Nocturnal Animals Quotes

Naoko stayed frozen in place, like a small nocturnal animal that has been lured out by the moonlight. The direction of the glow exaggerated the silhouette of her lips. Seeming utterly fragile and vulnerable, the silhouette pulsed almost imperceptibly with the beating of her heart or the motions of her inner heart, as if she were whispering soundless words to the darkness. I swallowed in hopes of easing my thirst, but in the stillness of the night, the sound I made was huge. As if this were a signal to her, Naoko stood and glided toward the head of the bed, gown rustling faintly. She knelt on the floor by my pillow, eyes fixed on mine. I stared back at her, but her eyes told me nothing. Strangely transparent, they seemed like windows to a world beyond, but however long I peered into their depths, there was nothing I could see. Our faces were no more than ten inches apart, but she was light-years away from me.

You write because everything dies, to save what dies.

Sometimes, I am the beast in the darkness. Sometimes, I am the ghost.

To be heartbroken means to have a story

You shall suffer for ever the influence of my kiss. You shall be beautiful in my fashion. You shall love that which I love and that which loves me: water, clouds, silence and the night; the immense green sea; the formless and multiform streams; the place where you shall not be; the lover whom you shall not know; flowers of monstrous shape; perfumes that cause delirium; cats that shudder, swoon and curl up on pianos and groan like women, with a voice that is hoarse and gentle! And you shall be loved by my lovers, courted by my courtiers. You shall be the queen of all men that have green eyes, whose necks also I have clasped in my nocturnal caresses; of those who love the sea, the sea that is immense, tumultuous and green, the formless and multiform streams, the place where they are not, the woman whom they do not know, sinister flowers that resemble the censers of a strange religion, perfumes that confound the will; and the savage and voluptuous animals which are the emblems of their dementia.

I decided, enough pain. To the lips of their nocturnal happiness I would attach those of my revenge. I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

When the ship approached the equator, I stopped going out on deck in the daytime. The sun burned like a flame. The days had shortened and night came swiftly. One moment it was light, the next it was dark. The sun did not set but fell into the water like a meteor. Late in the evening, when I went out briefly, a hot wind slapped my face. From the ocean came a roar of passions that seemed to have broken through all barriers:'We mus procreate and multiply! We must exhaust all the powers of lust!' The waves glowed like lava, and I imagined I could see multitudes of living beings - algae, whales, sea monsters - reveling in an orgy, from the surface to the bottom of the sea. Immortality was the law here. The whole planet raged with animation. At times, I heard my name in the clamor: the spirit of the abyss calling me to join them in their nocturnal dance. ("Hanka")

I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.

I don’t know how much more you can take.” He laughed. “You’re a witch. From a family of witches. My ex-wife is a witch. Apparently literally and figuratively. Plus my kid’s a witch. And I am probably some kind of animal shifter. All that, and I’m still upright and functioning. I don’t think there’s anything you could tell me that would break me at this point.

at least some paleontologists believe that the demise of the dinosaurs was accelerated by nocturnal predation on reptilian eggs by the early mammals. Two chicken eggs for breakfast may be all-at least on the surface-that is left of this ancient mammalian cuisine.

Gabe watched her move to the center of the green. In one gloved hand, she clutched a leash. The other end of the leash was attached to... something furry and brown that rolled. "What is that?" "That would be mongrel with two lamed hind legs. Apparently, Her Ladyship's friend devised a little chariot for his rear half, and the dog careens around the neighborhood like a yapping billiard ball. If you think that's strange, wait until you see the goat." "Hold a moment. There's a goat?" "Oh, yes. She grazes it on the square every afternoon. Doesn't precisely elevate the atmosphere of Bloom Square, now does it?" "I see the problem." "I'm only getting started. Her Ladyship has single-handedly set us back a month on the improvements." Hammond pulled a collection of letters from a folio. He held one aloft and read from it. "'Dear Mr. Hammond, I must request that you delay completion of the parquet flooring. The fumes from the lacquer are dizzying the hens. Sincerely yours, Lady Penelope Campion.'" He withdrew another. "'Dear Mr. Hammond, I'm afraid your improvements to the mews must be temporarily halted. I've located a litter of newborn kittens in the hayloft. Their mother is looking after them, but as their eyes are not yet open, they should not be displaced for another week. Thank you for your cooperation. Gratefully yours, Lady Penelope Campion.'" Gabe sensed a theme. "Oh, and here's my favorite." Hammond shook open a letter and cleared his throat for dramatic effect. "'Dear Mr. Hammond, if it is not too great an imposition, might I ask that your workers refrain from performing heavy labor between nine o'clock in the morning and half-three in the afternoon? Hedgehogs are nocturnal animals, and sensitive to loud noises. My dear Freya is losing quills. I feel certain this will concern you as much as it does me. Neighborly yours, Lady Penelope Campion.'" He tossed the folio of letters onto the table, where they landed with a smack. "Her hedgehog. Really.

Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity the theory of relativity W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Chopin’s nocturnes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Peter Pan Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm The Cat in the Hat Charlie Brown Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity the theory of relativity W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Chopin’s nocturnes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Peter Pan Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm The Cat in the Hat Charlie Brown Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind Google Harry Potter *

like traveling without knowing what country you’re going to

She wanted to walk until her body and mind were exhausted. Her snug house felt like a distant goal, a place she had to achieve through enormous physical effort.

Money would compensate for lost dreams.

It is in our sleep that we most glimpse the power of spirit. Our minds will speak across this narrow distance. It will be here, together in nocturnal stillness, that we shall finally become unbound by time, by space, by natural law and physical law. We shall roam the world however we like, in our dreams. We shall speak with the dead, transform into animals and objects, fly across time. Our intellects shall be nowhere to be found, and our minds will be unfettered.

Some of our greatest ideas, art, and inventions—from the theory of evolution to van Gogh’s sunflowers to the personal computer—came from quiet and cerebral people who knew how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there. Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity the theory of relativity W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” Chopin’s nocturnes Proust’s In Search of Lost Time Peter Pan Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm The Cat in the Hat Charlie Brown Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind Google Harry Potter* As

Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me. December 97 My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at once awakens, bursts forth and - once the crisis is over - leaves me in mortal terror of myself. Just now in the avenue of the Bois, I whipped my dog till he bled, and for nothing - for not coming immediately when I called! The poor animal was there before me, his spine arched, cowering close to the ground, with his great, almost human, eyes fixed on me... and his lamentable howling! It was as though he were waiting for the butcher! But it was as if a kind of drunkenness had possessed me. The more I struck out the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that quivering flesh filled me with some incomprehensible ardour. A circle of onlookers formed around me, and I only stopped myself for the sake of my self-respect. Afterwards, I was ashamed. I am always ashamed of myself nowadays. The pulse of life has always filled me with a peculiar rage to destroy. When I think of two beings in love, I experience an agonising sensation; by virtue of some bizarre backlash, there is something which smothers and oppresses me, and I suffocate, to the point of anguish. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night to the muted hubbub of bumps and voices which suddenly become perceptible in the dormant city - all the cries of sexual excitement and sensuality which are the nocturnal respiration of cities - I feel weak. They rise up around me, submerging me in a sluggish flux of embraces and a tide of spasms. A crushing weight presses down on my chest; a cold sweat breaks out on my brow and my heart is heavy - so heavy that I have to get up, run bare-foot and breathless, to my window, and open both shutters, trying desperately to breathe. What an atrocious sensation it is! It is as if two arms of steel bear down upon my shoulders and a kind of hunger hollows out my stomach, tearing apart my whole being! A hunger to exterminate love. Oh, those nights! The long hours I have spent at my window, bent over the immobile trees of the square and the paving-stones of the deserted street, on watch in the silence of the city, starting at the least noise! The nights I have passed, my heart hammering in anguish, wretchedly and impatiently waiting for my torment to consent to leave me, and for my desire to fold up the heavy wings which beat inside the walls of my being like the wings of some great fluttering bird! Oh, my cruel and interminable nights of impotent rebellion against the rutting of Paris abed: those nights when I would have liked to embrace all the bodies, to suck in all the breaths and sup all the mouths... those nights which would find me, in the morning, prostrate on the carpet, scratching it still with inert and ineffectual fingers... fingers which never know anything but emptiness, whose nails are still taut with the passion of murder twenty-four hours after the crises... nails which I will one day end up plunging into the satined flesh of a neck, and... It is quite clear, you see, that I am possessed by a demon... a demon which doctors would treat with some bromide or with all-healing sal ammoniac! As if medicines could ever be imagined to be effective against such evil!

Apart from such visits, for the first time in her life Eliza was truly alone. In the beginning, unfamiliar sounds, nocturnal sounds, disturbed her, but as the days passed she came to know them: soft-pawed animals under the eaves, the ticking of the warming range, floorboards shivering in the cooling nights. And their were unexpected benefits to her solitary life: alone in the cottage, Eliza discovered that the characters from her fairy tales became bolder. She found fairies playing in the spiders' webs, insects whispering incantations on the windowsills, fire sprites spitting and hissing in the range. Sometimes in the afternoons, Eliza would sit on the rocking chair listening to them. And late at night, when they were all asleep, she would spin their stories into her own tales.

Summer Nocturne" Let us love this distance, since those who do not love each other are not seperaated. --Simone Weil Night without you, and the dog barking at the silence, no doubt at what's in the silence, a deer perhaps pruning the rhododendron or that racoon with its brilliant fingers testing the garbage can lid by the shed. Night I've chosen a book to help me think about the long that's in longing, "the space across which desire reaches." Night that finally needs music to quiet the dog and whatever enormous animal night itself is, appetite without limit. Since I seem to want to be hurt a little, it's Stan Getz and "It Never Entered My Mind," and to back him up Johnnie Walker Black coming down now from the cabinet to sing of its twelve lonely years in the dark. Night of small revelations, night of odd comfort. Starting to love this distance. Starting to feel how present you are in it.

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted. I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep. There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces.

In Miss Miller’s fantasy, too, there is an inner necessity that compels it to go on from the horse-sacrifice to the sacrifice of the hero. Whereas the former symbolizes the renunciation of biological drives, the latter has the deeper and ethically more valuable meaning of a human self-sacrifice, a renunciation of egohood. In her case, of course, this is true only in a metaphorical sense, since it is not the author of the story but its hero, Chiwantopel, who offers himself and is voluntarily sacrificed. The morally significant act is delegated to the hero, while Miss Miller only looks on admiringly and applaudingly, without, it seems, realizing that her animus-figure is constrained to do what she herself so signally fails to do. The advance from the animal sacrifice to the human sacrifice is therefore only an idea, and when Miss Miller plays the part of a pious spectator of this imaginary sacrificial act, her participation is without ethical significance. As is usual in such cases, she is totally unconscious of what it means when the hero, the vehicle of the vitally important magical action, perishes. When that happens, the projection falls away and the threatening sacrificial act recoils upon the subject herself, that is, upon the personal ego of the dreamer. In what form the drama will then run to an end it is impossible to predict. Nor, in the case of Miss Miller, owing to the lack of material and my ignorance of her personality, did I foresee, or venture to assume, that it would be a psychosis which would form the companion piece to Chiwantopel’s sacrifice. It was, in fact, a κατοχή—a total surrender, not to the positive possibilities of life, but to the nocturnal world of the unconscious, a débâcle similar to the one that overtook her hero.

Treasure of my soul," he said. He took one of her hands, brought it to his lips, and kissed it, just above the knuckles, as he had been doing every night for the last month, since their engagement. "You have brought me such peace." "Ambrose," she replied, amazed by his name, amazed by his face. "It is in our sleep that we most closely glimpse the power of the spirit," he said. "Our minds will speak across this narrow distance. It will be here, together in nocturnal stillness, that we shall finally become unbound by time, by space, by natural law and physical law. We shall roam the world however we like, in our dreams. We shall speak with the dead, transform into animals and objects, fly across time. Our intellects shall be nowhere to be found, and our minds will be unfettered." "Thank you," she said, senselessly.

Owls are nocturnal, swooping down silently, with the soft edges of their feathers muffling the sound of the wings, before pouncing and swallowing their prey whole. Death unseen, death unheard, death from above—the military drones of the animal kingdom

We remember England’s “terms of venery”— the jargon of hunting— for giving us specific words for groups of animals, such as a school of fish or a pride of lions , and also for such quaintly forgotten phrases as “a tiding of magpies” and “a kindle of cats.” Experts suggest that many of the terms that amuse us today—“ an unkindness of ravens,” “a shrewdness of apes,” “a disworship of Scots”— were fanciful even in their own time and never in common use. The true language of venery, however, did more than describe beasts by the bunch; it richly evoked their behavior. The lark’s habit of flying into the air to sing was known as “exalting.” The nocturnal song of nightingales was called “watching,” from the idea of keeping a watch through the darkness. Venery’s description of animal sounds was poetic, but also accurate: weasels really do “squeak,” mice really do “cheep.” Goldfinches chirm, boars girn, starlings murmur, geese creak. The seemingly slow, ambling walk of bears was referred to as “slothing.” Ordinary life in the past had an intimacy with other species that today we mainly associate with trained biologists and dedicated naturalists.

How many were there of these homely visionaries, prophetic pythonesses, sententious prophetesses, raving old women, swooning damsels, talking crickets, these convulsionaries haunted by incubi, who ‘dropped down dead with epilepsy,’ how many the matrons desirous of regeneration, and the old women seeking ‘purgation?’ How many the ‘fountains of deceit,’ the ‘amphitheaters of monstrosities,’ how many have tumbled into the ‘cavern of nothingness.’ Collective infatuation, ‘epidemics of the imagination,’ ‘filthy dreams’ born of ‘obscene’ and delirious ‘fantasy,’ ‘nocturnal flights through the air,’ ‘brutal releases of pent-up lust’ by “melancholic women, endowed with vigorous imaginations and ferocious animals spirits, or indeed old women consumed by all manner of filthy and libidinous desires, which they abet with generous quantities of liquor: no wonder, then, that when asleep they are prey to such nefarious deliriums

It was a peaceful place, as was the case with most small communities situated on desert worlds. Despite the desolation that was apparent at first glance, it boasted its characteristic assortment of indigenous life-forms. Regardless of the absence of much in the way of visible vegetation, the distant isolated hoots and mewlings of nocturnal native animals indicated that life was present even where none could readily be seen. A single wind chime yodeling in the occasional breeze provided a tinkling counterpoint to the yelps of hidden sand-dwellers.

Over the years, the gaze of entomologists gradually magnified, each generation scrutinizing what the previous one hadn’t bothered with or noticed. By the time Powell was surveying the dunes in the late seventies and early eighties, the insects he was bringing home included the minuscule and the nocturnal—because that’s what a scientist of his generation was accustomed to collecting, and what was left to be caught. The biodiversity of the dunes hadn’t expanded. But people’s perception of it had. —

It did not fear any god the people constructed from marble and stone. It thrived on demoralizing the frightened prayers of the weak that clung to sanctuary walls. Its intoxication found in the terror, the superstition, and worship that fed its merciless existence. The night sky provided the nocturnal shelter where it walked freely. The festivals of the changing seasons, reminding the mere mortals their time upon its fields were short. Brief in comparison to the thousands of years that it casually passed. It ruled the Earth, long before the human animals learned to conquer shelter and formulate abstract thoughts. In the cave paintings of the most primitive, they feared to paint its imagery on stone.

Spotlighting for animals at night, you’re looking for their luminous eyes. Eyeshine is technically an effect of the tapetum lucidum, a layer of tissue behind the retina of some vertebrate animals that reflects light, allowing the eye’s photoreceptors a second chance to process incoming signals. This gives nocturnal species their superior low-light vision, and the tissue is highly visible: if you direct light at an animal with a tapetum lucidum, its eyes will seem to glow in the dark. The color varies by species, and you can often guess the type of animal by its eyeshine. Cat and dog eyes glow iridescent green; horses and cows are blue; fish are white; and coyotes, rodents, and birds are red. (Primates, including humans, don’t have a tapetum lucidum, so you won’t see any eyeshine by spotlighting a person. The redeye effect in powerful flash photos is a reflection of blood vessels at the back of the eyeball.)

In an article published in 1998 in the normally staid pages of Neurology, the Spanish physician Juan Gómez-Alonso pointed out other, less obvious parallels between vampires and rabid animals. According to folklore, the lifespan of a vampire was forty days, which coincides with the average time a victim lives after being bitten by a rabid animal. And just like rabid people, vampires were repelled by light (hence their nocturnal habits), strong smells (the odor of garlic, according to folktales, could ward them off), and water (pouring it around graves was recommended to keep them in their underground vaults).

Sometimes the dogs attacked grown men, even cops, as if they wanted to die, growing bolder and more dangerous in the summer, when people stayed out after dark, and rabies began to spread. It came with warm weather, and carried by the night wind and nocturnal animals gone mad - prehistoric possums with pig eyes and needle teeth, squealing in the alleys. Rats on the sidewalks at noon, sluggish and dazed. Raccoons hissing in the nettles and high grass along polluted golf course creeks. Feral cats, bats falling from the sky, dreamy-eyed skunks staggering out of the West Hills, choking on their own tongues, their hearts shuddering with the virus they carried, an evil older than cities or civilization - messengers perhaps, sent by some brooding, wounded promise we betrayed and left for dead back when the world was still only darkness and frozen seas.

To convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing. Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.

You’re sure?” Pandora asked after he’d left. “An animal is a commitment, you know. It’s like marriage. For better or worse, sickness and health and all that.

That’s the beauty of animals—they adapt. Ever since I’ve become nocturnal, Roscoe has, too.

It’s a perspective on story that may also shed light on why you and I and everyone else spend a couple of hours each day concocting tales that we rarely remember and more rarely share. By day I mean night, and the tales are those we produce during REM sleep. Well over a century since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no consensus on why we dream. I read Freud’s book for a junior-year high school class called Hygiene (yes, that’s really what it was called), a somewhat bizarre requirement taught by the school’s gym teachers and sports coaches that focused on first aid and common standards of cleanliness. Lacking material to fill an entire semester, the class was padded by mandatory student presentations on topics deemed loosely relevant. I chose sleep and dreams and probably took it all too seriously, reading Freud and spending after-school hours combing through research literature. The wow moment for me, and for the class too, was the work of Michel Jouvet, who in the late 1950s explored the dream world of cats.32 By impairing part of the cat brain (the locus coeruleus, if you like that sort of thing), Jouvet removed a neural block that ordinarily prevents dream thoughts from stimulating bodily action, resulting in sleeping cats who crouched and arched and hissed and pawed, presumably reacting to imaginary predators and prey. If you didn’t know the animals were asleep, you might think they were practicing a feline kata. More recently, studies on rats using more refined neurological probes have shown that their brain patterns when dreaming so closely match those recorded when awake and learning a new maze that researchers can track the progress of the dreaming rat mind as it retraces its earlier steps.33 When cats and rats dream it surely seems they’re rehearsing behaviors relevant to survival. Our common ancestor with cats and rodents lived some seventy or eighty million years ago, so extrapolating a speculative conclusion across species separated by tens of thousands of millennia comes with ample warning labels. But one can imagine that our language-infused minds may produce dreams for a similar purpose: to provide cognitive and emotional workouts that enhance knowledge and exercise intuition—nocturnal sessions on the flight simulator of story. Perhaps that is why in a typical life span we each spend a solid seven years with eyes closed, body mostly paralyzed, consuming our self-authored tales.34 Intrinsically, though, storytelling is not a solitary medium. Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance. This offers a related design rationale for coding story into the human behavioral repertoire—for identifying, that is, the adaptive utility of our storytelling instinct.

Thou comest from Paris then, said Pantagruel; and how do you spend your time there, you my masters the students of Paris? The scholar answered, We transfretate the Sequan at the dilucul and crepuscul; we deambulate by the compites and quadrives of the urb; we despumate the Latial verbocination; and, like verisimilary amorabons, we captat the benevolence of the omnijugal, omniform and omnigenal feminine sex. Upon certain diecules we invisat the lupanares, and in a venerian ecstasy inculcate our veretres into the penitissime recesses of the pudends of these amicabilissim meretricules. Then do we cauponisate in the meritory taberns of the Pineapple, the Castle, the Magdalene, and the Mule, goodly vervecine spatules perforaminated with petrocile. And if by fortune there be rarity or penury of pecune in our marsupies, and that they be exhausted of ferruginean metal, for the shot we dimit our codices and oppignerat our vestments, whilst we prestolate the coming of the tabellaries from the Penates and patriotic Lares. To which Pantagruel answered, What devilish language is this? By the Lord, I think thou art some kind of heretick. My lord, no, said the scholar; for libentissimally, as soon as it illucesceth any minutule slice of the day, I demigrate into one of these so well architected minsters, and there, irrorating myself with fair lustral water, I mumble off little parcels of some missic precation of our sacrificuls, and, submurmurating my horary precules, I elevate and absterge my anime from its nocturnal inquinations. I revere the Olympicols. I latrially venere the supernal Astripotent. I dilige and redame my proxims. I observe the decalogical precepts, and, according to the facultatule of my vires, I do not discede from them one late unguicule. Nevertheless, it is veriform, that because Mammona doth not supergurgitate anything in my loculs, that I am somewhat rare and lent to supererogate the elemosynes to those egents that hostially queritate their stipe.

Often Khaster heard noises in the night he could not identify. They were the sounds made by animals, but had a human resonance to them. Sometimes gouts of light would spurt into the sky-red, turquoise, gold-and some moments later thunder would come, but from beneath the earth rather than the heavens. Strange smells, bitter yet musky and sweet, would occasionally come in through an open window to haunt a room. Khaster knew that the priest-mages of Madragore employed a regiment of alchemists who worked in a shuttered citadel on the east of the city. Its huge domed roof, which was covered in flaky verdigis scales rose up from an area of factories and tanning shops. Stories leaked out of the citadel along with the fumes. Creatures were made there, homunculi, golems, beasts of war. Sometimes the creatures escaped or were let out to roam the city by their keepers. That accounted for the strange nocturnal noises. But perhaps these were only stories after all. Perhaps the citadel hid secrets of a more mundane yet brutal nature. Prisoners could be interrogated there, tortured with corrosive steams. The alchemists made killing perfumes for use on the battlefield. Khaster had heard tales of a liquid that when released into the air corroded all the flesh from anyone who smelled its delicate aroma. The alchemists made weapons; if not magical beasts, then mordant potions and poisons. They had to test them on someone.

Familiars are almost always men. And all familiars have an animal form.

A grunting nocturnal animal, a machine of flesh and blood who wasn’t ashamed of himself. But he never found redemption.

Hazel Dormouse

some places, barn owls are considered birds of evil omen, and as such are driven away or killed.

Apart from such visits, for the first time in her life Eliza was truly alone. In the beginning, unfamiliar sounds, nocturnal sounds, disturbed her, but as the days passed she came to know them: soft-pawed animals under the eaves, the ticking of the warming range, floorboards shivering in the cooling nights. And there were unexpected benefits to her solitary life: alone in the cottage, Eliza discovered that the characters from her fairy tales became bolder. She found fairies playing in the spiders' webs, insects whispering incantations on the windowsills, fire sprites spitting and hissing in the range. Sometimes in the afternoons, Eliza would sit on the rocking chair listening to them. And late at night, when they were all asleep, she would spin their stories into her own tales.

By looking at tetrachromats among modern animals and working backward, scientists can deduce that the first vertebrates were likely tetrachromats, too. Mammals, probably because they were all initially nocturnal, lost two of their ancestral cones and became dichromats. But they scurried beneath the feet of dinosaurs, which were almost certainly tetrachromats and “probably saw all kinds of cool non-spectral colors,” Stoddard says. It’s ironic that for the longest time, illustrators and filmmakers portrayed dinosaurs in dull shades of brown, gray, and green. Only recently have artists started painting these animals with bright colors, inspired by the revelation that they are the ancestors of birds. But even these vivid hues, applied with a trichromat’s eye, capture just a tiny proportion of the colors that dinosaurs probably wore or saw.

A dead world is never really dead. Even when the stars vanish in a great exodus, leaving an inky night that swallows the sky. Even when the sound of silence is a terrible thing to listen to in a city that once groaned with noise. But it’s not quite silence, is it? There are the birds that soar over bare roof rafters, egrets and jackdaws and scruffy brown scraps that go by a multitude of names calling joyfully to each other. There are the nocturnal animals who claw and scrape over cobblestones, lifting their gazes to the two pale moons impressed against a violet sky. There are the trees that stretch upwards, overgrown and languorous, from leaf-strewn courtyards, extending gracefully through balconies and walkways. And below them, the ferns that unfurl in dark, damp corners that might still bear cracked tiles in parched colours, or spongey wooden skates engraved with toothy chisel marks. Life, persistent and predictably stubborn, goes on. Close your eyes and the stars might not sing in this hushed city of dust and dreams, but there’s still singing nonetheless. Even if there’s just one voice left.