If you had the chance to fix the shattered, the broken, the beaten, would you do it? If you had been locked away in a room full of suffocating, pitch-black darkness, and after years of suffering from the hand of other evils, you finally saw just a flickering gleam of hope, would you race to it? Would you run, and run, and swallow gulps of the first bits of fresh air in a century as you chased the ghosts of light, just for the mere chance to be whole once more? Would you do it even if it dropped the trapdoor on the gallows, inevitably choking the life of an innocent soul?

Would you do it even if your other half was at risk? 

It happened in the dark. Discovery of the forbidden, one might say, something so foul that it was a forgotten name, only to be uncovered by a desperate soul yearning for affection. Desperation was the perfect target. 

An act of discovery led this desperate soul to think. The thinking led to hope. Hope led to action, action led to thievery, thievery led to planning, and planning led to ritual. In the end, a wish was granted, but it left behind a mere crack of an open portal in its wake, allowing darkness and evil to slip through into the corporeal realm. She only wanted to be enough. Now she never will.

But that was seven years ago.

Today, there lay in the wood a fallen stag. Its life had come to an end. It was a long one, a noble one, spent surveying the forest and all its beauty. It had escaped the clutches of hunters, bears, sickness, and infection, and one day, it simply lay down and died. A peaceful slip into eternal sleep. By now, natural processes had already laid waste to its corpse, with maggots chewing away at its flesh and their eggs nestling in the crevices of its innards and bones. A vulture or two had come along to partake in the stag for a quick meal before taking flight to the next resting place. Such is the way of life. You are born. You live. You die, and you return to the earth to become one with nature again.

But with all its rot and decay, this stag still had use to it.

A black ooze began to push through the porous dirt beneath the corpse. It moved as one as inky globs, swirling and encircling the corpse that was now more bone than flesh, defying gravity as it floated with a mind of its own. It entered the nooks and crannies of decomposing sinew, and despite there being so little left, it took what it could. It consumed, just as it always did.

    The stag began to twitch. First, a tail, then a hoof, and then, its remaining skin and flesh began to crawl and rumble as though snakes slithered below the surface. The deer lifted a limp and furry neck, its head dangling as putrid, black blood dripped down from its gaping neck. Strangled moans and whines forced through rotting vocal cords, each one a pitiful cry from the afterlife. The deer began to quiver as its sun-bleached bones began to grow, some piercing the remaining skin and making its fur a tapestry across its body. The antlers elongated, the hooves enlarged and splintered like wood, its teeth sharpened and its clouded eyes melted down its tear ducts. Black ooze seeped from its every crevice and its ears flicked as its limp head turned this way and that. The creature stood up on long, shaky, bony legs and stumbled like a newborn fawn taking its first steps, but it was anything but a rebirth. The creature, on shaky legs and a deformed spine, broke the silence of the desolate woods by letting out a blood-curdling bray that bounced off the bark of trees that could tell no secrets. They could only wait in silence, and witness without a word.

Deep within the wood, something grew. Deep within the wood, darkness formed.