There were villages that bribed me in with meat and cloth and begged me to intercede on their behalf to their harvest gods. There were villages that kept me out with pikes and rifles and screaming klaxons. I shared the grass with herds and occasionally with riders, with birds I considered cousins and with animals I had thought myth.

I slept alone, hidden in folds of stone or in copses, or in bivouacs I threw up when I smelt rain. Four times something investigated me when I slept, leaving hoofmarks and the smell of herbs or sweat or meat.

Those sprawling downs were where my anger and misery changed shape.

I walked with temperate insects investigating my unfamiliar smells, trying to lick my sweat, taste my blood, trying to pollinate the spots of colour in my cloak. I saw fat mammals among that ripe green. I picked flowers that I had seen in books, tall-stemmed blooms in subtle colours as if seen through thin smoke. I could not breathe for the smell of the trees. The sky was rich with clouds.

I walked, a desert creature, in that fertile land. I felt harsh and dusty.

One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me.

I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn, and rest.

I had been a harder creature when I first stepped onto those hills and plains. I left Myrshock, where my ship had landed, without spending even one night there. It is an ugly port town containing enough of my kind that I felt oppressed.

I hurried through the city seeking nothing but supplies and assurance that I was right to go to New Crobuzon. I bought cold cream for my raw and seeping back, found a doctor honest enough to admit that I would find no one who could help me in Myrshock. I gave my whip to a merchant who let me ride his cart for fifty miles into the dales. He would not accept my gold, only my weapon.