They had fought in countless cities across the millennia. The granite tenement walls that framed the alleyway and the shadows of spires, turrets and domes that stretched between the gloomy orange lamplight made this as suitable a setting as any of the others. Not as Gothic as Prague of course, nor as symbolic as Jerusalem, but fitting enough.
Lucifer stood at one end of the alley, his lithe silhouette tapering out towards Michael.  Their eyes were locked and arc sodium light reflected a feral violence.
As, always, it was Lucifer who made the first move, bounding up the alleyway.  He already had his weapons unsheathed, ready to strike into Michael's soft flesh, but Michael, as always, was prepared for the charge.
.
The sound of their battling could be heard up and down the street.  In number 34, the noise awoke Mrs. J. Masson from a light slumber next to her comatose husband. Careful not to wake him up, she climbed out of bed and made her way to the window looking down on the alley. She opened it up, stuck her head out into the chill of night and then, turning towards the warring angels, half screeched, half whispered,
"Get away you noisy beasts! Go, on scat!"
She waved her arms emphatically and Michael, who had his blades buried in Lucifer's side, turned and looked up at her, quizzically.
"You heard me! People want their sleep!"
And then the injured white rolled out of the black's grasp and ran off into the night.

It always turned out that way.

The river is black now.  By day she flows a murky, greenish brown, and Strauss is proven false.  Swimmers brave the beaches of Margit Sziget and there are parties by the banks, but though the breeze is fresh and the view a pearl of Europe, you cannot escape that filmy surface, that unclean sheen, that tepid, ancient lie.

But the river is black now; lacquered gold where street lamps cast their gaze.  Her bridges arc in filigree chords and all the monuments of greatness - squandered and taken - stand out like rich topaz on a field of starry black.  Tourists smile and point, immortalise themselves on her banks and spans.  They are backlit by splendour, eyes starry in the flash. Beneath, pleasure boats cruise past like they're sliding on glass, through the shade of their Grand Prince, beneath the chains and the roaring lions, towards freedom (hid) and the distant, stolen sea.  They slice through their own reflections and are gone.

But the river is black now - she frames her city like a mirror in a darkened room, defining light and shade and nothing more.  She cuts between classes, the high and low, between those elevated and those levelled; West and East.  Spots of colour on her banks tell of burger chains and clubs, vending machines and hotel bars.  Trams weave by like the ghosts of regimes past.

But the river is black now, so the old man on the hill does not watch her, nor remember how they threw him to her grasp; the red wake he left behind him in his spiked and sudden coffin.  The river stained, the bishop sainted, yet above a verdant lady stands, her gaze upon that long, dark ribbon: not just Gellért's blood at all.  How could she glance away from one she claims, twice now, to have freed?

But the river is black now - on her banks lie many shoes, cast-off and cast iron: forgotten reminders of a forgettable night, or a frozen memory of an unmentionable one.  Who wishes to recall such cold amidst the summer heat, or the black-clad ice that flowed through the city and turned the river white, then red.

But the river is black now - no one sees those shapes lurking in its shadows, picking scraps and making do midst the waste and grime, lost and forgotten in its flow like the souls in back alleys begging for change, or the woman selling flowers to tourists, back bent and humbled even as the roses stand tall and proud.

Because the river is black now, and every step forward seems a step further back.  All this progress, like the Danube, merely lies.