The ghostly light of the waxing half-moon shines through the pine forest as the glow of daylight recedes, and the symphony of the night stirs to life. The trees bow and murmur in the crepuscular breeze, and dark shadows dodge newborn stars as they wing in silence across the bowl of the sky. Near the hilltop, the muffled cracks of trodden deadfall signal a herd of wisent on the move, until they reach the road and their drumbeat recedes into the soft tap of hooves on concrete. Past the frail grasses pushing through the road's spiderweb cracks, a bear cub pauses in her foraging—glancing up with shining eyes over berry-stained muzzle—and scrambles up a tree trunk. Her mother lopes up and chuffs a warning, and the wisent turn and plod away. A five-legged cicada scurries off the concrete as the herd passes by, and waits patiently for the breeze's next caesura, bracing his legs and flexing his tymbals. As the pines hush, he starts his rattling solo, and another cicada responds from the rock-field at the hilltop. The duet is discordant—the newcomer's song is off-key, occasionally popping into silence before rattling back to life—and it is almost a mercy when a shadow swoops down to the rock-field, cutting off the harmony and receding into the sky. The shadow arcs through twilight—with flashes of white showing amid the dun as she beats her sleek triangular wings—until the swallow alights on a road sign with her evening meal. There is a soft crunch as her crooked beak cleaves into the cicada's exoskeleton, and she eats quickly, claws poised against the metal. вхо́д воспрещён, it reads, white on red, the enamel of the sign faded with age. Her belly full, she takes wing once more toward the distant silhouette of the chimneys stabbing into the sky from the squat concrete lump on the horizon—never noticing the larger shadow above her until it's too late. Her world lurches as a body slams into her, talons closing around her wing and neck, and then with a wrench and a pop her awareness dies and her form goes limp. The great eagle clutching the swallow's form beats her wings against the burden of her new meal—regaining altitude as the breeze stirs to renewed life, backing the lone cicada's song with the chorus of the pines. The eagle wheels a lazy circle back toward the dying light of the sun, soaring away from the forest and through dark and silent high-rise buildings, until she reaches the rusted Ferris wheel standing silent sentinel at the edge of the city. There, in the nest at its apex, two chicks stir, peeping in expectation of their next meal.