Talk:Through the Trees/@comment-3185460-20160210225242

So the guy moves to a rural area with his family and the kid gets lost in the woods never to be found again. Some time (several years?) later he learns about this folklore monster and becomes obsessed with it. That's probably the point where his wife left him.

Now completely alone, this mentally unstable man buries his grief and loneliness into researching the feathered bogeyman, until he can think of nothing else. In his mind it turns into a pagan god, something that's beautiful, powerful and awesome - a force of nature. Something that deserves his adoration. Something that deserved the life of his only son and much more.

He keeps on researching, learning, worshipping. At this point malnutrition and sleep deprivation have done their numbers on the man and he starts hallucinating. At first he sees the seed eater in nearby birds, then he hears its voice. And he knows what it wants because that's exactly what he wants - to end the loneliness, to share the pain.

The first steps were scary and he didn't know what to do afterwards. Murdering that innocent child was too much. Guilt paralysed him for weeks. Only another hallucination could kick him back to gear. His path was set, he had to continue killing. Continue the charade of an angry god demanding tribute to avoid facing his sin. That's when his conscience kicks in and for a moment he sees himself as the killer he is, before quickly shifting the blame back to the monster. But that was enough to turn his role within his own delusion. Now he has to fight the seed eater and that surely will end him just as much as the electric chair would if he admitted his own atrocities. But he gets to quit as a hero and that's what matters...

Yeah, sorry about his. I know "it was all a hallucination" is about as creative as "it was all a dream/coma", but I felt that the final few paragraphs implied my conclusions. I usually prefer straight explanations, but this narrator is clearly unreliable and quite deranged. The lack of internal consistency in how the S/E operates (takes narrator's kid/demands offerings, eats children for their youth/eats adults for their flesh, etc) makes it seem like the lore is made up or altered on the fly to support his delusion too.