A stag whose antlers bloom with the same brown rot that eats old paper. It walks the margins of the dying wood and cannot be drawn twice the same way.

The keepers of the wood no longer try. Their bestiary holds eleven plates of the Hart, each contradicting the last, and the marginal note beside the twelfth, blank plate reads: it is more honest this way.

What is known: it eats only what has already fallen. It is not gentle, but it is patient, which the dying mistake for gentleness. Where it sleeps, the ground foxes in the shape of it, and those stains do not weather out.