The Stag-Wraith

The Stag Wraith




His love for a child made him cruel.  

The Stag-Wraith roamed the dark forest Kura Mori as a whisper among the trees. Few mortals saw him.  Those who did were most unfortunate.  

In his living days the stag was strong.  His antlers were long, with six points each.  His coat shimmered like tawny silk.  His hooves were sharp and silent.  He was as wary as any creature of the wild and had escaped the claws and teeth of many predators.  

Death had come swiftly to him, but not without pain.  His hind legs slid out from under him when the arrow pierced his liver.  A second arrow, off aim, punched through his shoulder.  The stag fell with a bawling cry, his eyes wide and wild, foaming at the mouth.  

For a moment, he stood staring at his slain body and at the pair of humans that had come to collect it.  

“Now, that was a quick, clean kill,” one of the hunters said as he pulled an arrow free from the deer’s flesh.  

“A quick, clean kill indeed!” the spirit of the stag snorted, stamping an invisible hoof.  He heard a horse’s whiny behind him.  He turned to see a rider on a skeletal steed.  Both the horse and rider were specters, just as he was.  The rider appeared to be human, but that stag knew that she was not one.  She held a sword in her hand.  A long silver cord swirled around the stag’s hooves.  It trailed toward the rider and back toward his corpse.  It was severed.  The rider looked to him with eyes in shadow.  The stag ghost was filled with terror and he fled.  

“Come!” the Scavenger shouted after him.  The hooves of her horrific horse thundered through the forest, unheard by the ears of the living.  

“No!” the stag bellowed back to her.  

“You do not belong here.” the Scavenger replied.  “It is time for you to submit to me!”  

“No!” the stag cried again.  He could feel the breath of the Scavenger’s steed on his heels, if what the ghoul-horse issued could be called breath.  “No and never!  I was young and in my glory!  None could stand against me in the rut!  Many are the does I have loved and the wolves I have thwarted!  The hunters have stolen that from me and I must avenge myself!”  

“You do not belong in this world!” the Scavenger demanded.  “I am not to be argued with!  Come with me!”  

The dark woman pulled spectral chains from her robes.  She lashed them out after the stag, but he kept a pace ahead of her.  

“I want to live!” the deer howled.  He leapt desperately.  

“I take both the frail and the strong,” the Scavenger sang, “Between youth and age I keep no favor.  I run down the slow and the swift.  You have no hope of evading me forever!”   

The stag kept running, leaping over logs and rough ground.  He sped through boulders and mossy tree trunks.  The Scavenger’s binding-chains nipped at his heels, but he kept just out of their reach.   

After an unknown span of time – whether he had been running for mere seconds or for infinity, he could not guess – the stag failed to feel the frozen breath of the Scavenger’s horse.  He stopped running, and looked behind him.  Some distance away, the skeletal stallion stood still upon a hill, the Scavenger astride him, calm.  “You shall not outpace me forever,” she said.  Both she and the horse vanished.

Thus the Stag-Wraith became the only creature in Rhlem that had ever outrun the Scavenger.  

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The ghostly deer wandered through the forest.  He came upon his hunters.  His body hung from the branch of a sturdy oak, skinned and steaming.   One man worked with the skin stretched upon the ground while the other set to butchery.  

The Stag-Wraith stormed into the camp.  Spectral flames rose from his nostrils. His ghostly hooves rent the ground and his eyes glowed with crimson light.  The hunters saw the spirit.  They yelped with fear and fled from him.

The stag tore after them and drove them with his incorporeal antlers.  “You!” he boomed.  The hunters heard and understood his voice.  “You took my breath and my blood!”  

The hunter that was ahead slipped on a patch of mud and skidded off the edge of a shallow cliff.  He landed in the great River Oro that cut through the Kura Mori.  The second hunter followed after him.  Both men fell into the frigid water with echoing splashes.  The stag watched as they flailed in the water and grabbed onto one another.  Soon, both fell under the swift water and were swept away.  

The stag wandered along the river’s edge until he found the men’s bodies washed upon the mud of the bank.  The stag smelled the lingering floral aroma left by the Scavenger.  He kept alert, but she did not appear to chase after him again.  He snorted at the two dead men.  He was very pleased.  

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Thereafter, the Stag-Wraith became the terror of the Kura Mori.  

He appeared to hunters in the forest, whatever their quarry.  He appeared to most humans he found wandering in his forest, as well as to many souled beasts.  

The Stag-Wraith discovered many ingenious ways to drive humans to their deaths.  He took a great, vengeful pleasure in this, whether he came upon hunters before or after they had made a kill.  He even drove many who came into the forest with no intent to kill anything to their deaths.  

Whenever the Scavenger came to clam his victims, he would flee upon hooves as swift as lightning.  Many were the Scavenger’s pursuits of him, yet she failed to capture him.  

The Stag-Wraith drove his victims to swift demises.  For him, it was enough that the creatures that had caused his death died – they did not need to die slowly or with agony.  In the end, it was their own fear that killed them.  Had any man stood up to the Stag-Wraith, he would have found the great deer powerless, merely a whisper, a fearful specter that could not truly harm them.  

The Stag-Wraith’s love for a child made him cruel.  The strangest thing about this love was that it was not for a fawn, or even for a pup or a cub.  The child that the Stag-Wraith loved was a human girl.   


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Myr wandered through the evening mist.  She shivered in the cold and in fear.  She turned and looked.   There were dark trees before and behind her.   Their shadows grew and thorny bushes rose up like hungry monsters.  Her feet were numb in her shoes and she’d long since lost even the ghost of feeling in her fingers. She was hungry and tired, but most of all tired.

Her mother had told her not to walk through the woods without her big sister at her side.  Myr had wandered off alone.  Her throat was tight from shouting and crying.  “Mother?” she called at intervals, “Father?  Nara?”

The trees looked the same everywhere.  The stump with the bracket fungus disappeared behind the thorn-bushes and did not appear again.  The big white rock that looked like a sleeping cat was joined by another just like it several steps into the forest – but it was not the same rock.  That other rock had been wedged into the roots of a spruce.  This one stood next to a bramble of blackberry bushes.  

Every loam-muffled footfall brought Myr deeper and deeper into the forest and farther away from home.  Whenever she backtracked she had taken an unwitting turn and became more deeply entangled.  

Night sounds overwhelmed her.  The crickets raised a cacophony of shrill noise, joined by the chirping of frogs and the dry sound of a mouse scurrying through leaves on the forest floor.  

Myr’s limbs felt heavy and she was cold.  She curled up in the dead leaves and needles.  She stayed there, ceasing to shiver after a while, too numb and too tired to do anything but sleep.  

The Stag-Wraith wandered into that part of the woods.  He snorted at a familiar cold odor, a reek of old flesh and flowers.  The Scavenger was there, seated on her horse, which stood over the sleeping girl.  

The Scavenger lowered her sword to the child, to the silvery cord that bound her to life.  The woman did not bother to dismount.  She regarded the Stag-Wraith with a glare that told him that he was too petty a thing for her to bother with at the moment.  She had other business.  

The spirit of the little girl awakened.  She rubbed her eyes and cringed when she saw the Scavenger.  The skeleton-steed stamped a hoof and snorted.  “Patience, Andreas,” the Scavenger whispered.  

She sheathed her sword and offered out her right hand.  “Come, child” she said to the girl, gently.  

The spectral child cowered and cried.  “Mommy!” she wailed, “I want my mommy!”  

“You must come with me now,” the Scavenger said.  

The girl simply cried.  She shrunk from the Scavenger.  She did not attempt to flee, but neither did she take the Scavenger’s hand.  

The Stag-Wraith snorted.  He bolted over to the girl and hefted her onto his back with his antlers. The Scavenger uttered a garbled sound that was halfway between a shout and a growl.  She swung her sword at the stag as he turned and raced away from her.  

The girl gripped the stag tightly as he fled from her body and from the pursuing Scavenger.  The child screamed in fear and surprise.  The hooves of Andreas echoed after the Stag-Wraith, and he could hear the Scavenger call to him.  

“Leave her!” the dark woman pleaded.  “Leave her!  The child is not meant to remain!  She is destined for Paradise! Give her to me!”  

Myr cried and held onto the Stag-Wraith’s neck. “Don’t let her have me!” she wailed desperately.  “I’m scared! She’s scary! I’m scared of her!”  

“She shall not have you!” The Stag-Wraith snorted as he dove through the trees.  “I hate her, therefore, she shall not have you.  She has chased me often, but has yet to catch me.”  

The Stag-Wraith ran until dawn, his hooves swift, and with no muscles to tire.  As the sun rose, the Scavenger vanished, finally giving up the chase for the moment.  

“Confident wench,” the Stag-Wraith said as he slowed to a walk, and then stood still.  Myr climbed down off his back.  “She shall be after us again.  She only bides her time.  She shall not have you.”

“Th-Thank you... Sir Deer...” Myr shivered.  She stared at him for a long moment, and then looked at her hands, seeing the ground beneath them, through them.  “You’re like me, aren’t you?” the girl asked.  “We’re both... ghosts... we’re both d-d-dead.”

“I am afraid so,” the Stag-Wraith said with a nod, regarding the innocent and frail creature before him.  “I was murdered by hunters some time ago.  You are freshly dead.”

“I don’t wanna be dead!” the child cried.  “I wanna go back home!  I want my Mommy! And Daddy! And Nara!”  

“You cannot return to them,” the deer said sadly, “I have tried returning to my own herd.”

“Take me back!” the girl pleaded, “Take me back!”

The Stag-Wraith hefted Myr upon his back again.  He walked back through the forest slowly – quite literally through – for he stepped into and out through every tree in his path rather than between them.  The ghostly way of travel was so much easier than the kind of walking he used to do when he was inside his body.

Myr slid from his back and ran to where her body lay.  The corpse was stiff and cold.  A thick layer of frost covered her delicate patched dress.  Myr touched one of her dead hands.  Her incorporeal fingers passed through the pale flesh.  She stared for a long time at her face.  The corpse’s eyes were half-lidded and covered with a translucent white film.  

Myr stared at her dead eyes, pale blue glazed over with white.  This was strange – looking at her own eyes.  This wasn’t like looking at herself in a mirror.  She was not looking at a reflection of her eyes, but her eyes themselves.  The little girl-spirit shivered.  

Myr lay down over her body, her ghostly form passing through it.  She found herself within it, but not within it.  She lay over it, but was not bound to it.  

“Get up,” the Stag-Wraith said.  “You are dead.  You cannot return.”

Myr rose up and sat beside her corpse.  She placed her spectral hands in her lap and stared at them.  

“What is this, Sir Deer?” she asked, “I seem to still have a body in this form.  I have hands and feet.  I even have my dress – the same one as my body is wearing.”

“Our forms are our memories,” the Stag-Wraith sighed, “At least, I think so.  It does not matter what happens to your body now.  Your spirit shall keep the form it is in now – always.”

Myr sobbed again.  The Stag-Wraith nuzzled her.  “Let us go,” he said, “It is not good for you to stay here.  Watching your body will only upset you.”  

The girl followed the Stag-Wraith to another part of the forest.  The forest was frigid and would be so all day, though Myr felt warm.  It was the light – ever increasing as the sun rose higher.  The light made everything look as though the air should be warm, and thus it felt to the child – now that she was without skin to feel the cold.  

“What should I all you, Sir Deer?” Myr asked.  “Do you have a name?”

“A name?” the stag asked.  In life he had never needed one.  His world had been a world of smells, primarily.   He had identified friends, does, fawns and strangers by their scents.  The only time he recalled having a “name” of any sort was when he was a fawn.  His mother had a special call for him.  It was the same kind of call that every mother do would use to summon the attention of her children, a word among deer that simply meant “fawn!” The Stag-Wraith was known in this forest by his fellow deer in life, but by sight and scent.

“Name?” the Stag-Wraith said to Myr, “ I do not understand ‘name.’  What do you mean by this?”

“My name is Myr,” Myr answered.  “It is what I am called.  People call me Myr.”

“A human thing,” the Stag-Wraith snorted, “I have never had a name.”

“I had a cat named Percival,” Myr said.  “I miss him and you are pretty and fluffy like he is.  I will call you Percival.”

“If that is what you wish,” the deer said with a bow of his antlered head, “Myr.”  

“I don’t want that lady to take me,” Myr said after a time of slow walking. “I don’t like her. She’s scary and her horse is scary.  I don’t want to go with her.”

“You shall stay with me,” the newly dubbed “Percival” replied.  

“Why did you save me from her?” the girl asked.

“I do not like her,” the stag replied, “and you were so frightened.  I have no love for humans – but you are just a frightened little doe-fawn.  The fawns among your people are frail and harmless, and few of the does grow up to be hunters.”

The Stag-Wraith and Myr wandered the forest together.  From the Wraith, Myr learned the ways of death and the ways of the forest.  With him, Myr wasn’t lonely.  


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“These are my does and, with them, my children,” Percival said as he and Myr stood on the edge of a meadow.  Many sleek deer fed in the grass, their bodies golden against the pale green.  Little spotted fawns skipped in the field.  Some stopped to feed from their mothers’ swollen udders.  A few of the does and fawns looked up and toward the edge of the forest before returning to their peaceful activities.

“They know that we are here,” Percival said.  

“If they are your family,” Myr said, “can’t you go back to them?”

“No,” the Stag-Wraith answered sadly.  “They are aware of our presence, but do not know who we are.  We are like a sharp, cold breeze, a presence and nothing more.  We are dead.  They only know and care about that which is living.”

Myr stroked Percival’s muzzle.  “Aren’t you lonely?” she asked.  

“No,” he answered, “I have you, my little doe-fawn.”


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The Stag-Wraith would leave Myr at some spot in the forest whenever he sensed the presence of living humans within the woods.  He would tell her to stay, to never follow him.  The child was always content to stay and watch the butterflies and listen to the whistle of wind through the trees.  

When he found hunters, he would appear and give chase to frighten them to their deaths.  He no longer killed quickly, however.  He would drive his victims to broken bones, to impalement on jutting dead trees and to other slow agonies.  This way, the Scavenger was long in coming to them.  This way he had time to go back to Myr before the Scavenger could reach her, for if the Scavenger came for one soul, she could come for another at the same moment.  

Gone were the days when Percival could drive men to swift ends.  He loved Myr and would not let the Scavenger take her.  He never told Myr what he did on his hunts.  She was an innocent creature.  She would hate him if she knew what he did, or, at the very least, fear him.  Myr would flee from him, surely, if she knew that he was a killer.

The Stag-Wraith usually found hunters before they’d made a kill.  If they had killed any creature for which the Scavenger would come before he found them, he quickly went back to where Myr was, hefted her unto his back, and began his run.  In those instances, he would deal with the human hunters later.  Some men were able to leave his forest, and one man even lived there.

In one way, Percival’s love of Myr made him a less dangerous creature.  In another, it made him a much more fearful specter – for those he now managed to triumph over always died slowly and with much pain.


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A young man moaned in agony from two broken legs.  The Stag-Wraith had driven him off the edge of a shallow cliff.  He now lay in a rocky ravine, bleeding from bones protruding through the flesh of his calves.  Percival stood over him.  

The great deer nodded as the man shivered, moaned, begged him to leave and cried out for human help.  Percival turned and walked away.  The hunter would not last much longer.  It was a chill day, and the deer knew it, though he’d long since been unable to feel the bite of the air.  Patches of snow littered the ground.  If the man survived through the day out in the open air with his wounds, he would not survive the night.  

The ghostly stag wandered back through the trees to where Myr sat upon a rock, staring up at the clouds through the branches of the pines.

“What is that sound?” Myr asked, “I hear moaning.”  

“It is only the wind,” Percival lied.  “The wind makes strange sounds when it blows up through that ravine.  Come with me.”

The girl hopped up on Percival’s back and they wandered under and through the trees.  Percival would lower his head to graze before remembering that he hadn’t needed to do so for a long time.  

“What’s that?” Myr said, “Over there?  Oh, Percival, walk over there, will you?”

The faithful steed of a stag walked to where Myr wished to go.  When he stopped, something pale laid beneath his hoof.  He felt Myr shift to get off his back.  

“No!” he commanded.  “Stay on!  I can sense the dark woman coming.  Stay on.”

Myr obeyed, but leaned over on Percival’s neck to get a closer look at the object on the ground.  She considered its roundness and the mud piled up around it.  Water dripped from the edge of a hollow in it.  Percival sniffed at it.  It was a small human skull.  It lay in fragments held together by the mud of the forest floor.  

“That was me, wasn’t it?” Myr questioned.  “Where is the rest of me?”  

The Stag-Wraith stepped lightly around the area, keeping his nose to the ground.  He discovered three vertebrae, a few tiny bone fragments, and nothing more.  “Wolves and ravens, probably,” the deer replied.  “My half-butchered body was taken away by wolves.  I remember it.  They also took my skin.”

Percival had told Myr of how he was killed by human hunters, and that they never got the chance to eat his flesh, but he never told her why.  How long had she been with him?  They were looking at her skull now, cleaned by the scavengers and insects of the earth, washed by the rain and the snow, bleached near-white by exposure to the sun.  How long had Myr been wandering with him?  

“I’ve told you not to worry about your body,” he said to the girl, “What happens to it has no bearing on who and what you are.”  

He was not sure if this was entirely true.  Percival thought about the living deer of his wood. He tried to recall what he had been like when he was alive.  Had he been as vapid as other deer?  Had he thought like them – a wary creature, yet unaware of so much?  He was definitely a Wise Beast now, but had he been when he was alive?  He could not recall.  He remembered things he had experienced when he had lived – it just seemed to him that he thought differently now.  Had he gained a soul upon being slain?  

Myr was destined for the Gates of Heaven.  The Scavenger had said so, calling out to the Stag-Wraith to leave the child with her as he fled with the girl astride him. His own destiny he did not know.  He knew that the Scavenger would catch him – and Myr – eventually.  He grew tired of running, bored, actually.  He tired of the wandering, the out-pacing, even the very forest, which he loved.

He knew that the Scavenger caught up to everyone and everything eventually.  He felt that truth – more strongly than he had felt anything, in his life or in his death.  This was a dreadful knowledge that stirred in him more powerfully than his anger toward mankind, or even his affection for Myr.  

The child draped her spectral arms around his spectral neck.  “They never found me,” she sighed.  

“What is that?” Percival asked.

“My family.  They never found my body.  I stayed out here, never burned and never buried.  Did they even look for me?  Did they even try to find me?”

Percival knew little of human customs regarding the dead, so he did not quite understand what Myr said about burial and burning.  He did his best to comfort her.

“I’m sure your herd sought you,” he said.  “The forest is deep and dark.  You laid down here, far from where others of your kind gather.  Don’t trouble yourself, little one.  The seasons have come and gone.  Others have benefited from your body – like the wolves and the ravens you so love watching.  After the snow melts, many flowers will grow in this place.”  

Myr smiled and combed Percival’s ghostly fur with her ghostly fingers.  “I don’t think I belong here,” she said.  “The scary lady keeps calling to me when we run.  She says she wants to take me to Paradise.”  

The Stag-Wraith sighed sadly and hung his head.  “Do you wish to go, little doe-fawn?  I flee because I am afraid.  Are you no longer afraid to let the woman take you to where you belong?  I will let you go to her, if you’d like.”

“No,” Myr answered.  “Heaven is supposed to be a wonderful place, but I am to scared to go.  I’m not ready yet.  The lady scares me.  I’m still too afraid of her to let her take me.  I want to stay with you.  Percival, will you stay with me?”  

The deer wandered back through the darkest and most wild part of the forest, Myr lying comfortably upon his back. He wandered as he had since death and might until the end of the world.  

“Always,” he said, “Always.”  










Copyright S.E. Nordwall 2004.
All Rights Reserved.