The need to wander had faded some within him, and though he still found himself lured away from the Throat, from the company of his friend, Ranjiri, he did not wander far.
 
It wasn’t that he wished to escape her or the kind desert dwellers he had come to be introduced to, rather that he needed time to walk alone and think.  It was not always easy collecting one’s thoughts with Ranjiri around – she was effervescent, always full of bright conversation about faith, family, or the weather.  And, while he loved her for her ability to fill the long silences with the bouncy cadence of her voice, he also still held the deep reverence for being on his own as he always had.
 
And so he was alone now, crossing the ruddy fringes of a gem bedazzled flatland.  Unconsciously, he wandered to its center, his tall figure casting a long and awkward shadow in the late afternoon, the western sun to his left; thus it was with some measure of surprise that he pulls to a halt at the brim of the pit that, once, all of Helovia had hidden in.
 
It had been a long while since he’d thought of the caverns, and never had he been in them without the masses filling the strange center room and the various branches that extended outward from it.  Tentatively, his dark muzzle tests the cool air wafting up from the craterous hole, smelling on the dank mustiness of places not often travelled, dark and hidden, and cautiously (he’d once nearly broke an ankle making the descent), he decides to make his way down into the ruddy illumination of the fire falls in the central cavern below.
 
Across his shoulders the skin pulls taut, causing the gathering collection of boils there and along his sides and spine to burst open and leak putrescent fluid down his shoulders, either from the sheer tension across his skin, or the rubbing of his dark leather harness against their fragile curvature.  The disease has not covered his figure as it did that of Ranjiri, but nearly hourly he can find a new bulbous, stinging protrusion along his figure; he blames, rather than his friend (or even the very nature of viral diseases), his absence, accepting the painful boils as a penance for having abandoned his herd and friends so suddenly.
 
And so, somber are the thoughts of the stag as his hooves click across the smooth stone, the smell of so many once pressed within its confines lost to the trail of time and the cool winds which usher from the deepest recesses of the earth.  Dissonantly, he comes to a halt before the flaming falls which casts reddish light about the dark room, eyes searching the infernal flicker absently as his mind traces through all he had been told since he’d returned.
 
[ OOC: YEAH finally able to make some posts. ^^  If anyone wants to drop in and cure him of BFB, that would be neat. ]
 
@Sheba 

memorablemoose & larfsalot @deviantart
dinpattern.com