Nick Swarbrick

“Ostension. A process by which real-life actions are unconsciously modelled on a legend, thereby narrated into praxis. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or seeing ghosts in an old house that you have been told is haunted.”
― Benjamin Myers, These Darkening Days

“There was no answer. There had never been an answer.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan

“The rock is cold and impartial beneath his hand. When he places a palm there he feels time slip away. Ancient and obvious, it is incapable of experiencing pain. With trembling hands Garner turns up his collar and zips up his coat.”
― Benjamin Myers, These Darkening Days

“As Bevis and Randal, touched by its stillness as though it were a great wing that brushed over them, walked slower, and stopped, out of the darkness of the river woods below them rose one clear, perfect note of birdsong, long drawn and insistent, repeated again and again, then breaking into a shining spray of notes, a cascade of runs and phrases that seemed to shimmer on the ear. It was a song that the two young men standing up there among the bramble domes had heard often enough before; but surely it had never sounded quite like this, so that it was one with the white flood of moonlight and the smell of the elder flowers. ‘Oh, listen!’ Randal whispered, stupidly, for the whole night was already holding its breath to listen. ‘Listen, Bevis, it’s the nightingale.’ Bevis stood as though he were rooted, like the brambles and the elder scrub, into the hill beneath his feet. His head was up, his gaze not turned down to the dark woods below from which came the song but going out up the curving length of the dearly familiar valley to the long, low huddle of the Hall that he had been born in, under the steep stride of Long Down, and the Manor Mill by the ford. His thin face was remote and far off, as Randal glanced aside at him, as though he were hearing something else, something that was beyond the singing. In a little, he shook his head. ‘It’s a song spun from the moonlight. But if it were me up here in the hollow hill, and I were to wake tonight, it would not be the nightingale but the speckle-breasted thrush or our Wealden blackbird I’d be listening for, to tell me I was home again.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Knight's Fee