Bearclaw Valley ghost of a monster child

red and dark; light shining behind one's eyelids; the shadow of sleep. children who summoned their own spirits. he did not look to his blackbird.
he did not look to the others; he was utterly consumed by each movement of their small paws, carrying the pair toward the inexorable power of the one that ursus called witch. and yet he was drunk upon the agreement of them to he as had never been before; some tiny link clicking into a notch long before made to house it.
a blink; the eye with its blaze of scars; merrick tasted salt between his teeth. some warm river that cut its way along his hardworn visage.
the downed soul's limbs began to churn against the ground; they could not raise up, only watch in a soaked, half-horror, as the bearcubs approached.
merrick drew a breath, watching the saliva drip from the dark jaws of the boy. and the girl, further back, but no less intent upon the trespasser that had fallen to his jaws. he lifted his head to all of ursus; he held his lover's aubergine stare, smile curling like the edges of shaved bark, an ear-and-a-half sweeping toward the little ones, the little wolves grown up from grubs that mewled at their mother's side.
something, now, something — he must make it so;
build for them a legacy from the roots up. his birthright had been bitter as wormwood, but there was no such reason it must be so for 
a pebble's insistent knock behind the door of his forehead. merrick blinked, lowered his muzzle conspiratorially toward the pair, glancing over them with the firegourd wash of his single eye. he stepped over the harrowed body on the wet grass, and in a motion of fluidity, merrick threw wide the gate of the prisoner's throat, a gout of crimson flaring wide as he sought to anoint 
"my children!" the bearwolf suddenly exhorted, suddenly choked with tears as the spinning death painted all in its path with a torrent of scarlet that appeared as a mist within the rain-filled air.
"ursus loves you." no heaviness in his jaw when he spoke, no clench of anger; they were his. they belonged to him, and the bearwolf at once sent up an exuberant howl of welcome and cunning threat toward those who would ever raise a paw to harm the pair of young bears that astara had granted him.