Silvertip Mountain cultist

and so the shadow returned to that mountain where first they had tasted bitter betrayal. the taste lingered once more in their maw, stark and foul as they gazed upon familiar lands. the void-priest fell back until they felt @Ingram II at their side, turning expectant eyes on their ashen companion. the shadow would not call upon the bear cult; her companion would, or else the cultists would stumble on the pair of waifs on their doorstep.

to the mountain that ursus had claimed from the forest of neverwinter, the pair walked and ingram was glad in some respects that he had never wandered too far from ursus' claim when he'd went out on his searches. that one would prove fruitful he could've never imagined. his resolve was set: he would observe her attempts to get her father to see and then he would leave with her.

to where ever their path led them.

they come to the ursus' borders and ingram observes as she falls back until she is beside him, and catches her expectant look towards him.

he tips his head back and calls for @Merrick.

Y'all are free to skip Ingram as needed; just tag me if you'd like me to jump back in the thread with him! <3

the splashes of the woman's blood had not left his mind. merrick felt himself contorting inside the cave. it was as if his bones were breaking. reforming him. 
merrick was reshaping 
and what emerged from the crystalline maze was hardly wolf. whittled down to his sinew and his muscles, merrick pulsed with a deep and hungry violence.
tongue slid to wet his teeth;
merrick blended with the night and with the mountain's shadows. he did not emerge from the fringe of forest to greet his rawboned unchild.
she was no longer his.
when merrick's scarred and one-eyed face at last bloomed from the foliage, it was without a fatherly love upon his face. he stared at her with a long etching of moments. ingram went fully ignored.
"you were meant to be her heir." his voice was a cracked rasp. "she is dead."
the madness lurched. merrick drew a shaking breath to think of her black fur fading to nothingness along the scarlet winding. beneath the snow.
"you abandoned ursus." surely she understands by now that the sons and daughters of merrick and astara have always been held to far higher standards. 
the remaining eye burned. merrick shifted closer. the serpentine coils roiled across his expression. "for what reason have you come back now?"

the war reaper called out, and the mountain shook its coat and flung its fleas in offering at the feet of the shadow. the mountain did not bring to her merrick, the man, the priest, the father. instead, madness; a creature twisted by false worship and needless grief and hunger, so much hunger.

so much was different, yet so much was the same.

the shadow bore the ramblings of the madman they had once called a father with the proud, grim silence of the eternal. he spoke of an heir, of the dead, of abandonment and return, and the shadow knew then that his blindness ran bone-deep.

he would never see; his mortal mind was long since broken, stuck in endless loop of all the things that would never touch his greatest creation.

she is in otherworld now, the shadow said, at length, tasting the thinning wolf-scents on the air. spirits call out, say: return to ursus, return to father-betrayer, make him see. but you are lost. you follow bear, face of hunger, devourer of all. now bear swallow ursus, and still hunger for more.

the shadow turned away, for their meeting had already stretched too long; it was too late, and this was a waste. the prophet had waited too long to heed the call of the spirits. they would not make that mistake again.

lost.
betrayer.
bear.
merrick chuckled, a low and grating sound that gradually became louder and louder; ah, surely @Aventus and @Arielle could hear it now, spiraling spiraling spiraling;
he stared hard at the rawboned child in front of him. hate showed merrick what was beneath: she wore astara's fur and astara's eyes and astara's feralness but she was not;
"i should have killed you and your brother," the bearwolf ground out. "perhaps if she had not — poured herself — into you she would not have weakened."
merrick's malice had found its mark. in asperas was all that could be. he saw her suddenly, violently, standing at the heading to a path where he could not follow.
the man's mind begged for death;
oh, to lie in the snow against his blackbird's bones and become nothing more. his single eye slid to ingram. but that was all. merrick was not despondent to lose asperas; she was like averna, tethered to transparency. "you will always belong to the bear. it is in your blood."
"but i do not want you to come back."
his words were final. merrick had ceased his time in fatherhood. he led to bloodshed now, earning the peace that would come when he could be reunited with her again;
forgive me, he breathed to her shade; she is our child but she is not mine.
merrick felt his heart might shatter into shards of spirit.
the time for words was over.
he advanced, ready to drive back and out the wayward child who saw now fit to betray ursus and malign the bear.

in that moment, the shadow forsook all that had once been paramount, the very roots of mortal existence. from the day the unchild had first made the decision to abandon the cult of the bear, they had known the mountain would never again be home; there was a new finality in this, however. a cutting of blood ties that could never be strung back together.

before the mad bear-priest ever spoke, the shadow had made this decision. they did not turn back, but beckoned to @Ingram II to follow.

merrick's ire fell on the ears of the dead, unhearing and uncaring.

let him wish and want and hunger til the end of his days.

i am infinite.

ingram is quiet during their exchange, brief as it was; as he should have been. the words they parried back and forth with were not meant for him ...and he held no specific feelings about this estrangement. how could he? when he committed the worst of all crimes: matricide.

merrick advances to drive him out but ingram will and does not linger. when his shadow beckons he joins her at her side; her loyal companion for as long as she desired his presence.

it was the end.
he was not surprised when ingram departed. they were children, and asperas had come into this world not whole but part of a pair. as aventus and avicus before her.
there was no relief in merrick. no joy. there was nothing.
and yet as he watched her shadow fade, merrick wanted to scream.
he stood in silence long after the pair had disappeared from silvertip's border.
their pilgrimage here — merrick felt breath hitch in his throat. the endless loss was insurmountable.
the bear will purge by blood.
merrick turned. he would go back to the scarlet winding and lie alongside the draped arrangement of her bones.