The iconic image is a quiet, peaceful awakening of the woods, of the animals, of the pink-orange-yellow streaks creeping quietly, serenely across the grey sky. The ideal is that dawn slowly slinks into the world, despite the phrase, the name, of “breaking.” But not today. instead, today dawn does not just break. It invades. It attacks. It imposes itself upon existence. It rips a gash through the silence of the night and renders the world into two, before and after its existence. Before, quiet, peace, tranquility as the animals retain their rest, as the flowers and the bees and the blossoms on the peach tree await the sprinkling of the dew to wet them with fairy-soft kisses. After, a cacophony of noise, of existence, as the flames of gold and firehot fingers of light burn their way across the morning sky. They flee the sun, screaming harbingers of the heat, the brilliant white light that comes with the sun. They flee its destructive power; they advance across the expanse of cloudless vision like frightened, terrified children fearing poltergeists inside an abandoned farmhouse. They light flees the sun. So, too, do the animals wake, not calmly and peacefully and serenely, but instead with emotions unfelt before, with desires for nothing more than self-preservation, a terror emanating from inside them at the preposterous proposition that this coming tsunami of light brings not peace but destruction, the sword, pain, torture, even death, for those who are not swift of paw enough to outrun its terrible reach. The squirrels, the raccoons, the chipmunks and deer, the bears and badgers feel this intensity, this fear, this longing, and they follow its path, follow the herds of their fellow beasts, follow or run ahead of the advancing, impending, looming uncertainty, undesirability, unknown imposing THING reaching for them out of the darkness, riding on the advancing waves of light, riding the path of destruction from the cold east to the colder west, dragging behind the dawn not truth and serenity, but heartache, pain, emptiness; a void that has no end; a need, a yearning that cannot be filled. A want, an emptiness, a thing which has no other complement to fill it, a feeling that there will, not only now, but never, never for all time, never while the sun burns and then burns out, never while the planets spin then slow down then stop, never while the galaxies drift closer together then further apart, succumbing to the heat death of the universe, the multiverse, the infinite res, never even then shall this missingness be considered filled, never shall there be completion, wholeness, perfection, again, and it is this intimidating, overwhelming, unrelenting gape that yawns in front of the eyes of such poor creatures, scaring, frightening, terrorizing them from stillness to action. it is this they flee, and for good reason, because when the Void catches them, as it inevitably will, when it reaches their back paw and then hips and then chest and then shoulders and then heads, it sucks them in, it pulls them closer and subsumed them into itself, unmaking them, unmaking them in its own image, unmaking themselves from thing into No-thing, and while being No-thing will not hurt, will not be anything at all, while no-thing-ness shall not really be anything, they still fear; they fear the unknown. They fear the change. They fear the void, and they flee, and thus they announce the Dawn.