Ourgh

Body

The antler is the mutation: bone that the blight has taken and will not let stop, fed by a vascular web that runs up through the pedicle and out to every tine, so that the rack is a living spore-bearing structure and the animal beneath it is a pair of lungs and four legs carrying it.

This is the blight doing what it does everywhere, which is to grow along the roads already there rather than build new ones. In a person it takes the vascular tree and the veins stand proud of the skin. In a stag it took the one structure in the body that was already fed by its own web and already growing, and it never let it stop.

Country

Behind it the ash falls out of the air where there is no ash, and the ground it has crossed produces a red summer out of season. An ash country is the richest farmland in the world for three years after a red summer and is uninsurable for the fourth, and Ourgh delivers that cycle to places the volcano never reached, on no schedule anyone can read, at a walk.

Three villages have been abandoned along its route and two more have started leaving offerings on it, which does nothing, and which it has never noticed.

Regard

It is the one thing in this class that can be described as innocent, and the description does not help anybody. A region that has been crossed gets one extraordinary harvest and then finds out what else the ash has changed, and by then the stag is a valley away and still walking.