanding an audience with the apocalypse.

A tourist nearby lowers his camera slightly, glancing between Magdalene and the sky like he’s trying to work out if he’s missed something. A woman with a toddler edges her child slightly further away.

“Behold what, exactly?” Felix says, arms folded.

“Wait a minute,” Magdalene says with her arms still outstretched, not remotely deterred. Eyes fixed on the horizon with total, unshaken conviction.

We wait a minute.

Nothing happens.

Adam clears his throat gently. “Magdalene, maybe we should give it a rest for today.”

“One more minute.”

We wait one more minute. The tourist has fully lost interest and wandered off towards the other side of the platform. A pigeon lands on the railing beside Magdalene, regards her with total disinterest, and flies off again. It feels, somehow, like the most damning review of the entire proceedings so far.

I feel the knot in my stomach ease slightly as cautious relief creeps in at the edges. Maybe this is it? Maybe this is where nothing happens, where Magdalene’s finally, genuinely wrong. Where I get to go back downstairs and reopen the shop and spend the rest of my shift, and the rest of my life, blissfully unaware of cosmic significance.

Magdalene’s arms are starting to visibly shake with the effort of holding the pose.

“Perhaps,” she concedes, finally lowering them slightly, “the timing was slightly off.”

The sky changes.

It happens all at once, no warning, no gradual build. Just a sudden wrongness to the light, the sun flaring bright and strange overhead. Then, impossibly, colour bleeds across the sky in sheets of green and violet. The kind of aurora that has absolutely no business appearing over Bristol ever, let alone in broad daylight.

Every phone on the platform and in the park below goes off simultaneously, alarms and notifications shrieking in a discordant chorus. Somewhere below, a car alarm starts up, then another, then what sounds like every alarm in the city. All triggering within seconds of each other. A rising wall of sound rolling up from the streets below.