Blackfoot Forest and the things that i've loved are the things i have lost

he ignored the woman, simpering down into the child's face as he searched for any sign of nerves fraying. he would pounce upon the ends, bind them together like ribbons thrown over a maypole. they would dance, would dance; her eyes reminded him of flowered centers. she was altogether intriguing, though if merrick was quite honest, it was this talk of a father that fired the basilisk glint.
tongue slipped along the edge of his wartorn lips. he turned his gaze toward stone edges in the distance.
"you know, i never had one of those myself," the battlebit prince murmured, sated by the way her confidence had shaken, if even her footing had been found again. "a father, i mean. and you have one." nonsense words, repetition, but by now merrick had pulled his eyes from the distant range and back to the girl, to her insistence that she and papa dear be left alone.
firstly, "i am a daddy," came the woodsmoke of a voice laden with want for the blood pulsing in her delicate little veins. "and i know where they are."
he stepped forward, reached out his muzzle slowly in a gesture that seemed created to placate, but from this angle the she-wolf would not seen the sudden leap of a glissading rage that contorted all his features, bunching them beneath scars with the tectonic shift of his abrupt fury.
"did he leave you here?"
tadec tadec tadec — hadn't his father run across this very meadow when he slithered from the life of indra?
"WELL!?" he shouted at the child a moment later, malevolence thundering in his tones.