Losing My Wings

Yagahrek's loss as new direction

Mieville writes “Time is quite still. I am poised. There is no sound. The city and the air are poised. And I reach up slowly and run my fingers through my feathers. Pushing them slowly aside as my skin bristles, rubbing them merciless the wrong way, against the grain. I open my eyes. My fingers close and clutch at the stiff shafts and oiled fibres on my cheeks and I snap my beak shut so I will not cry out, and I begin to pull.” “I am not the earthbound Garuda any more. That one is dead. This is a new life. I am not a half-thing, a failed neither-nor. I have torn the misleading quills from my skin and made it smooth, and below that avian affectation, I am the same as fellow citizens. I can live foursquare in one world.”
 
It is not that humans are more or less developed then the Garuda, it’s that we moved differently through gothic moments. Consequently, the figures and forms that haunt our dreams, our stories, and our sciences inform us not only of what we have become but also of what we could have been.

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