Once, he moved like a ghost through spruce and shadow—antlers wide as winter’s reach, hooves carving silence into snow. He drank from black lakes, tore bark with ancient fury, and watched the northern lights flicker in his reflection. But something—hunger, ice, or the slow bleed of time—caught him in the quiet. The forest swallowed the end without fanfare.

Now his skull stands like a shrine, weathered and hollowed, crowned in blossoms that should not bloom in such a place. Death gave him a second form—stiffened wood, sunlit bone—watching still. This is the elegy of a life once wild, now rooted in decay, where even ruin remembers.