The world was alight with smokeless flame. The beautiful emerald pigment had bled from the landscape. Only the bright gold and blood red of fire remained, accented with the hue of copper and a sky made of cold blue steel. The rut had seemed, like every year, to spark the flame that fueled the death of the landscape, each labored breath of the warriors fanning the blaze. The canopy fell more every day, crackling as it hit the earth... a thousand falling ashes to signal the death of summer. As if the smell of smoke hung low in the air as warning, animals skittered among these fallen emblems in search of provisions to sustain them, fearful for the promise that lay in every single fallen flag.

Autumn was a promise of terrifying beauty ahead. Winter: when the world would be blanketed in ice that glittered like diamonds, and rubies would become a visible sign of death on the ground that no murderer but the season herself could hide. There would be no food unless one stole from spring, digging deep beneath the blanket that hid the incubating season of plenty and pilfering the buddings of what could have been a lush feast a quarter year away. Or, one could simply strip the coats from the trees, killing them in the same way a predator would tear free the skin of his prey, exposing it to the icy cold. In winter, though, carelessness was the only way to get by. None could ignore the need for survival.

Carelessness has for millenia been regarded as a terribly negative feeling. Everyone ignored the gentler side of the term as if it were a blade with no master.

Quietly, a living creature moved among the ever-aflame world that the birch forest symbolized. No chroma of this world singed him, for he was already browned from something greater than the sun's heat. From touching the ravaging fires of fall, his tips were blackened; Horn and hoof. And yet, beneath a protective layer of polished wood and color, incubating purity remained preserved on his white-dominated face.