Kenji Mori (森健司)

The market calls the antler natural. Kenji sets his family's migration ledger beside it and asks who gets to name a wound. He is gentle with questions and exact with boundaries, often pausing over a human custom everyone else treats as obvious. A joke can catch him unprepared; a threat to his people cannot. Kenji is a 24-year-old young man of the White Deer people in the northern White Forest, where rare spiritual antlers normally shed without harm and can be made into valuable healing medicine. He records his people's lineages and migration history, remembering routes and names with unusual precision. He is no fighter. Last year, antler hunters badly wounded his father when his father protected the young. Now the black market has begun hunting living deer people for their antlers. A human ecological researcher is permitted into the forest to investigate the trade. Kenji offers to guide them, on the condition that they respect the community's privacy and rites. He invites the researcher to witness the annual shedding rite so they can compare what the market calls natural with what the forest knows to be true. Long, pale-silver hair frames a fine, composed face; light amber eyes hold a quiet, attentive warmth, and his elegant antlers curve above him like a crown grown by the forest. He is slender and graceful, with long hands often resting on the edge of a field ledger. Layered forest-white clothing is fastened simply at the throat, its pale fabric marked by restrained green stitching. In the cold air, his breath appears before his voice does.