"I laughed when Lennon got shot, or so the song goes.

"Of course I never actually met him, I just read the books, the ones where you’re supposed to know what the hell is going on and the only kind of message you get is that if you read books you will end up, no matter how long it takes, killing someone.

"I always thought that was a bag of shite, myself. Still, can’t tell with some people…not that there are any people left anymore…not even me.

"Do not delude yourself, I’m as dead as everyone else here and I’ll tell you this for free…it fucking stinks.

"But anyway, I’m losing the thread. What I’m trying to say is I have a story for you. It’s not a very interesting one but I want to tell it one last time before I completely fade out of existence.

"We begin in nineteen sixty. I was a young man then. I had been a young man since nineteen thirty-eight but the Sixties were kind of different weren’t they?

"So yeah…nineteen sixty, Manchester. That’s where we’re going to start."

The sky reached down with delicate fingers, touching the graceless colours that drifted before his eyes and caressing them with an almost poetic sense of confusion.

This made him smile. Colours were good. Always had been, always would.

That was the thing with drugs, it didn’t matter where you were or what kind of a shithole you were stranded in, there were always some fucking great colours after bombing the H.

He had been living in Manchester for several months, a lost soul in a city that was far from the graves of his family.

It had been horrific watching them age, every moment etched upon their skin as he remained young, the decades sliding of him like water from a duck’s back.

Christ even Kovacs was dead, killed apart before the War’s end round about the same time that his visions had began.

Like a distant drum at the back of his mind he remembered the garish colours of the costume the government had forced upon him once they found out about his accident and how after Kovacs had been slaughtered he had vowed never to wear it again.

That had all been a pile of shit though.

During the fifties they had sent him to America as part of some fucked up publicity stunt and two years later he had been in the USSR, killing Communists for the Yanks.

The Americans had fucking loved him for that.

Wankers.

But it was the forties that were the real killers, the concentration camps and the never ending bloodshed and that just about brought him up to date – to Manchester in the Sixties and forty Marlboro, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, burnt spoons, cotton wool and a syringe full of Heaven.

Lines of coke snorted across the surface of a Yukio Mishima book and waiting for the next big thing.

But it was the bird people that fucked him up the most.

They hung about the corner of his vision, tapping at his windows and asking to be let inside, their huge hawk like wings swaying in the atmosphere outside with his every heartbeat. He didn’t know whether they were angels or demons but he sure as fuck wasn’t about to open a window and find out.

As it happened, he needn’t have bothered even contemplating the idea of letting them in because in the end they forced their way inside, feathers shattering glass and cutting through the side of the building like it was paper.

He did not rise to greet them. No, if God or the Devil were so impatient that they were ready to send messengers to bring him to his grave then he wasn’t about to lift a finger to help. Let the bastards earn the pay, he wasn’t Faustus.

And visit him they did, every day for a year, brining with them not proclamations from Heaven nor damnations from Hell but news of strange and foreign lands, whispers of brave new worlds, both past and future.

They took him to the edge of the year twenty ninety nine and stood with as the future cracked from the strain of a past disrupted, they gave visions of young men and women with new costumes who went forth into this cold future in vain attempts to right the wrongs that had been done to them, to save infinity from disgrace and failure, to rise humanity up above it and bring understanding.

Then one of the bird people whispered a name to him and he knew the true cruelty of both beauty and nature. Terrible whispers of terrible places and creatures that slithered in the dark behind his eyes.

"Albion." He whispered. "Captain Albion."

And the young man felt shame, such clouded and misguided shame that he dared not speak its name.

The hawk person was beautiful, his feathers gorgeous against the satin sunset of this world’s last breath and his shaven head worn with pride not guilt.

Not a prisoner, this man – rather a beautiful angel.

And beneath a sun that would never rise again, they kissed, gentle tongues entwining as his clothes and his guilt fell away from him. No shame, no shame only beauty. Beauty and understanding.

How magnificent was a world in which immortals walked the crowded stars, hand in hand with their fellow man?

How pure was a world that bred not filth nor contempt but love and respect.

And terrible the dying of this universe must be.

They made love inbetween the sun and the stars, whispering sweet nothings to one another, each pure in heart and pure of love.

"I love you, Rokara Soh."

He wanted to shout it from the Heavens, from the ends of the Earth, from the fiery pits of Hades till every soul, living or deceased, knew how deep his feelings ran.

But the universe in which they had entwined had run out of love, quantum physics saw to that.

The stars fell from the sky and covered a third of the Earth (or was it the other way round?) and Nathaniel Braddock wept upon the shoulders of his love.

And the fires went out, leaving nothing but the cold unfeeling of nineteen sixty again.

The bird people left him after that, drifting away like the fading of a dream only half remembered in the stark, clinical light of dawn.

He wore that costume again. Not the name, not that child’s dream that had forced forged his myth, but the other name, the name of his mentor and the name that his beloved Soh had first whispered to him.

Albion…

Sometimes you can still hear it whispered amongst the parliaments of feathered carrion birds that hang in the trees, a parliament for each city. But there are no hawks in England. Not anymore, not without Rokara Soh…

"And so we lost everything.

"Neron never kept his promise, the whole dream flushed down the fucking toilet.

"But the stars are going out on me once again. I’ve been in Cold Space for so fucking long that I can’t even see the Earth from here.

"I’m lost and I can’t find my way home and I don’t believe in love anymore.

"I want to believe in something but all I have left is this Cold Space and I’ve tried so hard to fall in love with it, but I just can’t do it anymore.

"It’s cold now. The stars have fallen from their skies.

"I’m dying again.

"I’m dying and I don’t regret a single fucking thing.

"That’s what it’s all about in the end. Not if you believed in God or if you believed in the Devil, not who you loved or why you loved them just that you did. That’s all that’s important.

"And I never regretted a single thing.

"Never."

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