Alone for the thousandth night in the magnificent albeit confusing stream of his inner life, Francis wiped away tears from his warm, quivering cheek, ashamed that even the animals would see these tears as glimmering beacons confirming the boy's inherent weakness, and not as the painful-yet-necessary baptismal waters of his impending transmutation which will supersede the moonlight. The loneliness; the forest with its black nights; the animals graced with the sweet understanding and effortless ability to traverse the bleak chasm of mind and mind, though not necessarily to penetrate the bizarre, perennial mysteries unique to mankind's mirrored psyche, that most mutant of entities in creation's menagerie of unparalleled strangeness and earthbound idiosyncrasy; the disembodied eyes of owls which complement the young man's philosophical nightmares which he is unable to shake. The new moon disguises its calloused nature in the hopefulness of its name, its promise of renewal unmasked in the light of this immediate and utter estrangement.

The moment of an ambivalent epiphany: a thin, barely noticeable outline of light graces the underside of Francis' wrist as his hand descends from his moist face, and in the back of his mind the music is there once more, signalling the onset of the familiar vision. Lizards and snakes crawl from the broken windows of a mansion overrun by weeds and vines and colonized by reptiles, spiders of all sorts pursuing their line drawings in space, and other creatures which defy ready taxonomy. Though the vision lacks this crucial detail, he is certain that deep within the structure's shadowy core there exists a source of light, whether that of a single candle's flickering flame or sickly star he cannot say. He believes that, though a fundamental separation between himself and his animal brethren must ever exist, all who dwell in the forest will one day be equal inheritors of this selfsame jewel, this photon the existence of which he has deduced from the information available. The music is not pleasant, it antagonizes Francis' inborn sense of harmony as well as the rhythm of his own heart, though its sudden onset is not without a kind of consoling absurdity which the young man very clearly perceives, and it is this seduction of the absurd which causes him to cling to its impenetrable melody with the full momentum of these thousand days and nights and the insights they have withheld.