Silvertip Mountain to look into the mirror is to see the future, in blood and rubies

the spiderling listened intently, every part of her denying her father's admission. the bear was not her, she was not the bear, could never be. she knew this, yet she did not know the reason, not truly. the why of it remained shrouded, though perhaps merrick had begun to grasp the thin edges of the truth;
in those crucial weeks of formation, when the siren song of new life lured souls to fill the tiny bodies borne of the bond between stonemaw and bruin-witch, something else had answered the call. an entity of the void, a being so full of emptiness that nothing could ever hope to take its place. a creature that sought to grasp the one thing it could never comprehend: life through the eyes of a mortal, a world in painted in hues it was never meant to see.
a cruel joke, then, to be cast down powerless and lacking — still lacking! — that which it had sacrificed so much to obtain.
but as the weeks passed, asperas began to forget. perhaps the forgetting was a blessing; the unchild would never mourn what could not be recalled. now, she knew only the truths of what was and what was not; power and powerless; god and ungod; life and unlife. she knew that her father spoke of these things now, though she felt her own denial deep in her bones. her eyes fell away from him, back to the bones, and she knew instinctively that she could never voice this denial of the bear-spirit in her father.
spirit, she echoed instead, as if the answer to every question in the universe lay in that single word.