[=9]Golden hooves. The color of value, purpose...so dainty and worthy compared to the vast portion of soggy soil on which they trod. Yet again, the little doe (if one could use such terms on a creature of more bird than deer) found herself wandering alone. It was habitual now for her, to revert to something like the nomad she once was. Perhaps she was turning into her mother, who, in the setting suns of her life, looked upon Rowan with such foreign eyes. A lost old creature, bound by chains that which only she imagined.
Rowan had come from a family of nomads; aimless wanderers. Though she was not an old doe, she was not the young hapless hind she once was. She found her mind wandering more frequently, her lips moving in speech only to herself, and her legs not settling in the dust for hours on end. It was if she had lost something. It was known information that her little child had been stillborn; she frequently heard of it again and again in stinging whispers and pitiful stares. She was not looking for it directly, perhaps not even at all. Even the feathered little creature herself knew not why she wandered. Whatever she had lost, she seemed apt to wander with no purpose in hopes of recovering it.
What she found the eve after the rainstorm was not what she was looking for. Strangely, she had been holding a pleasant conversation with herself when she came across it. Oh, how it plagued her nightmares as a youngling. Even after her death, his strench would be bound to her skin. And she knew it. She was used property; damaged. As if on instinct, her virtually nonexistant left ear flicked at his arrival. This loss of ear was one of his many gifts to her.
The beastly stag hauled the nightshade behind him. He devoured the sunrays around the doe, and comanded the sun take her leave. Some things even the great mother of Earth must not witness.
