Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
- "Spring and Fall", Gerard Manley Hopkins

Dark days fell over the world, but frightful news breezed by him, and unease dissipated like colours in the mists. Nieven was certain of his future. He was young, but someday he would be old, and then someday young again. His life had a beginning, but no end; it would loop back upon itself, holding him securely, like the silk that a moth’s larva spun around itself to form its cocoon.

It could be said that he left because he was curious about the world, and it could be said that he left only because he knew nothing of the world. Shadows of nightmare cities danced in his head: ugly cities, artless cities, dusty searing cities, cities swollen like boils, cities like birds on the spit. Yet they were shadows only, and inspired in him more fascination than horror. He was no adventurer, but visiting family in the company of family was hardly an adventure. One day soon he would return—not only to his home, but to the person he had been and the life that was his.

Nieven had watched them emerge many a time, dusk-winged moths and bright-winged butterflies, had even taken one as his familiar. He knew that the silk would be severed, the chrysalis broken, and that the wings, once dry and stiff, would never fit back within the pupal cage. And he knew that they were different from him. They were fragile, they were prey, some lived only days—he pitied them.

His aunt had told him long ago that all living beings were kin and akin to one another, that the dimmest could not speak this knowledge and the brightest often forgot it, yet even they could not escape it. He was dimmer then than her, but brighter than the trees and the birds and the butterflies; and though he forgot much of what she said in the years to come, he never did escape it.