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1 " Underhill saw Sorrowmouth stooped in the doorway with his bowl and thorn, mottled skin burnished gold in the lamp glow, beady eyes beseeching him. Underhill nodded and he dipped his head under the doorframe and into the room, towering over both Underhill and Mary. Mary continued, her words beginning to slur.“I think, no, I know that if I didn’t have my beliefs, you know my absolute belief in, well, in angels, guardian angels, all around us, around me, I wouldn’t have gotten through these last few weeks.”She glanced up, beyond where Sorrowmouth’s face hung like a stiff mask in the cloud of cigarette smoke, and saw something else entirely. She closed her eyes and smiled an entirely benign smile at the very notion of her personal angels. There were some crude and disappointingly prosaic paintings on the wall around the fire of them floating in the air, their wings outstretched, lit up with a golden glow that Underhill remembered like the tattered fragments of an ancient dream. Angels looking over babies in cradles. Angels hovering above the Earth, showering it with their benevolent light.Sorrowmouth finally pricked at the woman’s grief with his thorn until it seemed to bleed furious moonlight. Chaotic swirls of black and silver and red convulsing in the air around them. He gathered it all into his upturned bowl and began to sup at it like an eager dog. "
― Simon Avery , Sorrowmouth
2 " Underhill had to fight with himself to remain in place. But something was already changing inside him. Something that had become familiar in the last year or so. He could feel the world subtly reordering itself as his father walked away; that strange feeling that he sometimes had and couldn’t explain, not even to himself, so certainly not to his mother or anyone else. But he couldn’t acknowledge it right now; he was afraid that if he didn’t know his way home, he might wander lost in unfamiliar neighbourhoods until the end of time; he might end up in a different country altogether. Soon Underhill couldn’t even hear his father’s footsteps but the panic subsided, and the world gradually began to settle around him, changing little by little, soft and gentle and pliant, like his mother’s embrace. He could hear the insect drone of a languid summer day and the silence of a Christmas Eve wrapped in snow. It tranquillised him. He looked up to find the buildings were all changed and very distant from him, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. They were lit up from within with an incandescent golden light. They were like cathedrals floating in a changed sky; all the dreamy colours of a place where words ran out and art took over. "