“He thought he stood upon an English hillside. Rain was falling; it twisted in the air like grey ghosts. Rain fell upon him and he grew thin as rain. Rain
washed away thought, washed away memory, all the good and the bad. He no longer knew his name. Everything was washed away like mud from a stone. Rain filled him up with thoughts and memories of its own. Silver lines of water covered the hillside, like intricate lace, like the veins of an arm. Forgetting that he was, or ever had been, a man, he became the lines of water. He fell into the earth with the rain.
He thought he lay beneath the earth, beneath England. Long ages passed; cold and rain seeped through him; stones shifted within him. In the Silence and the Dark he grew vast.
He became the earth; he became England. A star looked down on him and spoke to
him.
A stone asked him a question and he answered it in its own language. A river
curled at his side; hills budded beneath his fingers. He opened his mouth and breathed out spring.
He thought he was pressed into a thicket in a dark wood in winter. The trees went on for
Over dark pillars separated by thin, white slices of winter light. He looked
down. Young saplings pierced him through and through; they grew up through his body, through his feet and hands. His eye-lids would no longer close because twigs had grown up through them.”
―
Susanna Clarke,
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
