Unblemished Hinds
Unblemished Hinds are the deer of the Apex, the commonest of its Harmony-Beasts. They are deer as they would be if nothing about them could be bettered, and they graze the plane’s perfect meadows forever. Hunters come for them and cannot kill them, and in the end cannot leave them either.
Appearance
A Hind is a slender deer the size of a red deer of Caeldon, every line of it in exact proportion, the two sides of its body mirror images to the last hair. Its coat is a saturated gold, paling to pristine white at the throat and belly, with no scar, mark, or worn patch anywhere, and it seems to glow in the plane’s shadowless light. Its eyes are large and calm and dark. It moves in perfect, unhurried grace, and a herd moves together, each animal turning as the others turn, never colliding. The only sound they make is the plane’s own harmonic hum. They have no smell.
Habitat and Range
They graze the Apex’s meadows and domed hills in herds that never grow or shrink, each herd keeping to the same ground forever.
Behaviour and Temperament
Hinds graze, rest, and walk, and nothing more. They do not flee, since nothing hunts them, and they do not fear people. A visitor can walk among a herd and lay a hand on a flank, and the hind will go on grazing. They show contentment and nothing else: no play, no rut, no alarm.
Abilities
They cannot be harmed. An arrow loosed at a Hind falls short or turns aside, a blade will not cut it, and anything that marks it is corrected by the plane. They do not age or change. Their beauty works on a watcher as the plane itself does, slowly drawing the will out of anyone who looks too long.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing: they cannot be killed for meat or hide, and a hair taken from one is gone by the time the taker reaches the Veil. Their danger is the Apex’s danger in its gentlest form. A hunter who comes for a perfect hide finds the bow will not draw against something so whole, and then finds there is no reason to go home. Some of the plane’s Echo-Statues stand in the meadows among the herds, bows in hand.
Lore and Belief
Hunters on the Material Plane tell of a golden hind that cannot be caught, and the tale is often told against pride: the hunter who follows it never comes back. Some take it as a Mirror Gate story, of a hind seen in a still pool. Travellers who have seen the Hinds say they are the loveliest and saddest thing on the plane, and that the trick is to look away before the herd turns its heads together to look at you.
The best-known version is of a lord’s huntsman who followed a golden hind through a still pool, and of the lord’s hounds who came home alone a month later.