As told in fragmented oral tradition, partially preserved in the Harrower's Book of Telling — Folio of Threads, p. 214)
This version was recorded by Elias Maerlowe from a dying woman in Dorset who insisted it be spoken, not written. Her tongue split before the last verse.
Once, when the world was not yet weighed down with remembering, a fawn was born beneath the branches of a tree no one had ever named.
The fawn was small, ash-grey and silk-thin, with eyes like river stone. She had no herd, no mother, no god to claim her. But she could hear the thoughts of the tree.
The tree, too, had no name. It was too old for that. Its roots curled around bones of forgotten kings. Its leaves whispered not in wind, but in dreams.
And the tree loved the fawn.
Each night it spun her lullabies from threads of shadow and dew. Each dawn it taught her how to trace the constellations on the backs of sleeping birds. She grew strong, though she never aged. In her hooves was silence. In her gaze, the breath before a thunderclap.
But the Courts noticed.
The Seelie came first, draped in bloom and promises. "Let her be reborn in gold," they said. "We will give her a name and a song and a place in the story."
The Unseelie came next, robed in dusk and salt. "Let her rest beneath the tree's roots," they said. "She will remember forever, and be at peace."
But the fawn chose neither.
She asked the tree, "What should I do?"
And the tree said only, "You must choose, little thread. That is the only power I cannot give you."
So the fawn ran.
She ran beyond the lands of bloom and root. She ran until her hooves bled and the stars forgot her path. Behind her, the Seelie tore down her tree and made a throne from its bones. The Unseelie buried its leaves beneath a library no one dares name.
But still the fawn runs.
They say she is the thread that loops through every soul that cannot rest. That her hoofbeats are heard in the silence between memory and choice. That when you stand before a glamour and feel something watching—
—it may not be a god at all.
It may be something that remembers too well.