Blackfeather Woods each night reunites me with the feral tenderness of my own evil

Soon the trees aren't populated by leaves at all, but with those shadows, those feathers. He stares up at the trees and watches the transformation but really, isn't perceptive enough to see it. One moment there are so many sharp-edged leaves; the next they are soft, silent things. Fluttering between one another and falling from the boughs overhead.
As they fall, some feathers become more — they seem to take flight of their own volition. Mou doesn't realize he's watching a host of crows moving between trees. Maybe he is, maybe that's also a fabrication, he has no way of knowing as the mushroom is absorbed by his system. The most important detail is something he entirely misses, though. Some feathers fall and fly off, others fall and keep falling - but as they do so, the blackness peels away from them, exposing the many shades of autumn. No, not just autumn --- he can't make it out. The feathers aren't black but shades of red, and as he watches one in particular land before him on the soil, he wants to say he understands but he honestly doesn't. The feather isn't a crow's or a raven's, and brings to his mind an image of a hawk —

Mou begins to think of the hawk in his vision; the bird burned black by shadow. The trees shake and dance and he's overwhelmed, suddenly, by the falling feathers. Mou begins to snap at the air as if to catch them but there's nothing there. He murmurs a sad and airy noise meant to be a growl but it comes out a wheeze, and then he springs away from one row of trees and then another, thinking they're coming alive and reaching for him. The boy is overwhelmed by avian imagery and can't understand any of it - nor can he fathom why his companion isn't reacting to the encroaching darkness. Does he not see it? Does he not feel the pressure of being buried beneath it?