We join our young prodigal on the eve of her womanhood, but instead of attending the ceremony to commemorate her coming of age with the others, she is afraid, and slips away from her village in the night.

Inexperienced, the forbidden jungle beyond her village fills her with wonder and she fearlessly sets out across it to explore its every inch. However in her naivety, she is careless, and becomes lost in its depths in the dead of night with no shelter.

Here, the beasts of the dark wander, unheeded by sunlight when the world is bathed in shadow. She is cold. As she shivers and inches closer to death, a specter enters her vision, before materializing into a denizen of nightmares, a hungry... "jaguar", they call them, but to her it is little more than frigid and agonizing fear. Somehow, survival kicks in and she moves with purpose, first slow as it circles; her goal a tiny crevice below a slipshod heap of boulders. She does not take her eyes from her enemy's, even as she stops, steels herself, and does what she must.

She survives that night, and many of the next, now allowed to see the wonders of the world outside the order of humanity with the caution of the steel-tempered will. By her sheer desire she keeps on, and lives long into her old age, her withered eyes keeping careful watch from beneath the canopy. A sentinel stands where the prodigal dies.