Chapter Text
Heavy breaths.
Rustling of young oak trees and ground ivy.
A form emerged at a run, their blonde hooved feet stamping into the damp earth beneath. A piece of a fallen branch lurched up as their hoof slammed down on it, but they did not seem to care. They continued forward, their mouth agape as they hurried along at a run. Although the forest surrounding them casted the area in a soft shade, their white fur from their hips down was striking. An eyesore. They stood out amongst the green and brown they ran past.
The faun, a young stag, didn’t pause to see where they were going. They didn’t even take a moment to breath . Their chest, ivory in complexion and lacking mark nor fur, glistened as sweat pooled, and it heaved as they struggled to breath as they ran. Along their shoulders was more white fur, though along the back was a brown patch that extended halfway down their back. Their legs, similar to the back half of an elk, was streaked with green from plants that mashed against them. Their white fur that had spots of brown was an absolute mess. Something that should be cleaned.
Still, they did not dare pause to do so.
Scrambling over a fallen tree, they pulled the woven basket closer to their chest. A basket that certainly had
something
in it, though that was none of their worries right now. Their human-like face, with long blond wispy locks that were puffed out from the tussle of the wind that whipped by as they ran, was contorted from the grimace. Their eyes were wide, and teeth were exposed as they sucked in breaths past the pearly whites. Jutting out on the side of their head was two long deer-like ears, white with small brown specks dotting them. It was pinned against their skull, as though to keep the leaves from entering their ear canal and whispering whatever secrets the trees had to offer. They need not do that, though, for the stag could already hear them.
‘
Run, Soren
,’ he would have sworn the leaves whispered to him. ‘
They are not too far behind.
Run
’.
And why would the stag say no to such a warning? He knew he needed to run. To get away. To get to safety where he knew no one would touch him, see him,
eat him
. They traversed the land as though they were a rock falling in a landslide. Quick, without care for what was in its path. He shoved a few smaller trees out of his way with a free arm, to clear a path to more easily move without slowing down. Of course, the trees bit him back, and left red welts on his arms and body, but he did not seem to care.
“He went that way!” a voice called behind, causing a low whine to escape the stag like those words were arrows penetrating into his back. Fur bristling and tail raised, he tucked his arms closer to his body and veered off to follow along a deer path. Deers always knew how to get out of the woods safely, or so he believed. In reality, his mind was so jumbled that it didn’t care what its body was doing as long as it was going away from the threat behind him.
Although his body was running on autopilot with the adrenaline coursing through it, the stag’s mind was rushing a mile a second to comprehend what went wrong . He had been sitting down on a rock off a weathered path, jotting down notes in his journal- or what he often called the Keeper of Words . Having just seen a fascinating sight of a cluster of birds he had never seen before, he sketched it out. He made sure to draw with his quill and squid ink the detailing of the feathers, and most of all the red dot on its forehead. Wishing to ensure he remembered what color it was, he pulled out some flowers from his basket that he stashed away for dying purposes to color the bird in.
He thought it was a perfect topic to talk about with his herd quite a distance away from him. He could tell them all about how these red polled birds clustered in the reeds and whistled and bantered like a gaggle of gossiping does. And before he sat down and drew, how friendly they were when they took some grain he saved for himself out of his basket and offered it to them. They were, and still are, a lovely creature. Far better than the odd white puffs of anger that resided in the snow of the north.
At the time, he was slow and careful to get the details right. He was focused on the task, so focused in fact that he didn’t hear the rustling behind him growing ever so close. It wasn’t until he heard a call, a cry of a doe, close to the tune of his own kind that his head rose from where he was sitting to look that way. He remembered tucking his book away, and determining whether or not to go and help or stay out of it. At worst, it could be a doe in need. At best, it could be a doe in *that* sort of need. He didn’t quite know which was worse.
He equally remembered standing up and turning his body that way as well. And when he stood and looked, really looked , he saw them . At first his mind thought it was another stag, hiding away in the brush behind a tree. But soon it caught up on the little details. How the long deer-like ears his kind had was short and fleshy. How they lacked antlers or growth of any sort on their head. Most of all was their *clothes*. Not fur, but something orange and reflective. It hit him like a lightning bolt when he saw those colors.
A human, his mind supplied.
A human with a hat on their head was watching him from afar, with something tucked beneath their arm. He couldn’t see what it was, but honestly he didn’t care. His tail had raised, his muscles grew taunt, and his breath rushed into his lungs in one quick gasp.
For a time, they stood there, staring at one another. His blues against their hazels, as time stilled around them. Even the birds not too far away that he had been admiring stopped their singing. All stopped, frozen like the wastelands he traveled to in an effort to see what the world has to offer.
Worse of all in the encounter was one single action. A smile formed on the human’s lips. A smile that made the stag’s blood run cold.
His mind played that smile over and over again. He couldn’t remember if they said anything. Their mouth certainly opened like it was going to, but he grabbed his bag off the boulder and ran deeper in the forest before he could register it. In all honesty, he didn’t want to know. If it was human, beast, anything, he would rather not know and be left alone to sketch and ogle at the wonderful world around him. Alas, he could not. The Gods above had other plans for him, though he felt confident it was the work of Dimitrie . The God of trickery was quite good at bringing danger to his herd, and bringing disease, famine, and god forbid the creatures of the night that stalk them.
Flipping his head to the side to avoid a low hanging branch getting tangled in his rack, he spotted the light at the end of the forest. Ears rising, he leaped towards it, hope in his chest to be away from the eyes of man. Soren erupted out of the forest into a clearing of wildflowers. He stumbled forth a fair distance as he slowed himself down, before he ultimately stopped and heaved a heavy breath. Whipping their head back behind them, his white ears with specks of brown raised as he stared at the forest behind him, waiting , anticipating .
Bang !
A guttural scream escaped him as he turned back forward and scrambled all over again. Pain blossomed at his shoulder, near the meadow instead of towards the forest where he knew humans lurked. Having turned to the meadow, his mind told him to continue on, to get to the other forest to be safe. What he did not realize was that danger lurked in the meadow just as much as the forest behind him. His tail rose flush against his back as he ran a distance towards a figure. It took his mind a few seconds to realize what he was rushing to, but by then he had to choose whether to plow them over or chance being grabbed.
Plowing them over sounded good to him.
Lowering his antlers, he ran into the human before him, one wearing gear that blended in with the surroundings from head to toe. His antlers rammed into the man, knocking them and the gun they held down to the ground. Soren stomped over them, nearly falling with them, but righted himself in time by sacrificing his bag to them. He would have sworn a noise came from the human, but he wasn’t paying attention enough to care. Instead, he carried on his way, his chest burning all over again, as his eyes fixated on going to the stretch of woods on the other side of the large meadow. If he can just get there, he might be able to avoid them all.
Tipping his ears back, he took a deep breath in and used every bit of his energy and adrenaline to get one last spurt , to reach the location his heart desired before the humans reached him first. Having heard rustling behind him, he needed to get there. He needed to get away, to survive.
But oddly enough, his body had other plans. By the halfway point, the trees started to turn on its side. His head, body, and mind began to feel lighter. Was his lungs and mind craving a fresh breath? Maybe it did. He took several quick breaths, but the effects he felt were not subsiding. The world continued to tilt, to a dangerous degree his mind supplied, and he attempted to compensate.
Fixing his posture was not the move to do, he came to find. Leaning to the side as he ran, he stumbled over his hooves, and crashed into the ground with a heavy ‘thump’. A huff escaped him as the air was knocked out of him, followed by a gasp as he tried to gain what was ripped out of him back. His arms moved to press beneath him, followed by his legs, but all he succeeded in doing was rolling onto his side and flailing as his body became heavier far too quickly.
‘This is it’ he thought to himself. ‘I’ll never get to see the stags of the north. I’ll never get to see the does from the south. The sea gliding muntjacs, the cave dwelling caribou, none. I’m dying, I’m dying’
As his panic began to dampen as he tried to accept his fate, his mind drifted to other matters. Home . He wanted to go home, even if it was the last time. To tell his father he loved him, to hug and kiss his mother one last time, to hold his two younger brothers and toss them in the air, and see his older sister’s upcoming fawn. He had so much he wished to see, but the world was growing darker and darker. His fate, something he never would have expected after following the same path time and time again after all these years, was sealed to become something he had nightmares about. Something that the Gods and the village elders warned him of time and time again.
Before he succumbed to cold hands of darkness clouding his vision, he heard his own voice whisper in his mind.
‘Please, let it be painless.’