merrick saw astara arranged beneath the scarlet winding, with flowers from the sunfield caught in the blood-matted fur. beside her, the holy pelvic bone she had always carried from each of their homes, nudged lovingly where it might rest eternal as well beside the welcoming decay of his blackbird's body;
he gazed at what remained of her beneath rent flesh and gleaming bone;
merrick stood stiffly staring at her until his breath galloped and at last he forced into the air a horrible and clawing howl for the wolves of ursus at once to stand and witness what had been done.
his cry also for the lost girl and the boy who had run away in merrick's preturnaturally focus elsewhere;
merrick freed the captive with a word. the prisoner called keme was warned away, warned of ursus' willingness to take back this mercy.
when as many of the bearwolves had come as would arrive, their witch stared dour and unseeing upon each face, tilting his muzzle with its ridges of scar-laced flesh toward the crumpled mound of torn fur only half recognizable as wolf.
"the saints of the dying lights have killed your queen. my wife. the mother to my children."
merrick drew a breath and placed an inner hand upon the humming zeal of the serpent rising until it felt his skull might split with its expanding scales.
"i mean to have blood for her. ursus must go. she must be avenged. and yet i will not demand that you come with me. i will go alone, if i must. if you wish to take our name," merrick went on, glancing between all of them, "and go elsewhere, i will not stop you. the saints are many, and they are powerful. if you come with me, do not expect to return."
the single eye burned, singeing the air with a melodic and crazed power;
three tears, falling softly as his jawline tensed, but the voice next was the splintering tones of a devil crawling from merrick's skin;
"and if you accompany me, prepare to kill."
the lacerated face with its old wounds transformed into a rictus.
"their young ones. their old ones. the sick ones. the mothers. ursus has no mercy. ursus has no charity."
night had swept over ursus by now; it blued the air and set merrick into a cherrywood darkness that shimmered in a mirage of hatred. "a canyon of red sand was where i last knew them to be."
"i leave at dawn." his remaining eye rested upon aventus and avicus in turn. 
merrick meant to hear nothing more. he turned his back upon the assemblage and bent his head over the ragged pelt of his corvid ruler in a fel and charcoal silhouette.
a vigil.
the last before merrick departed ursus a final time.