As he brooded in the park and moved up and down the street, groping within himself for a stronger signal, new things like leaves began to fall to the ground. But they weren’t coming from the trees. They weren’t red. And they were much smaller. For the first time in many a day, he turned his attention upward into the space above the trees, which had just been more chaos the last time he had regarded it. Now it was a dull white. Small leaves of a brighter white were falling out of it. A few at first, then more in such quantities as to dwarf the number of leaves. They collected among the tiny green leaves that constituted the ground, and began to accumulate and climb up those tiny stalks just as the red leaves had before climbed up the trunks of the trees. In time enough of them had descended that they covered the green entirely and made the whole ground white. The park was a different place altogether now from what it had once been, but he mastered a fear that the red beauty would never return.

For many days, he gazed down the length of the street at the shapes of the branches against the white ground. At night he looked up into the sky, which sometimes was merely a gray fog out of which more white flakes descended. At other times, though, it was black, and decorated with brilliant points of light. When first he took note of these, they were scattered about in no particular way, which put him in mind of chaos and therefore displeased him. But on longer inspection he began to see shapes in the stars, just as he had, eons ago, seen a leaf emerge from the chaos. The more he attended to those shapes, the clearer and more perfectly formed they became, as the stars shifted and arranged themselves across the dark in a manner that better suited him. He knew not, however, what the shapes they described were. The only shapes in his world were leaves and trees. The figures in the stars, though beautiful, could not be likened to those.

Sometimes a white flake would stick to the dark trunk of a tree and he would gaze closely at it. Early the trunk and the flake both were simple and featureless, but he knew this to be another thing that required bettering. By attending more carefully, he drew forth greater complexity from both. The smooth trunk developed furrows and ridges. The white flake grew six arms, each sharing the same shape, which branched like that of a tree’s boughs or a leaf’s veins.