Lou

There is a stag in the snow.

'Stag' being at least in UK culture the image of the single man - connotations of masculinity, even within the bounds of it being the male of the species who grow antlers. 'In the snow' - positions this directly in parallel to the previous scene: "Dorian stands in the snow with shaking, near-frozen fingers and scotch-warmed thoughts, watching Zachary through the glass"

Blink and he will vanish.

I have personally developed a fair bit of Dorian's backstory - an unavoidable tragedy of writing someone for so long - but as he is handled in TSS he is elusive, shady, difficult to pin down. He is the figure in the shadow, even to himself much of the time. He does not appear with distinct presence in the narrative when he does first appear, nestled comfortably into both a novel and a set of parenthesis: "He heads back upstairs to the almost empty reading rooms (a librarian with a cart organizing books, a student in a striped sweater typing at a laptop, a man who looks like he’s probably a professor actually reading a Donna Tartt novel) and heads to the far corner" Even if this isn't the first glimpse of him (though I think it's at least close to the most explicit first sighting), it's characteristic enough that it makes the point: he vanishes. Blink and you miss him. He's there without explanation or excuse, he will appear as and when he sees fit. He is a member in high standing of the Collector's Club. He knows how to disappear. And how to remain unseen. Unknown. He is a voice in the darkness first, which tells Zachary a story (forever obsessed with it being his voice and his smell which is how he first appears to Zachary. He is a scent, a breath, a story).

Was he a stag at all or was he something else?

Similarly to the above, he is elusive, he is difficult to pin down. But also in this line is the specific introduction of doubt that he is not what he seems he is.

I am a problematic person to expand upon this thought because I have nearly two million words worth of Ao3 works, WIPs, drafts, and notes which try to make sense of what else it is that he is, becomes, and can be. But even within TSS he becomes so many things: he is a storyteller, he is a figure on the steps of the NYPL, he is a spectre strung up in ribbons and severed door handles, he is a Guardian but no he isn't, he is a figure in a book the same way as Zachary (when reading Sweet Sorrows: “This…this boy in the library, with the woman in the green scarf. This is me,” he says."), but then he is anointed with the scimitar tattoo and maybe he is; he's a crewmember on Lenore's ship, he's a guest at the inn, he is hand-in-hand with the owl-headed man, he is the illustration from Fortunes and Fables, carrying it in living ink over his skin. He is a murdered, he is a lover, he kills, he restores life, he hopes, he despairs, he gives up, he gets up again.

He cuts so many figures in the darkness, and even more to Zachary: he is a phantom paramour, he a storyteller, he is a spectre and a missed opportunity, he is an unconscious body and the smell lemon and leather, he is dead, he is alive again, he is an enigma, he is a grief, and then he is so many visions: he is a temptation in a winter sweater, he is a gift from the moon, he is the resolution to the story and the one who told it to him in the first place.

He slips through cracks in the narrative you wouldn't even know were there unless you'd read it five times.

Was he a sentiment hanging unspoken or a path not taken or a closed door left unopened?

ALL OF THOSE THINGS AND MORE.

I have written/developed a lot of Leander's story (OC from Fateheart) and spent a lot of time in that space thinking about the relationships between members of the Collector's Club and the doors they handled/hunted/destroyed. This is something Dorian and Leander have in common, this relationship with the doors of the Harbour: was Dorian also haunted by these impossible gateways, kept out of reach even though they were entrusted to destroy them? Did he ever try to open one, just to see if the stories they were told were really true? Maybe this inference is all me but I am taking this wording to mean that he didn't. He carried out his job with absolute accord. All those closed doors left unopened. All the times he could have reneged, or chased a different route and didn't.

And the 'path left untaken' - don't get me started on Dorian "remembering how he felt reading Zachary’s book, reading about what guardians once were, trying to guess what his sword would have looked like if he were a real guardian and not a poor imitation of one." How long has he been holding it against himself that all he ever really achieved was to sell his autonomy and capacity to a woman who strung him along his entire formative life? And how much longer before that did he suspect that the story they were being sold was nothing but a poor imitation of a much greater path?

Or was he a deer, glimpsed amongst the trees and then gone, disturbing not a single branch in his departure?

Okay first of all, 'glimpsed' but 'disturbing not a single branch in his departure' is all enough of its own worries - imagining that maybe he never made a difference to the story, that his part was so inconsequential, or perhaps so badly misguided, so poorly led, so futile, that he leaves nothing unchanged, that all he is is an image??

But mainly, and crucially, 'was he a deer'? There is so much here and it forms the main thesis of The Lotus Flowers, the follow-up sequel to Fateheart. I am too tired right here right now to do it justice - and I think it fares better being told in story form anyway - but if all he ever has been is a series of figures, of stories, of illustrations to the greater fables he spends his life inhabiting, then what is he to himself, even?

What is his relationship with gender? With his own body and expressions of selfhood as told through body and dress and voice and movement? You could read 'deer' as diminutive: not the regal, crowned stag figure but something smaller, more fleeting - is it a loss of masculinity? And is that a bad thing, or here is it an inevitable thing? That Dorian is this too - not just the stag but also the deer. That one figure amongst many is the fleeting thing which leaves no traces, the hint amidst the trees of some other colour, some living, moving thing?

I dunno that's just me. But I did also write 250k words of fiction about it.

The stag is a shot left untaken. An opportunity lost.

Well this is the one which is something of a gut-punch. I'm thinking of Allegra's final, parting gesture to him - her attempt to shoot him at point blank range, once he has finally expended all usefulness, even as bait to Mirabel or Zachary. To discard of him. WIth so little ceremony and nothing more than a dismissal: "What makes you think I want to talk?” And an opportunity lost: Zachary? Or the opportunity to die, perhaps? Or, gorgeously, the intrinsically connected dual-wield of both. Zachary is a life he will never get, Allegra's is a death he won't get either. He slips through the floor of the earth away from either of them, as if "disturbing not a single branch".

Of course this could also be the shots he himself didn't take - his regrets about Zachary, about not pursuing what he really wanted soon enough - perhaps because it took him so long to work out that it was what he wanted at all.

Stolen like a kiss.

Definitely thinking of Zachary, then. This is something heartbreaking: is all pleasure stolen? Waiting in the snow, standing on the other side of the glass. So long in stasis, trying your best to work out how to think for yourself - starting with such small things: “I’ve spent a great deal of my life doing what other people wanted for me and not what I wanted myself and I’m trying to change. Impulse decisions. No shoes. It’s refreshing in a terrifying sort of way.” What if a single kiss was as far as he had gotten with working out what exactly it was he wanted from Zachary? What if that was as much of an impression of himself as he had managed to glean through the trees - the first sign of caring for something beyond what he has, his whole life, been told to care about?

Or maybe it's just poetry, hm.

In these new forgetful times with their changed ways sometimes the stag will pause a moment longer.

"How did everything lead to this? One book, one man. Years of mystery and tedium and now things insist on happening all at once." The times they are a-changing indeed. Mirabel surviving the collapsing ceiling of the Harbour. Zachary feels it in his toes.

This is almost besides any Dorian-flavoured points, but I like in this line that change is a passive quality, almost: the times are forgetful and their ways are changed. Nobody - least of all the narrative - could presume to say who changed them or how. Yet time is behaving differently. Moving strangely. Those years of mystery and tedium and now time changes its ways. And inversely, Dorian slows down: there is a story happening now. The stag is almost out of step of these new times and their changing ways. Perhaps he has been out of step with regular time all his life.

Which makes sense: a storyteller must, one would be presume, be outside the story to tell it.

He waits though once he never waited, would never dream to wait or wait to dream.

CHIASMUS!!! Again with stag-Dorian being a creature out of time, out of the passage of how these stories move and flow.

Again I am thinking of the Collector's Club. Has he not spent his life in a culture/setting where they were set apart from how the rest of the world experiences the flow of Fate and Time? Something about cult structures and otherness, the weirdness of internalised set-apart-ness, of never feeling in the central stream. It's a position of power, to be sure: to be outside something, to be able to manipulate it, enter it and exit it at will - it is part of Dorian's slipperiness, his ability to morph and fade and hide in plain sight - but it is also a very manipulable space.

Imagine the dreaming that goes on in a group of people who have been ostracised from the shared understanding of the rest of the world and told indefinitely to wait. I go into this in a bit of detail in Fateheart, and far more in other fics, but I think this is a crucial part of the psyche of ex-Collector's Club members. It is a deeply isolating social and psychological position, and how much more so for Dorian, who was forcibly ejected from the comfort of the exceptionalism narrative, even though it was still alive and well and now totally beyond his reach?

Imagine being part of something secret and clandestine, almost gnostic in its private, privileged knowledge of things beyond the common world - and then being cut out of even those who have been separated. Imagine how hard it would ever be to dream again that you knew what you were.

He waits now.

<s>YOU BET YOUR ASS HE DOES</s>

In this fragile space called 'now'. Outside of time, at the will and whim of fate, maybe. Positioned as nothing at all. Learning from scratch how to dream for himself. How to figure out what he wants.

Of course he started with impulse decisions and no socks. Reclaiming a position, even a trembling, determined, static 'now', in the face of so much manipulation and rupture is enormous.

For someone to take the shot. For someone to pierce his heart.

'to take the shot' - has he been waiting to die all this time? 'to pierce his heart' or has he been waiting to live? To be alive, to love, to be loved, to be seen, to be captured? To be something less ephemeral than the figure in the trees and the shifting shadow through frosted glass?

I don't know. I'm doing this about it-

To know he is remembered.

To be more than a faceless voice in a story, leaving more than a mark in the snow and a broken branch in his wait.

GOD it makes me have to go for long walks and cry to stupid music.

I love this character. I have talked endlessly with friends about how little Dorian we get but how much we get out of what is there.

I don't know if I had never read this stag passage as Dorian before or if I had and then forgot. Either way I am going to sit with this for a while.

'To know he is remembered' - to expound upon the way time is used here: I love the past participle and the present tense together in this sentence. They are holding hands. He is remembered. He is and will be. He will wait for his chance to make a mark on this story.

And what a mark. What a devastating thing he is heading towards. After all that deprivation, all that uncertainty, all that disillusion - to begin to dream for himself again, to pursue bare feet and impulse decisions and finding something called a self that is stag and deer and both and none of them. To see Zachary through the frosted glass and think that maybe that is something he wants.

He was waiting for someone to pierce his heart. He was maybe thinking of Zachary. Yet when it happens only one of them is killed, and he is the one who has pierced his own heart, as effectively as if the shot had been taken after all.

Man.

I would talk more about how in the text of TSS the stag appears to Zachary each time he has an encounter with Dorian in the depths, which is also something I didn't notice until today. But frankly I think this is enough for now - if I start writing about Zachary's specific place in all of this I will not go to bed for another 3 hours.

But to end here: consider this person's slow, tentative, autonomous re-approach to the narrative: letting himself be seen, of his own volition, in his own time, letting himself choose, letting himself ease in as a voice, a hand in the dark, a notecard, an encounter. Imagine how much strength it has taken to slow himself after all that unsteadiness, and to hold that precarious 'now', looking in at Zachary, and to dream for himself. To wait.

Then to lose it all. To be shot after all. To be the one who takes the shot after all.

And then to open that dang box and give to his not-quite-lover the heart which changes everything.