Kristmas Wish Fulfilled for: pre_raphaelite1
From: A Wonderous Watcher: newt_cakes

Title: The Running of the Deer
Characters/Pairings: Luna/ magical beast
Rating: R
Kinks/Themes Included: Bestiality, dub-con, voyeur!paintings, The Carol of the Bells.
Other Warnings: Bloodshed, death of a non-canon magical creature, voyeurism, pagan themes.
Word Count: 1723
Summary/Description: Near Yule, Luna goes investigating the legendary Horned Ones.
Author's Notes: I claim no ownership over either the canon characters/settings or the non-canon mythology in this story



Luna Lovegood sat at a grimy table in a Muggle café, drinking weak coffee and doodling pictures of red-and-violet frogs on her notepad. The café’s rather tinny radio was playing Carol of the Bells, and the man she was supposed to meet was late. The door opened, and she jolted, but it was only a pair of teenagers who ordered soup and hot chocolate at the counter without looking at her.

Restless, her attention drifted back to the music on the radio. It was not the first time she had heard it—her father had believed in keeping the widest possible selection of music, Muggle and Wizard alike, but this was the first time she had paid it much attention. It was…odd, for a Yule song, she noticed. The other holiday carols she had heard were usually bright, precise little melodies, evoking burning hearth fires and fat stockings and eggnog. This one had a rather ominous undercurrent, and as the tempo quickened, there was an ever-mounting tension and a hint of barely suppressed violence. This was a carol for the darkest winter nights and the racing hearts of hunted creatures. This snow was bitterly cold, the song seemed to tell her, and always a half-breath away from being stained with heart’s blood.

A sudden rush of frigid air rustled the leaves of her notepad. She glanced up to see a man enter—tall, with long, unkempt brown hair and searching eyes. Without glancing long at the few other café patrons, he crossed the room and sat down across from Luna. “Miss Lovegood.”

After all this waiting, she found she was unable to do anything but nod.

He ordered a cup of what must have been the dregs of the same pot that Luna was sipping, and the whole time his tawny eyes never left her. Later, she would find herself writing that his gaze was neither predatory nor wary, but strangely watchful in a way that suggested they had been that way for eternity. She readied her notepad, balancing it on her drawn-up knees to put some barrier between them.

“If you understand as much about my family as we believe, Ms. Lovegood, you will know that we are…reclusive.” He swirled a spoon in his coffee mug, and she realized that his fingers were oddly long and delicate, and covered with downy reddish hair. “It is tragic, I think, that we are also proud.”

Luna continued to gaze back at him, twirling her pencil. He was still on the cusp of making up his mind, she realized, and she didn’t want to jinx it by speaking. Assuming, she thought, remembering a few past interviews, he really is one of the Horned Ones and isn’t just having a laugh.

“There are rules,” the man continued. He picked up one of the greasy-looking knives from the counter and ran a finger idly over the dull edge. “You may write about what you see, but no names, either the ones we give you or the places we meet.”

“Oh…of course not..” Luna realized she had nothing to call him, and was unlikely ever to. “Did you mean that I can see the Yule Rites?” she blurted, although she instinctively lowered her voice at the words “Yule Rites.”

The man looked at her, and his grip on the knife tightened slightly. “Yes.” He handed her a piece of paper with a place and a time. Then he stood up and walked back out into the swirling snow.

Three nights later, Luna alighted awkwardly from her broomstick in a frozen meadow not far from the café where she had first met him. The icy grass crunched under her feet as she dismounted. Even with the shelter of the hills and woods, the December wind cut through her stoutest woolen robes and she tucked her gloved hands into her sleeves and shivered.

For more than half an hour, there was no noise except for wind rattling the branches and the distant cry of an owl. The only light came from a crescent moon just peeking over the tops of the tallest trees. Luna wanted to light the meadow with her wand, but stopped herself. Somehow, she didn’t think they would like that.

Until the moon peeks over the trees , she told herself, rubbing her hands together. Then I’ll know it was a hoax and I can go home and drink butterscotch cocoa and I’ll need to find another story for the paper, but I’ve been saving that one about the proposed origins of house-elf culture for months, so it will be fine.

The weak moonlight pierced the branches, and glimmered on a pair of amber eyes a few yards from Luna. Many pairs of amber eyes, all set in slender cervid skulls, all watching her.

There was no sound except for a creaking branch, and Luna’s breath, unpleasantly harsh on the frosty air.

One of them approached her. He was naked, she saw, but his body was human in shape from the neck down, except he had hooves where is feet would have been and his whole body was covered in down. On his head was a magnificent pair of antlers. There was something in his hand, but she was so mesmerized by watching him that for several moments she didn’t realize he was trying to hand it to her.

It was a stone knife.

“Luna,” he said softly. She recognized his voice from the café. The knife hilt pressed cold and solid into her hands. “Follow me.” He led her away through the circle, and the others parted noiselessly for them. He led her up a short path through the woods, to a low-roofed cave set into the hillside. As they reached the entrance, Luna thought that she heard a rhythmic thudding in the forest to her back. “They’re chasing me,” he told her calmly when her head whipped around. You’ll be able to see some of the chase from hillside, but you must stay in the cave. It always ends here. Keep the knife, and wait for me.” He turned, uttered a deep bellow to the sky, and bounded back down the trail.

The moon had risen higher in the sky, and Luna could see the stark shadows of the trees and the silhouettes that wove between them. They ran like men, but far more gracefully, seeming almost to glide over the snow and the buried branches. And always just a little ahead of the rest of the herd was a lone shadow. Their hoofbeats echoed across the valley, muffled by the snow, but still deep and persistent. The rhythm reminded her of something. It sounded like the skeleton of music—like the skeleton of Carol of the Bells, actually, before it had been swaddled in musical instruments.

The figure in the lead had slipped into the trees at the base of the hill, and Luna darted into the cave. The floor had been spread with soft animal hides over balsam branches, and the cave smelled of musk and evergreen. The walls and low ceiling were covered with crude paintings—all of Horned Ones, all watching her with their amber eyes. They seemed expectant, somehow.

Suddenly the weak moonlight was blotted out by a monstrous shadow, and he stood there in the cave entrance.

“I ran well,” he said, bending low to get inside the cave. His antlers nearly brushed the ceiling.

“I know,” she blurted idiotically. Yet he only looked at her calmly, and she realized he had never thought she would obey him.

She realized that she couldn’t get out, not with his body between her and the opening. He reached forward and gripped her knife-arm at the wrist. “You’ll use that,” he whispered hoarsely. “But the rites must be complete first.” Luna realized what would happen seconds before his other hand tore her robes aside, and wondered if she had known it would end this way all along.

Her body fought his at first, until curiosity overcame her fear, and she let him push her knees apart. He was rough, and when he first entered her she bit her lip to keep from yelping. The fur-covered skin of his pelvis was soft against her thighs, and despite the ache in her loins, she found herself reaching up to run her fingers through the smooth pelt on his back.

Above her, the sap-and-blood paintings watched. He shoved her down onto the pelts on the cave floor, and she found her eyes briefly locking with the etching directly above her. The eyes, she saw, were glowing amber gold now, and their gaze was hot upon Luna and her horned lover. He thrust into her, hard and urgent, until her soreness vanished to be replaced by warmth that grew low in her belly and spread throughout her body, until she dug her fingers into his fur and uttered a cry that had no meaning because it was older than words.

When he was done, he loosened his grip on her wrist and she rose shakily to her knees. There were lights all around her and she realized they were the eyes of the paintings, waiting. The horned one gazed slowly at the cavern walls, seeming to meet each pair of eyes, and then moved towards the cave entrance so that the moonlight just touched his antlers. “Now,” he told her.

Later, Luna would wonder how it was possible that she, the girl who had struggled for half an hour to cut wiggling tubers in Herbology, could have sliced open the Horned One’s throat in one whip-like swing of her arm. She didn’t even realize what she was doing (unless, again, she had known from the start), until the blood droplets spattered, steaming, across the moonlit snow and he collapsed at her feet, his last breaths floating on the frosty air. His eyes held hers until they went dim, and she closed them and dropped the knife at his side, and she guessed it was over.

The others were there, waiting at the treeline, but they parted silently to let her pass. In the distance, or maybe just in her mind, she thought she could hear the ringing of bells, the bells that would echo in her memory each dark Yule night for the rest of her years.