So I'm writing this story. It's 1912. There's a girl. She's a librarian. She slays vampires. I was pretty sure that was what the story was about. Until, of course, I actually started writing it. The girl's still telling the story, but the centre, the catalyst, has changed. In a lot of ways, the story is really about Rupert Caruthers, former teenage hoodlum of London's streets, who retreated into a quiet life of librarianship after dealing too deeply in black magics and opium and vampires, who was rescued from vampire thralldom by the government, who found himself bound in another kind of thralldom, using talents he doesn;t even think he should have in the government's employ, who buries his past in the foundations of a library and deliberately becomes as unassuming and harmless as possible, because he knows that if he doesn't watch himself, he is capable of horrible things that even he doesn't quite understand. Who spends several years being quietly and guiltily in love with his copper-haired assistant librarian, who also has a latent capacity for magics, and surely it is part of his penance (not atonement, he doesn't hope for that) never to let himself be in love with her (and anyway, he tells himself, he will probably kill her, somehow). Who becomes her teacher and companion when she tumbles, terrified and unwilling, into a life of slaying vampires. Who may or may not be a Tam Lin stand-in. Who, to my complete surprise, went from a one-off character of necessity into what may very well be the core of the story.

These are songs for Mr Caruthers, loud, fey, Victorianstreetpunk songs. There is also an unusual amount of singing saw (\o/). A companion, of sorts, to That Light.