If winter had been blackness, then spring had been twilight: a grey, dusky void with the mere suggestion of shapes looming in the dark. The change had been so gradual that at first Hasan had not noticed it, and had continued moping as he'd done all winter, quietly grieving the loss of his sight with all the bleak stoicism of the naked trees around him. But then, one day, the shadow of a bough had passed over his peripheral vision and he'd jolted forward like someone had lit a firecracker beneath him. It was only after he'd crashed head-first into the creaking embrace of an evergreen that he'd realized: he had seen something.

Hasan's hopes had, from then on, grown unchecked, and he had waited expectantly, as the sweet fragrance of spring blossoms was swallowed by the earthy heat of summer, for the dark shadows to clear into crisp reality. More often he'd crept from the depths of his hiding places to lay in the sun, to smell the sea air, or to listen to the distant laughter of the herd's children. Would warmth coalesce into light? Would salt materialize into roiling silver-blue? Surely, surely, a sing-song giggle would brighten into a dazzling smile?

No, they would not.

Hasan's hopes lay scattered across the Forest floor now, crunching beneath his hooves with the autumn leaves. He knew he should be grateful for any improvement; after all, last winter he had been unable to open his eyes at all for weeks, and now he could navigate the twists and turns of the Forest with little to no aid. There was a strange kind of beauty in this forever-twilight world, too, with its soft grey shapes swirling like rain-laden clouds, guiding him like gentle breath on his skin. Yet still he was choked by grief. He was not old, but neither was he young anymore. This fathomless purgatory could not be all that life had left for him.

One day, atop a hill deep in the Forest with sun dappled across his back, Hasan pawed at the leaf litter, unearthing summer growth that had withered in the dank and dark of its crisp blanket. He pulled up a tuft of spindly grass, one that most certainly was a shade of sickly yellow this late in the season, with several frosts having passed already. Yellow. Yellow grass. He furrowed his brow, but though the memory of the image remained, the image itself sparked and then fizzled out like a fish slipping away into deeper water.

Hasan blew heavily from his nostrils and let the tuft fall unsampled from his lips.