Silvertip Mountain the songs are all the same

today he took @Asperas to the whisperwood. the yellow leaves stood tall around the crystalline cave, and he trudged deeper and deeper until the light of midday became muted and soft.
"what do you hear?" he asked the little birdling;
and thought of her mother, lying disconsolate.
he would tell her of their thorn child later.

a change in the unchild, since that night when the bear-god had struck the stars and they had cried their cursed tears onto the land. asperas had become reticent. contemplative. reclusive. they guarded their secret closely, squirreled away where none would think to search — and, in the quiet of night, the night-pearl sought to understand the bear-god's curse.
she rarely slept.
asperas remained watchful as her father led her through the whisperwood, gaze dull and mismatched where once it had been bright and sky-hued.
silence, hot on the heels of the bear-priest's question. asperas listened, parsing the threaded whisperscreams woven into the quiet, under the distant sweetness of birdsong. birds sing, a murmur. bear screams: blood.
she looked up at merrick. the bear tore the sky down. he gave me... brow furrowed. what did he give her? i don't know.

he had heard of the transpiring in their woodland, the fate of spirits overhead.
merrick had not missed how the bloodfire in his tiny spiderweave daughter had faded.
he had always taken it for a truth that she had been touched by the bear, and apophis too. but to hear it!
chills trailed the length of his hackles.
he saw his unchild as a pathway through which the might of ursus could speak, a vessel already attuned.
a rabbit raised its patchwork ears too soon above the nearby grass.
merrick swept after, unthinking, and captured it writhing and screaming. a bear-blessed snap.
he carried it back, and dropped it beneath the too-soon stolen flatness of the bearling's eyes.
"he gave you the capacity to kill."
the rabbit's pupil dilated with horror.

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the sounds of the forest, dimmed in her own ears by the whispers she'd made companions of, in that moment seemed to asperas a silent tune to which her father danced. she watched wordlessly as movement took him, jerked him away and further until a shriek pierced through her glass threads and shattered them to nothingness. asperas was left with raw ringing silence, — true silence, not the facade of the unfocused mind — and the horror of bare-faced reality.
the rabbit's terror was her own, for a few seconds that felt full of eternity.
this was the bear-god's curse.
she snapped forward and caught skin. as easily as it tore away from the flesh, each moment of the creature's torment was like rending her own muscle from the bone. agony. the rabbit kicked and caught her chest with dirty jagged little nails, leaving tiny lacerations asperas scarcely felt. she pinned it with a paw, teeth finding the spaces round one panic-blown eye with force enough to rupture and snap and tear until she came away and left a gored gaping void. trembling little jaw next, torn asunder so each breath spurted crimson.
asperas suffered, and the rabbit died. and as it began to shudder through its death throes, her teeth finally found its throat and made an end to the carnage of her mind and its body.
but it did not end. not for asperas.

merrick watched in solemn awe and adoration and love;
this, this, should have been the gem of indra's nurturing in him!
oh if only she had seen the serpent within him as it grew!
if only she had fed him as he fed asperas now, in full and delighted acceptance of her inherent nature.
but he would not forget avicus, not ever, and presently merrick grew melancholy.
"soon you will need heavier bodies than this," he marvelled aloud.

it did not end, but rose foul and creeping like bile in the back of her throat, like scathing tendrils of panic in the hollow of her chest. teeth sank deeper into still-warm flesh, blood filling in the spaces between each needling ivory instrument and running in broken rivulets down night-kissed chin and throat. asperas closed their eyes, seeing that glowing streak in the sky again, the color of midnight wishes, the color of astara's eyes. then the glimmering nightscape of the skyrock, the star-dusted sky torn down and crushed into nightglass.
asperas knew, then, what had to come next.
she lifted the corpse, deaf to the bruin-witch's gleeful praise, and started toward the source of her suffering. the bear-god's cursed gift. the skyrock. her gait spoke of a sinister purpose, perhaps an invitation for her bloodcrazed father's presence — but whether he followed mattered little. what came next would not depend on his presence, nor the lack of it.
when she reached that hidden place, she would uncover the skyrock, and baptize it in the blood and terror of her first victim.

merrick followed indeed, reverent in his silence and observant in the way of a priest.
asperas had been marked for many things. her pathway beside the bear had become very different from his own. if it bothered the man, he would not admit it; admit the worry that that he could not see over his snakeling's horizon.
eventually her step did not turn and merrick fell behind, ebbing to a respectful distance.

merrick's footsteps echoed her own, mirrored rustlings through the greenery until the changeling slowed in the sight of her sacred space. an uncharacteristic caution stiffened her steps to doe-like hesitancy, rabbit clutched tighter in her tiny jaws. asperas laid it upon the ground carefully when she had drawn near enough, and reached out with one paw to dig at the loose earth covering the glittering skyrock.

she extracted the object of her curse with all the precision of a surgeon rooting around in an open skull. then she laid it on the dirt, and tore the rabbit from sternum to groin. the corpse was still fresh and warm, and the blood still flowed freely, so she lifted the corpse by the scruff and shook it so that a cascade of red rained down on the glassy surface of the rock. it seemed to glow under the sanguine wetness.

asperas's chest pulsed with a raw, chafed feeling.

once upon a time, merrick had stripped the hide from a screaming rabbit in front of a boy from easthollow.
that same cruelty was refined in asperas. it had become more than mere malevolence and was a rapture and a worship all its own. merrick likened this scene to the ecstasy he found in the moment of realization that death was only moments away, reflected in the pupil of a victim.
she too had a stone.
was it her mother's own?
merrick did not come closer, only watched with a low and adoring mien at all of his child's actions.