Stone Circle One more body to bury

I didn't proofread this because it is long and my brain is dead, hopefully it makes some semblance of cohesive and emotional sense lol My apologies for holding this up! I believe @Valette is next?

They were alone, in silence, for as long as they could be. Easthollow was never slow to intercept anyone who lingered on their borders -- stranger, or family, and especially not when coupled with a call as urgent as Arlette's.

Mother was the first to come. When his eyes met hers, he felt a moment of tense emotion. Palpable, and pointed; her eyes had only reached him, and Merrit felt a heaviness settle in his chest. What unspoken judgments did she hide behind the quickening of her step and her sudden shift to a brighter countenance? He felt Arlette shift at his side, saw his mother notice the corpse of her son, their brother.

Yet she did not seem to recognize him. Who could blame her? When was the last time she had even seen Clay? How long ago, since Merrit had chased him off of Moonspear, protected him from their teeth -- and for what? To see him fall to the jaws of another.

Why hadn't he left Moonspear the moment Clay ran off?

Why hadn't he followed?

A sliver of reality sunk its talons through his chest; his heart twisted, constricted, beat with a rushing pace.

Two others came. In any other place, he would not have recognized the younger. He had been so small when he'd left. So had Leta, Newt, and Clay. But his brother and sister were as absent as Keen, and as Merrit turned his eyes from mother to West, he watched the boy -- now a man -- in those short, uninterrupted seconds -- watched him look upon their brother's scorched and shredded corpse -- watched, as recognition dawned.

"Clay."

His brother's voice sent a whisper up his spine; Merrit shivered, and his paws felt numb against the earth.

Numb, until Greyback lumbered forward, a ghost along the plains, and Merrit's eyes fluttered with a strike of sudden shock. He wasn't dead? But he had seen him --

The patriarch hunched with age, and silvered hairs stole any gleam of youth from his face -- he was not dead, but this would surely kill him, and Merrit wished he had thought quick enough to obscure the body, to side-step to block Greyback's path so the patriarch would not see.

But the patriarch did see. He saw, as West had seen, and he stood, as stone stiff as a glacier, silent in the tears he wept over his lands.

Arlette offered the quickest explanation before her warmth peeled away from his side and he found himself alone, an alien amongst those he had once known. He did not notice the pale girl beyond them. The tenseness, the uncertainty, the grief, they pigeonholed him into this moment, and he felt everything and nothing at all.

"He has been disgraced in too many ways," his own voice surprised him when he finally spoke. His throat felt heavy, and his words, as if detached from himself altogether. Detached from them; his family's familiar accent no longer clung to the raven's voice. Instead his swam with the mark of having travelled many places, and he wondered how Clay might've talked --

"We must bring him to the stones," he looked to West, to Greyback. Could not look at mother. Wished he could turn and run like Arlette, but as far as he knew Ezra was not here, and neither Ezekiel nor Stark, and West was a man, but still a child, a grieving brother. And Merrit -- in this moment, he was the eldest son. And as the eldest, he stepped forward to grip what remained of Clay. He had failed to protect this of his mother's brood, and he would bear the body of the brother they had lost.