Name Seeker: The Grave of Crowns

Chapter One: Beginnings of Many Hooves

The wolves howled even more fiercely than the wind.
Summer Breeze lay panting on her side within the shelter of a mountain cave, her body burning with the fever of labor. The stone beneath her felt like a block of ice, and she feared for the calf she was about to bring into the world. This was far from the safe, warm birthing grounds - Summer Breeze couldn't even remember the journey out here, only what the white owl had told her:
The wolves are coming for your child, running tree.
Then he'd led her here - and disappeared right before the storm hit.
What a fool she'd been!
"Mountain Hide!" she cried aloud for her mate, though she knew the mighty scarred bull could not hear her. Doubtless he was out looking, even in the howling snowstorm that raged outside. The fool, the brave warrior, king of the Highland Herd.
With each passing shudder from her brown-patched white body as it struggled with the calf, Summer Breeze knew she would not live to suckle her calf, nor see it take its first shaky steps. It was all she could hope that the cave she lay in would not kill her calf with cold once it had emerged.
The wolves howled, still.
The world before her eyes began to darken, and Summer Breeze uttered a last prayer to the Great Elk.
"Mighty King of these plains...whatever it may need from the heavens...please...let my calf see their father...let my Mountain find us soon..."
She sighed, and closed her eyes.

"...up this way, I'm telling you."
"Your scattered bird brain better not be tricking your eyes," Mountain Hide snapped at the small tern fluttering about his mighty antlers.
"Mountain Hide!"
The reindeer's head jerked up to see his two lieutenants, one male and one female, staring into the rocky side of the mountain. He huffed and kicked up his heels, lunging up the last few paces of the narrow mountain path to find them standing before a small cave opening. The tern that fluttered with him came to perch on his antlers, and silenced his chattering beak.
Sunlight had finally pierced the remaining wisps that remained of the snowstorm's clouds, and it glimmered on the polished white dainty antlers of a reindeer he knew well.
"Summer!" Mountain Hide bellowed, rising and striking at the cave opening with his hooves. It was too small to allow him entry. The tern squawked in startled protest, fluttering free of the king's antlers before returning to perch on them again.
"Sire, let me," the female lieutenant urged.
"With speed!" he barked, and the smaller reindeer ducked inside. She was young, and her antlers were small enough she could manage easily. Summer Breeze had always had small antlers, despite being fully grown...but even so, how she had managed to find this cave in the storm, much less fit, or why she'd even abandoned the calving grounds remained a mystery.
"Sire," the remaining male urged, "what possessed her? She was so close to birthing --"
"Silence," Mountain Hide snorted, stamping a hoof. He'd heard the female within call out. "What is it, Sapling?"
    "Sire..." Sapling poked her head out, pale brown eyes wide. "You...need to see this." She pulled her head back in and there was a scuffing of hooves. The male Lieutenant, Broad Shoulder, pricked his ears at the sound of a second, smaller set of hooves.
    "Well I can't, now can I-" the Highland King stopped short as Sapling returned, but his gaze was not for her. It was for the much smaller creature that accompanied her.
A calf's small head poked out, all white with a pale pink nose. It took a step further into the outside world, blinking dark brown eyes.
"Sire..." the male gasped. "Summer Breeze, she must've -"
"Where is she?" Mountain Hide demanded, almost glaring at the calf as if blaming it for her absence.
Sapling at last emerged fully, her head low.
"Sire, she is...she gave her life in this birth."
"What?" Mountain Hide said, taking a step back. He felt dizzy and lightheaded, as though he'd been kicked in the side by a fellow hoofbeast.
Sapling curved her neck back to urge the little calf forward. The nervous bundle of legs stumbled into the light, finally revealing his full pelt.
Now the other lieutenant gasped.
"Sire!" he exclaimed. "It...it's..."
"It's a boy," Sapling said calmly.
"It's an omen," the male said ominously, casting his eyes away from the sight. "An omen of disaster!"
"It is...this..." Mountain Hide stared at the small, trembling calf as though he could not believe his eyes, and perhaps he couldn't.
"The white calf," the tern spoke in awe from his perch atop the King's crown. "That crazy owl was right!"
The male lieutenant looked sharply at the tern. "What did you say?"
The tern fluttered guiltily.
"I, uh..."
"You knew of this?" Mountain Hide said, trembling with fear, sorrow, and rage. He reared, flinging the tern from his antlers and rounding on it as it shrieked and hovered in the air above the edge of the mountainside. "Who told you?!"
"What owl?!" his liuetenant demanded.
"I didn't know any of this would happen!" the tern exclaimed, wings beating furiously. "The old owl just said her - her calf would be unlike any other! And he told me to lead you here once the storm passed! That's all I know - I promise!"
"He's cold," Sapling murmured in concern as she nuzzled the shaking little calf, who took all this in with wide, overwhelmed eyes.
"That doesn't matter," Mountain Hide snarled, rounding on her next. He glowered down at the poor calf that cowered before him. "Leave it here to freeze, for all I care. Bring out my queen's body."
"You'll leave your own son to die?!" Sapling demanded, shocked by the king's coldhearted decree.
"I will not return to my herd leading doom on its hooves," he rumbled, lifting his head and shaking the thick fur of his mighty neck. "This calf, as I see, is no calf of mine. My Summer Breeze would never birth such a curse upon her own herd."
"But sire -" Sapling protested.
"No!" he snapped. "No one will speak of this. Now bring me her body!"
Sapling pressed her lips together in a firm line across her muzzle. She nudged the small calf aside and ducked back into the cave.
It took a little time and a great deal of effort for Sapling, who was a slender deer while Summer Breeze, a former outlier warden, had always been large and well-muscled. But Sapling was anxious to have the business over and done with, as she felt she dishonoured the great dam by shoving her body into the light in such an ungraceful way.
As soon as he saw her, Mountain Hide could no longer deny the truth. With a great bellow of grief, he fell to his foreknees and bent his great head over the still body of his former queen.
The small white calf caught his father's scent, and instinct pulled him close to his family. He ducked his head and nuzzled along his mother's underbelly. It was the closest he would ever be to both his mother and father at the same time.
"Get away from her," Mountain Hide roared, his head whipping up and snapping his teeth at the small calf. It balked and scrambled backwards into Sapling's forelegs, its small hooves sliding out from under it and it crashed into the snow.
"Mountain Hide, it's hardly the calf's fault," Sapling tried to reason with the mighty bull deer.
"Get it away from here!" he bellowed. "That's an order, Sapling Branches! Take that - that curse - take it far from my herd, and leave it to die out in the Barrens!"
Sapling gasped.
"But - sire -"
"Do as you are told, or have your antlers broken!"
Sapling reared back, her ears flattened at the threat.
"Come now," she said shakily to the sprawled calf, nosing him hurriedly to his hooves. "Away from here!"
"Make sure it is done," Mountain Hide said bitterly to his second lieutenant. The male hesitated. "Now, Broad Shoulder!"
The larger male deer snorted a hot cloud of breath into the chilly air and trotted after Sapling and the white calf, though he could not shake the uneasiness of leaving his king alone and unguarded.
As Sapling guided the shaking, hungry white calf down the mountain, a great owl wheeled overhead. His white feathers made him invisible against the clouds, and even his piercing yellow eyes could not be seen from such a distance.
He sighed.
"Mountain Hide, you fool," the bird murmured, though the wind so high up snatched the words from his beak and swallowed them into its roaring mouth. The great white owl gave his wings one silent flap, wheeled in the sky, and flew away from the sight.