Update #3, 10/30/11 (or so): It was a chance meaning



and yet, perhaps no meeting is chance. The unnamed stag and the stag who eluded his full name – they met escaping Halloween celebration that neither could stand. The coming of fog behind them, they sat and spoke.

They spoke of illnesses, and the stag feels his own weariness, the decay of the recent past. But also the own confusion, the exhaustion of his mind.
‘I find you to be quite lucky,’ Bartleby, the stranger, said. And he simply could not see it. But as he thought of that, the unnamed stag could only keep thinking about illness. About how he ran in the forest like an enrage boar, like a monster in the brush.

“I'm...I'm better now. Much better. But the damage is still done... The da..."

He stops as the idea firework-explodes into his mind, revealing itself in a blast.
Because someone, someone, had hurt him. Somewhen, a high and ladylike laughter, ringing in his ears. Something dropping him, slashing across his middle. Some pain in his heart.
And all the while, the roaring and the laughter, flush in his ears, buckling his mind beneath it.

"...Something...Someone hurt me, like a knife in the seat of my soul. And then all there was was hurting."

He didn’t know what it meant, but it was so. That laugh, that drop, had done something to him. Whatever it was.


Update #2, 10/2/11 (Later): A Drink Refreshed Him

At least, it refreshed him enough to let him see straight. He bathed in the pond of the forest, diffusing the exhaustion into the water. How long had he been away? When had he been here last?
A stranger, who didn't linger long after, helped him get his antlers cleaned and white as bone. Stranger. Ha. It occured to the deer with no name that the stag could have been his best friend, and he wouldn't have known.

A doe backed away from him, a stag came and challenged him. He didn't intend to scare the doe -- only to drink. He didn't want anything else. And yet, when it looked to him like the doe was backing away from her defender...Why did it posess him, unthinkingly, to try and block the other stag's path to her? Why did he do that, foolishly and without realizing until it was done?
...
...Somehow, looking at the stag, clad in red and a great ivory skull, who taunted and bore his antlers, who made the unnamed deer quake in his confusion and exhaustion... Somehow, those motions, those colors, set his mind electric.

It jumped at him: the image, repeated in his skull, of the red pelt, its wave like the motion of a flag in the wind. More intimate than his own haggard skin. Picking it out, because it seemed like all the things he wanted to be.
What were those things? The moment he felt he knew, it turned away.

"Yes... Yes...I definately wore something like that, once...Once, I looked something like that..."

He muttered. Later, having helped the unnamed deer, the stag would not finish the fight he started. He didn't really want to fight. And somehow, the unknown deer felt the worse for it.

He went on, he used his energy to run with a stranger, and to rest beside that other stag -- his name dripping slowly out of the sievelike mind of the Unknown Stag -- in the water, a moment longer... Words again escaped his cracked lips.

"Who was he.... The deer in the pelt like a great red banner?"

He did not know if he meant the stag he had met and almost fought, his heart leaping like a jackrabbit, or if he meant the stag even stanger to him: the stag looking up at him in the water.

"What had happened to him?"


Update #1, 10/2/11: He was a deer without a name.


No, that wasn't strictly true as-such. He had a name. The deer, laying in the mud, felt certain of it.
His name 'existed.'

But what was it? What was he doing there, in this place? He had been there a long time: his body was coated in sweat and mud. There was no sign of care on him, his great antlers dulled with heavy use and poor tending. Bits of tree and bark, tattered shards of old fur and flesh, hung from them like garlands. He reeked of blood.

And he didn't know whose.

"...Where...am I?....Why... Don't I remember...


Anything?"

The word sank in. It was true. There was nothing...Nothing except a point of light in the darkness of his mind: A forest. Somewhere, far away, was a forest. It was the only place in his mind: everything else was black blood and tatters.

It would have to be home, until he remembered himself. He had to remember himself, and whatever had done this to him. That was his troth.