Playlist: It's three am and you can't sleep because of an agressively cuddly orange cat.

A drift of gray was leaving the Clouded Mountain, a slowly spreading smudge against the blue sky. But it couldn’t have been smoke: it was drifting against the wind that tore at the clouds. The king put his field glasses to his eyes and saw what it was. “Angels,” he said. Lord Asriel came away from the telescope and stood up, hand shading his eyes. In hundreds, and then thousands, and tens of thousands, until half that part of the sky was darkened, the minute figures flew and flew and kept on coming. Lord Asriel had seen the billion-strong flocks of blue starlings that wheeled at sunset around the palace of the Emperor K'ang-Po, but he had never seen so vast a multitude in all his life. The flying beings gathered themselves and then streamed away slowly, slowly, to the north and the south.