Despair has a conversation with a red giant star named Rao about the creation of life on an unstable world and the possibility of a lone survivor to continually mourn the destruction of that world: this is an allusion to the history of Superman, in that Rao is the red giant sun around which Superman's homeworld of Krypton orbited, as well as the Kryptonian God. (The colors of the stars in the story follow the DC Universe's standards, not the actual star life cycle.) The story is narrated by the Sun (here identified by his Latin name of Sol) to the Earth before the evolution there of life. Elements of "Brief Lives" appear as well: the statement that the palace and its chambers will dissolve into light shows that "matter and light are interchangeable" (one of the reasons that Destruction abandoned his realm and responsibilities); Destruction also plays a "creator" role (elsewhere, he suggests that he and his siblings are both themselves and their polar opposites); Desire provokes distrust and hatred in Dream's heart; Death is declared inevitable (a reference to "The Illusion Of Permanence" in "Brief Lives"); and Delight's speech has already begun to resemble that of Delirium. In both "The Heart Of A Star" and "Brief Lives", characters comment on Destiny's blindness and, in both stories, it is shown that there are questions Destiny cannot answer (in the former, he asks Killalla if she loves Dream and, in the latter, he is unable to tell why Delight changed to Delirium). Chapter 4: Despair - Fifteen Portraits of Despair Art by Barron Storey, designed by Dave McKean This collection of fifteen very short vignettes illustrates different aspects of Despair, either the character herself, the emotion in abstract, or people in a state of despair. One is about an unemployed man who's feeding cats, only to have them end up eating each other to survive when he goes on an extended leave for work. Another is about a priest who's being forcibly defrocked due to a molestation scandal, despite the fact that he can prove the allegations false. A third is about a woman who, after committing suicide to escape her pain, sits on the side of the road waiting for the happiness to begin. In the Introduction, Neil Gaiman states that he had originally planned to write twenty-five "Portraits of Despair", but said "I think, on reflection, that it