Be it bird or man; hound or mistress, know this - you are tied to everything. The land is your life, the birds your blood. All that walks is one.

Iyan had always been kind to animals. Through a kindred sense of being unable to perform much in the world (be it through song, dance, music, or any other valued methods of art), he had always found the natural simplicity of small critters to be comforting. The most notable exception of this being, of course, the spider. Supposing through superstitious means that this small beast of silken strings despised those who couldn't render their homes as elegantly as theirs, Iyan had never been surprised to be the subject of a nasty bite by way of one.

Aunt Myra admired rabbits the most, and often maintained a hutch of the large-eared prey in the back of the cabin, where the forest was easily accessed. Having been subject to their sharpened teeth, Iyan admired them from afar, but still learned much about them from Myra. In the mornings, she would clear their hutch of any frost or snow, and replace their bedding with fresh hay or straw. When there was none to be found, she used old scraps of clothes the Luttons had grown out of.

"Why do they need bedding," he had asked her, "if they've fur?"

"Why do we need clothes if we have skin?" She'd smiled at him and nodded her head smartly. "It's cold, Iyan; no amount of fur can block out the weather."

"Aren't there wolves that live in colder places?" He was a well-read child, but possessed none of the intelligence of having lived outside of the pages of a novel. This provided his aunt with a hearty laugh, though she understood she was to blame. Perhaps, she could have given him more access to real stories, biographies and natural journals. Too many fairy tales and fantasies were bound to render him a fool. Aunt Myra's heart was soft, however, so she patted him on the head before finishing her cleaning of the rabbit hutch. When the task was done and the rabbits fed, she took Iyan inside and shared with him a book on all of the creatures that roamed Saint Ivry. Iyan was half-convinced it was a story like all of the others, but Aunt Myra had shaken her head.

"It's all real, I promise." A promise from Aunt Myra was a guarantee, in all the severity of a heaven-sworn pact, and Iyan respected it as such.

"Which one is the most dangerous?" They sat pressed together on the couch, and she read aloud each of the entries (some of which were accompanied with detailed sketches). The question gave her pause for a moment, but she recovered soon.

"All of them are," she replied, brushing the page of the greyhound absently. "You must remember that, Iyan. All of the animals are beautiful and deserve love and affection, but they are all capable of hurting you. We're not so different, you and I."

"You would never hurt me," he had laughed, and he turned back to the page. "This says the greyhound can run over 30 miles an hour!"

"They're excellent hunters," answered his aunt, "but Iyan, look at me." He swivelled his gaze back up from the page; something in Aunt Myra's voice was different, scared almost. Suddenly fearful, he blinked slowly at her. "We all hurt, child. Every one of us is capable of hurting, both ourselves and those around us."

"Even the ones we love?" he whispered. Tears filled his little eyes - was he going to one day be the cause of grief for his beloved aunt? Was she going to hurt him where he was most vulnerable? The idea was enough to bring him to tears.

"Oh, don't cry!" Myra pulled him close, upset that her message had come across so sternly towards her nephew. "I only meant to warn you not to place me on so high a pedestal!" Her consolation did nothing for the indisposed Iyan, who sobbed without abandon into her stomach.

"I would rather be eaten by greyhounds!"

"There, there darling." When his sobs had subsided somewhat, Myra pulled him close and brought the book up to her chest. "Let's learn a little more about the greyhound, alright?"

To learn that man and animal were the same, and all capable of pain put Iyan out of sorts for several years. It was the sort of knowledge that robbed innocence from the youth, and Iyan would not find his ability to smile for quite some time. Everywhere he turned, all he saw was deceit and the potential for a threat. Was his maths instructor going to punish him in front of the entire class for missing a question? Were the children who played with the ball during the midday meal not going to throw it at his decidedly unathletic frame? Was his mother preparing to strike him for not putting her shoes in the right place when she came home after a night of drunken socialising? Eventually, one of Iyan's teachers noticed the abrupt change in his persona (which often found him curled up in fear in the coat cupboard after class), and made to call one of his parents about the startling behaviour. Had this teacher asked Iyan, they would have been told no parent could find the time to discuss it. Fortunately for the rest of Iyan's schooling, his aunt happened to be at his home on the day the teacher called, and it was she who met with the instructor later in the evening. This meeting would see more kind attention on the miserable subject and a more focused approach from his teachers to involve him in activities, but as with all things, time soon erased this.

By the time Iyan found himself in secondary school, his parents had met their unfortunate ends, his aunt had lost her only child, and his sleepwalking had begun in earnest. Only the first had been made known to his peers (enough, perhaps, to ordinarily secure some measure of sympathy from others), but as life would have it, only mockery was made available to Iyan. Isolated from the solidarity humanity should have offered, he attended his classes only sparingly. Where else to turn but the woods? He helped his uncle when the man asked, but months could go by before the extra help was needed at the post office.

Remembering the rabbits, Iyan sat in the company of the trees for hours on end, sometimes simply to stare, others to look for creatures. Spiders were often the only ones willing to venture too close to him (which he supposed was a laughing god's joke), but he was at last able to secure the trust and the permission of proximity from a stag.

The book of Saint Ivry's animals had spoken of stags, the country's most numerous beast. It was the bane of many a hunter, and the end to most hapless wanderers. Standing often over seven feet in height (on the smaller scale - the most impressive of these predators was well over ten) and weighing nearly six hundred pounds, Iyan could have been easily gored or trampled to death by the runtiest of the stag. Fortunately for his community of drunken roysterers, the closest sighting of a stag was almost a fifty miles off, somewhere closer to the endless Adelaide Forest that bordered the blackened Kelfordshire Estate. If fifty miles was close for animals, it was far enough for the citizens of Tottenham Cross.

The day in question that Iyan first discovered this most unlikely of creatures was warm, sunnier than it had been all year, and populated by exactly four minutes of class. One aptly aimed stick of chalk at Iyan's head had seen him the vacant student, and he directed his feet at once some miles away, near the family cabin.

"Miccolash, we've a dull day ahead of us," he grumbled aloud. Following the death of his aunt's unborn child, he often took to giving this lifeless child names and speaking with them when he was alone. He never did this unless absolutely certain he was alone (he knew how terribly insane it would have made him appear, and he didn't want word of the odd behaviour getting back to his aunt), but in the early working hours of the morning, he could be sure nobody was out here.

"It's only dull if you make it so," he quipped in response, taking on a cheery tone. How he wished this ever-changing companion were real! As he griped back and forth with himself, kicking stones as he walked, hands jammed angrily into his pockets, one of the stones made a strange sort of sound, and his head snapped up at once. Having been engrossed with the rocky soil below, Iyan had completely failed to notice the looming shadow of another presence.

His first impression on viewing the stag was fear - had he not read about the killing prowess of the powerful beast? When the stag did not move, merely breathed out through nostrils thicker than Iyan's fists, he relaxed (if only mildly).

"I don't want to hurt you," he said in a low voice. Was a quiet tone necessary with animals who were nearly four times his size in weight alone? Even as he professed his good intentions, Iyan could not help but look up and quake at the sight of the stag's horns, intricate and beautiful machines of torture. Each was whiter than fresh snow, spotted from the base with wide and irregular patches of darker brown. The stag possesses spots which are wholly unique to the beast, the bestiary had claimed, and have often been used by the more cunning of hunters to track a particular stag from region to region. Iyan trembled and wondered if the stag had a name, if its specific markings had any meaning at all to it.

It snorted and backed up, its large head swaying this way and that. What agitated it so? Iyan swallowed hard and pressed himself to a nearby tree. He wasn't necessarily good at climbing trees, but was prepared to try should, the stag advance.

"What ails you?" He held a palm out (after the encounter, he would berate himself for believing a stag of all animals would respond like any ordinary house cat) and felt his breath come in jumping gasps. "What frightens you so?" The stag made no answer. With one last snort, it reared its head and turned around, before running into the trees.

The encounter left Iyan exhausted. Simply the fear of the unknown sapped all the strength he had - he was quite sure he could have been killed in the woods that day. Still, whenever he found himself without work or the inclination to suffer through classes, he made his way back to the place in the woods where he had stared death in the face. The stag did not always meet with him, sometimes remaining distant for weeks at a time, but when it did find him, it was always with the same energy. Never murder - Iyan was sure of that. After the initial meetings, the stag would lower its horns and walked around him, as though confident in its own safety, confident in satisfying its curiousity about Iyan. This produced a well of emotions in the lonely young man, namely a measure of self-consciousness at being thought so little of by an animal, that it wouldn't consider him dangerous. Always replaced by awe, the doubt nevertheless kept Iyan from ever approaching the stag. Respect is what these majestic creatures crave. The lowering of the horns when facing a contemporary; the bowing of the head before battle; the bending of a knee before courtship - all are prime examples of the nobility in the stag of Saint Ivry. Iyan was quite careful to maintain and honour this respect. How silly indeed, if he were gored against a tree for taking granted so important a gesture as a tip of the head!

Iyan never told anybody of the stag. His relationship with the beast was in full confidence, but having been followed by a group of troublesome students, always eager for isolating Iyan from any hope of belonging, he soon found that he was not the only who learned of the stag's presence. Shock had been the primary emotion he felt when he saw that the papers depicted his animal acquaintance, slain by locals who had caught it unawares. The shock turned into a passionate sympathy soon enough. After long enough, only his bedroom was safe from jeers and taunts. How acute the irony had been, when horns were deposited at the post office itself, and only on such days as when Iyan worked!