Deer

 

“Time’s up, Victor.” The knight at the head of the group, Cassius, called out. His voice echoed from within his golden helmet, adorned with the silver antlers that marked the royal knights of Cervus. 

Before him, other royal knights had dragged two figures before him. They were both dressed in plain, common clothing, but nevertheless had the audacity to look the royal knight in the eyes of his visor.

Victor looked bruised and beaten, with a particularly nasty welt blooming on his cheek which adorned his olive skin like a corsage. His typically confident eyes were instead filled with uneasy panic, as they darted around to develop some sort of plan.

Next to him, Silvia appeared less bruised but certainly battered. The young woman had leaves stuck in her tawny hair, and practically snarled at anyone who got close.

“Did you believe you were simply going to kill me? With what; a good trap? A well placed arrow?” Cassius tisked, treating them like children who had been caught reaching into a cookie jar.

Victor instead directly his gaze towards the one figure who didn’t belong. The one warrior not dressed head to toe in gold, adorned with the mantle of the deer.

“You led the knights to us Cecilia?” He spoke with utter dismay in his voice, finally faced with a variable to his perfect plan he had not seen coming.

Cecilia looked down at him from Cassius’ side with a cold glare. Unlike the knights, her face was not blocked by a helmet. Her grey eyes twitched bitterly, and her words were spat like they carried poison.

“Cassius’ promised me the talisman. You had me play bodyguard. Of course I led them to you.”

Victor still didn’t seem to understand how it could be possible. “But you-?”

“But what?” She growled, getting right up to his face. “I heard what you told Silvia when you thought I slept. You demeaned me, insulted me. You thought to use me like a common thug, and you never planned to let me have the talisman.”

Victor’s face went white, and for once the man seemed to have nothing to say.

“And now the game is over,” Cassius commented, sounding almost bored. 

“You think he’ll give you it?!” Silvia yelled suddenly. “He’s just used you to get us!”

Cecilia frowned, turning to Cassius and holding out her gauntlet-covered hand. “I did as you wished. Your end of the bargain.”

“On this, the lowlander is correct.” Cassius didn’t even give Cecilia the dignity of facing her. “Consider it payment enough that I spare your life for your temporary treason. The talisman remains with me.”

Cecilia’s eyes narrowed, but felt the ever present numbers of knights around her. She simply stood still.

As if there was never any doubt that she would sit there and take the news as she did, Cassius continued speaking down at Victor and Silvia. 

“Now then, I would ask you about the information you got ahold of, but I doubt it will matter with you gone. Any final words, Victor?”

Instead of facing the knight, Victor locked eyes with Cecilia, who remained rooted to her spot.

“I thought about what I said afterwards, when you had disappeared. No matter what you’ve done in the past, it was fucked up to use you like I was. I’m sorry, Cecilia.”

She felt the words pierce her like a shard of ice, unable to break his eye contact. Cassius wouldn’t meet her gaze even to pretend she mattered in his calculus, and yet here was the man who had called her lonely, broken, wretched, and irredeemable, apologizing for those words with his final breath.

“Touching,” Cassius commented, raising his mace high.

Cecilia finally moved, placing herself between the royal knight and his prisoners. 

“If you want them dead,” she whispered, the sound carrying through the suddenly silent forest, “you’ll need to kill me first.”

Cassius formed the first sounds of a chuckle, before it was cut off by Cecilia lunging forwards with her twin falchions aimed right for his helmet visor.

“Run, now!” She roared as her blow was parried by a wide swing of his mace, battering her strike to the side.

Victor and Silvia did not hesitate to scramble to their feet, and begin to spring away behind her.

Cassius took a step back calmly. “I said I was going to let you live. But you threw that away, for what?”

She didn’t answer, bringing her blades back into a ready position.

“Three of you, go after the runaways. We’ll join you after the lady knight is gone.” Cassius’ face was still hidden, but she could feel his grin.

The silver antlers on his helmet crackled, and then a bolt of lightning impacted them like a lightning rod. His armor became covered in riled jolts of golden electricity, running across his mace as well.

“Behold; the fury of Cervus!” He roared, smashing his mace forwards.

His blow smashed into a tree as Cecilia ducked, sending bark flying like shrapnel from the weight of the hit.

She blocked a strike from another knight to her side, planting a blade into the ground to steady it as it took the impact. She quickly dove forwards, anticipating another strike from Cassius.

She needed space. In the dense trees, numbers could be rendered less of a hindrance with the choke points she could locate.

She pounced on one of the knights, moving her blades like twin arcs of fury. The knight staggered, but she had to pull her blades back to parry Cassius before she could press her advantage.

“You’re less impressive backed into a corner.” Cassius commented, still tinged with holy lightning. “You’ve finally found your place.”

“Backed into a corner by a herd of deer?” She barked out a laugh, pointing her blades forwards as she stepped back, creating space for herself. “No, you’ve forgotten your place. Beasts of prey ruling over a kingdom? You should’ve worshipped a better guardian.”

She dropped her blades, and they clattered to the ground unceremoniously. 

Cassius was momentarily caught off guard, and then he saw her eyes. Just like his would be, behind the helmet, hers were crackling with raw power. Not the gold of deer, but something else. Something red.

She lunged with a howl, and tore into one of the knights with her bare hands. Her nails slashed across the metal chestplate, carving a path to the body underneath.

Before she could finish the job, Cassius and another knight had surged in with their weapons raised. One of them missed, but Cassius landed a glancing blow on her side.

She flinched, the lightning behind his strike singeing her skin underneath the armor, but it did not stop her. She pushed through, and tore her way to the knight inside, cutting two deep chunks out of his skin before leaping up and hoisting herself into the trees.

“Fleeing?!” Cassius called into the leaves, but there was only silence. No rustling, no creaks. 

One of his knights was on the ground, trying to tend to the fallen knight. He turned to the other two, gesturing upwards. “Find her.”

Before either could respond, she had launched herself back down, and wrapped her arms tightly around the neck of a knight. With a savage grin, she squeezed her arms tightly, only taking a moment for them to begin pressing inwards. With a crunch, the screams were cut off, and she darted back into the trees.

Cassius whirled around wildly. “Get her down! Burn the trees!”

Without waiting for his men, he called upon the lightning once more to strike into the trees, with one massive barrage of power. With an earth-shattering crash, dozens of bolts smashed down to begin fires everywhere he could reach.

He panted, having exerted a massive portion of the guardian deer’s energy granted to him. His hand wildly clutched at the talisman around his neck, allowing the power to soothe his strain.

The knight on the ground suddenly screamed. Cassius and his remaining knight whipped around to see the knight which had been helping his first casualty lose his heart, as it was ripped from his sundered chest. Cecilia was gone in another blur of movement, leaving the warm organ to drop in the grass.

 “Isn’t this more like it?” Her voice came from the trees, and Cassius quickly replied by calling another lightning bolt on the location it came from.

“A couple of deer, anxiously watching the trees.” Her voice came from another direction, and he tried again in vain.

The knight to the side of Cassius bolted, beginning to run away. Cassius screamed at him to return to his side, but the man clearly feared one person in this forest more than him.

Then there was a yell, and a bonechilling snap. And just like that, Cassius was alone in the forest.

He glanced at the first man who was taken down, barely clinging to life, and then took off running. The powers coursing through his veins made him faster, more nimble. He could make it to better terrain.

And then, as he ran, she was there. 

Cecilia fell from a tree in front of him, landing on him as he barreled into the place she was falling. He tumbled, while she knelt on his back and carelessly brought her hands around the silver antlers on the top of his helmet. 

He fell forwards against the ground, his neck forced back as she began to pull on his antlers. He felt the force begin to dig, as the bottom of his helmet pressed desperately against his head.

Cassius braced, and summoned another strike of lightning to impact his antlers directly. Cecilia barely flinched, applying more and more strength.

Between Cassius’ body and the metal of his helmet, it was clear which one would be destroyed first.

There was a series of terrible crunches from within his body, before Cecilia fully ripped the head off of his head. The head itself remained within the helmet it occupied, though a small part of the upper spine hung from the bottom; the rest having broken within the body.

She tossed his head to the side, pushing his body over to rip the talisman from his corpse. It was a small cylinder of gold with antlers sticking off either side, glowing in the light of the forest fire.

She pushed it into her pocket, and looked north. Victor and Silvia were still out there, hopefully having escaped. She didn’t know where to go now, but it seemed in her interest to make friends. The best wolves hunt in packs, after all.

 

Prompt credit to createglue  

 

Mountain

 

Eli parked at the edge of the gravel lot where the trail began and sat for a long while with the engine off. The mountain rose ahead, green at the base and fading into clouds near the peak, exactly as it had when he was twelve and his father first dragged him up it. Nothing had changed. That was the problem.

He hadn’t been home in six years. The town looked smaller on the drive in: too many empty storefronts, too many people who stared just a second too long when he bought gas or coffee. Faces he half-recognized, older now, watching him like he was a trick of the light.

Roy was waiting by the signpost when Eli finally stepped out of the car.

“Didn’t think you’d show,” Roy said. His voice carried the same gravel as the path.

Eli gave a small nod. “Yeah. Me neither.”

Roy was shorter than he remembered, his shoulders stooped but solid. A ranger’s hat hung from his neck by a cord. The beard was grayer now, but his posture was the same; quiet, self-contained, as if the trees might overhear him.

They didn’t hug. They just started walking.

The trail wound through spruce and cedar, roots knuckling out of the dirt like veins. The air smelled of wet bark, sharp with sap. Mist clung to the undergrowth, and each breath drew cold into Eli’s lungs.

Roy kept a steady pace a few steps ahead, using a walking stick to test the ground before each incline. Eli followed, boots slipping slightly on the damp stone. The only sounds were their breathing and the rasp of gravel underfoot.

After a while, Roy asked, “You been keeping well?”

Eli nodded. “Yeah. Got a job in the city. Tech support stuff. Pays the bills.”

“That right.” Roy gave a slow nod. “Your dad never could figure out computers. Said they were just another excuse to avoid talkin’.”

Eli smiled faintly. “That sounds like him.”

It was strange, hearing the man mentioned out loud. Even the word father felt foreign in his mouth, like a title from someone else’s story. He’d come back because the lawyer said there were a few things left to settle: a small insurance payout, a storage unit, a request in the will for his ashes to be scattered “somewhere high.” That was all.

They reached the first clearing about forty minutes in. Sunlight broke through in a narrow column, glinting off a stream that crossed the trail. Roy stopped to drink from his canteen and offered it over.

“Your dad used to stop here every time, you know,” he said. “Pretend he was checking the map when really he just needed to catch his breath.”

Eli took a sip. “Yeah. He’d make me carry his water so he could say I was building character.”

Roy gave a low chuckle. “That he would.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward, exactly, just heavy. The kind with too much history to fit into words.

The trail narrowed as they climbed. Eli’s legs began to ache, but he said nothing. He focused on the sound of birds, the smell of pine, the thinning trees that revealed the valley below as a patchwork of rooftops and silver river.

Roy said, “You came up here a lot, when you were young.”

“Yeah. Every summer.”

“He used to brag about how fast you could make it to the ridge, you know.”

Eli shrugged. “Guess I had something to prove.”

Roy glanced over. “You still do?”

Eli didn’t answer.

He hadn’t known what he was hoping to find here. Closure sounded too clean. He’d told himself it was about respect for the ashes, for the past. But that wasn’t it. He wanted to see if the world still recognized him after everything had changed.

They stopped near the halfway point; a flat ridge overlooking a ravine. The trees opened to reveal distant peaks, still dusted with late snow. Eli sat on a boulder and pulled out a thermos. Roy joined him, lowering himself with a grunt.

“Your dad brought me up here once,” Roy said after a while. “After your mother passed. Didn’t say a word the whole way. Just hiked till sunset, then sat right there, same as you.”

Eli nodded. “He wasn’t big on words.”

“No. But on the other trips he kept talking about you, you know. Every damn trip. Didn’t know how to… say things right, I guess.”

Eli’s grip tightened on the thermos. “He didn’t try much either.”

Roy didn’t flinch. “Maybe not. Some of us get stuck in what we know. Doesn’t mean we don’t care.”

Eli stared down at the dirt. “He called me his daughter in the obituary.”

“Yeah.” Roy sighed. “That wasn’t right of him. But he wasn’t used to changing what was written down, you know.”

“That’s a lame excuse.” He shot back coolly.

Roy nodded, “Of course it is. Maybe he’d have a different one.”

The wind picked up, carrying the smell of rain. For a while neither spoke. The silence felt less sharp this time, more like air after a storm.

Finally, Roy stood. “Come on. We’ve got another mile. He’d hate to think we quit halfway.”

Eli huffed a laugh and followed.

The final stretch was steep, the path turning to loose rock. His calves burned. He remembered hiking this same route at fourteen, trying to match his father’s pace, pretending not to cry when he slipped on the shale. He remembered his father’s hand reaching down; not gentle, but firm. Up you get.

When they crested the last rise, the summit opened in a wide bowl of grass and stone. The view wasn’t grand, not like postcards, just rolling hills fading into haze, the sound of wind moving through scrub.

Roy took off his hat and held it against his chest. “Didn’t think I’d see this again.”

“Why not?” Eli frowned.

“Didn’t feel right, hiking the trail alone.”

Eli unslung his pack. Inside was a small tin, light as a memory. He opened it, and the ashes stirred faintly in the breeze.

He knelt, letting them fall through his fingers. The wind carried some over the valley. The rest settled among the rocks.

Roy stood behind him, silent.

After a moment, Eli said, “He always said he could see everything that meant something from up here, you know. Guess this’ll have to do.”

Roy nodded. “He’d have liked this.”

Eli closed the tin. “He ever tell you why he liked this place so much?”

“Because it made him feel small,” Roy said. “Said it was good for him.”

Eli smiled, and it was a real one this time. “That’s the most him thing I’ve ever heard.”

They stood there a while longer. The clouds broke apart, sunlight sliding across the slopes like slow gold. Far below, a hawk circled, catching the thermals.

Roy said quietly, “He’d be proud of you, you know.”

Eli didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The words sat between them, soft and true, asking for nothing.

On the way down, Roy took the lead again. The light through the trees had shifted, afternoon gold softening into gray. Eli felt lighter somehow, though his legs ached.

They didn’t talk much. At the final turn before the trailhead, Roy slowed. “You staying long?”

“Couple days. Gotta finish the paperwork. Then I’ll head back.”

Roy nodded. “If you need anything, my place is two houses past the diner. Still got the same mutt barking out front. Your dad never got along with him, you know.”

“Thanks.”

He hesitated, then added, “You don’t have to keep saying ‘you know.’ I know.”

Roy smiled, lines deepening at his eyes. “All right then, Eli.”

The sound of his name spoken plain, no question mark, no pause, landed heavier than the ashes had.

Eli swallowed. “Thanks for coming up with me.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it,” Roy said. “Trail’s better with company.”

They reached the lot. The sky had gone pale gold, the first chill of evening setting in. Eli looked back once. The mountain loomed the same as always; unmoved, but not indifferent.

He thought of the years it took for trees to bend toward the sun, the way stone held the warmth of a vanished day. Maybe change didn’t need to be loud. Maybe it could be as quiet as breath.

He turned back to the car.

“See you around, kid,” Roy said.

Eli smiled. “Yeah. You know it.”

He got in, started the engine, and drove down the winding road, the mountain shrinking in the mirror until it was just another line on the horizon, steady and waiting.

 

Prompt credit to createglue  

 

Crown

 

The first time I saw the crown, it was under the wrong kind of light.

It shimmered faintly where flesh met metal, just behind Lio’s ear, like a row of silvered hair vanishing into skin. The halo they produced was subtle, almost like heat distortion, and every time he moved, it caught the air the way an open wound might: a softness that shouldn’t exist.

We were sitting at a dive café under the violet glow of the city’s lower tier, the place where biotech leaks into the streets. The kind of spot where you could buy an organ and a sandwich with the same card.

I was trying not to stare.

“You’re an engineer, right?” Lio said, tipping his head toward me. “You keep looking like you want to dissect me.”

I laughed, a little too quickly. “Force of habit.”

“Don’t worry.” He smiled, and the halo pulsed faintly like it could hear him. “I like the attention.”

I worked in neurotech design interface safety and bioethics, the polite term for making sure people’s luxury augmentations didn’t melt their brains. Crowns had become the new obsession: organic neural enhancements shaped like decorative halos. They started as performance art; a sort of biotech couture, living jewelry, but quickly became the kind of thing venture capital called transformative.

The models I knew were legal. Government-cleared. Mostly cosmetic, with mild sensory expansion.

Lio’s wasn’t one of those.

He was beautiful in that accidental way some people are: too fragile-looking to belong to the city, and too sharp to survive anywhere else. He played in a noise band that never played the same set twice, lived three floors above a club that didn’t close, and swore he didn’t believe in sleep.

We met because he wanted me to fix his implant.

 We kept seeing each other because I didn’t.

The more time we spent together, the more the crown changed. It started growing down the back of his neck, more hair-thin, glinting threads that disappeared into his skin. Sometimes, when we were lying in bed and he fell asleep, I could feel it hum faintly against my chest.

At first, I thought it was resonance: a process of the device syncing to ambient electromagnetic fields. But it wasn’t that. It responded to touch, to breath, to speech.

Once, I whispered his name against his shoulder, and the halo brightened, threads contracting like muscle. Lio half-woke, smiled without opening his eyes, and said, “It’s listening.”

I should have walked away then. 

Instead, I kissed him.

In the morning, the crown had grown.

A new loop had appeared. It was fine, bone-white, like enamel just above his temple. When I touched it, it was warm.

He flinched. “Don’t,” he said softly. “It’s sore.”

“I can take a sample. Check if it’s fusing too deep.”

He turned away. “No doctors.”

“I’m not a doctor.”

“That’s worse.” He laughed quietly, then reached for my hand. His fingers trembled. “You’ll look at me like a problem to solve. I don’t want that.”

He was right. That was exactly how I looked at him.

Days blurred. Nights became experiments in tenderness and control. I learned the crown’s rhythms, the moments when it hummed and when it quieted. It seemed to respond to emotion: fear, arousal, pain. If he was agitated, it flared with color I couldn’t explain. When we made love, it glowed so faintly I could see the outlines of its veins through the skin.

Once, I tried recording it. The footage showed nothing. Only a static ring, shimmering and gone.

I ran tests in secret: spectral scans, EM fields, microcurrent readings. Every dataset contradicted the last. Organic but not biological. Reactive but not mechanical.

When I told him, he just smiled. “You don’t have to understand it to love me.”

But I did. Understanding was the only way I knew how to love.

The first real change happened a week later.

We were out walking through the underpass markets, where synthetic rain dripped from the ceiling and vendors sold pirated prosthetics out of crates. Lio paused by a stall displaying unauthorized neuralware. I caught a flicker in his halo; a subtle shift, like the shape of it had twitched.

The merchant looked up and froze.

“That’s not factory,” she said.

Lio smiled, but there was a tremor in it. “Just an early model.”

“No.” The woman stepped back. “That’s evolving.”

Her tone made my stomach tighten.

That night, I asked him what she meant.

He said nothing for a long time, then whispered, “I didn’t buy it.”

“Then where—?”

“I grew it.”

He said it simply, like he was confessing the weather.

He told me about a night months before we met. It was an afterparty, a biotech performance group that injected stem-sequence cocktails as art. 

“They said it would make me perceive connection differently,” he said. “I thought it was just drugs.”

But then, days later, he felt something under his scalp, like a heartbeat.

“It wasn’t infection,” he said. “It was invitation.”

He looked up at me, eyes wide, crown pulsing faintly in rhythm with his words. “And when I let it in, it stopped hurting.”

After that, everything accelerated.

He began finishing my sentences, anticipating touches before I made them. He’d wake up from dreams and speak words I hadn’t said aloud.

Once, while I was working late, he texted: You’re thinking about leaving.

 I froze at my desk.

I hadn’t said it. But I had thought it, for half a second, after another fruitless scan, another blank result.

I didn’t reply.

When I got home, the lights were off. He was sitting in bed, halo dim. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “It gets confused. I get confused.”

“Between what?”

“Between where I end and it begins.”

He reached for my hand, guided it to his temple. “Can you tell the difference?”

I couldn’t.

In the days that followed, I began hearing faint static when he was near. Not sound, exactly, but a shimmer in the air. The crown had grown again, pale ridges curving behind his skull like fossilized coral.

He spoke less. Sometimes, not at all. But when he did, his words felt shared, like someone else had whispered them first.

The last night we were together, he said, “It’s hungry.”

“For what?”

“For attention. For company.” He smiled weakly. “It wants to connect.”

His voice broke. “It’s lonely, I think.”

Then he looked at me and for the first time, I couldn’t tell whether it was him looking.

I tried to sleep, but the apartment was alive with the faint hum of the crown’s frequency. Every wall seemed to pulse with it.

At dawn, I woke to find him standing by the window, back turned, halo glowing faintly gold. The filaments had spread across his shoulders, a delicate network like veins beneath the skin.

He turned toward me slowly.

“It found others,” he said. “All night. Through signal, through dream.”

“Lio—”

“It says I don’t have to be alone anymore.”

The words were too calm, too perfect. His lips didn’t match them exactly.

Then the halo pulsed once, hard, and he flinched.

For a heartbeat, I saw the filaments beneath his skin shift, like something breathing in reverse.

He whispered, “I think it loves you.”

Then he smiled, and the smile was wrong.

By the time the medics arrived, he was gone. Not dead, but empty. The crown was inert again, colorless. They kept him in containment for observation, and I was told to stay away.

I obeyed for almost a week.

Then I went to him again.

The lab lights made him look pale and unreal. Tubes everywhere. Electrodes mapping signals that didn’t match any known brain pattern. The crown was still visible, dull ivory now, no longer glowing.

He didn’t move when I entered.

I sat beside him, took his hand. It was warm.

“I should’ve stopped it sooner,” I whispered. “I thought I could understand it.”

His fingers twitched.

The monitor blipped. It was faint, then stronger.

Then, in a voice that wasn’t quite his, he said softly, “You still can.”

The crown lit faintly, threads trembling.

I felt something bloom behind my own eyes. There was suddenly a static ache, a whisper I couldn’t decipher.

When I reached up, my temple hurt.

It’s been three weeks.

They say Lio is stable, though he doesn’t wake.

I keep working. I tell myself it’s research. I don’t tell anyone about the dreams; the ones where I hear him humming behind my skull, where I see threads of silver in the mirror when I comb my hair.

Sometimes, late at night, I feel warmth at the edge of my scalp. A pulse, gentle, like a heartbeat not my own.

It feels like someone touching me from the inside, softly saying I miss you.

And though I know I should be afraid, I touch the spot and whisper back,

“I miss you too.”

 

Prompt credit to createglue