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

asperas had not left the glass cave since ursus's arrival to the mountain. all around them, constant change; kaleidoscope colors wheeling and winking with the turn of the sun, a brilliant glittering display so thoroughly consuming of the senses it seemed to blot them out entirely. a varicolored void.
the voidsent had eyes only for the bear-god. simulacrum. apostate. usurper. their gaze, subtly mismatched as it started to turn, was hateful on the yellowed bones of the bear. filled with bitter curses and black bile. dethroned in her own mind and desolate, unable to come to terms with a power greater than her own, asperas did not sleep. she only stared.

would love a @Merrick if you have time <3

<3

surely she looked the picture of what his corvid had been in her youth;
when he was not traipsing the narrow shelves, acquainting himself with the mountain, he too was within the cave that glittered.
he lay in repose, watching his strange daughter glower toward the bones.
merrick spoke, rising: "the bears are why we have our power," a voice firm, resonant, gliding into the crystalline corners. "i saw him die."
for surely it was the self-same bear.
he nudged asperas closer to the great, grinning skull. "you know it as well as i do, night-pearl."

merrick's presence slipped between the fraying threads of her focus, a subtle, silent thing, until it wasn't. his voice reverberated through the cavern, looped through her thoughts again and again. i saw him die die die die die die —
the nudge broke them from their reverie of fading echoes, bony frame cast through the shimmering shattered-glass aura wreathing the bones. a flurry of scintillating cloudwisps flared up around her, an ephemeral cocoon of silvered latticework. gone in a moment, though it had never truly existed.
the din of a million whisper-screams filled her mind. a soft shudder fluttered over her frame, but asperas did not shy from the tumult. sin, she sensed, in her spite for the bear-god her father revered. but retribution did not cross her mind, so she pressed forward, sniffing delicately along the timeworn edges of the skull, the points of teeth long unused. then she turned to merrick, expression unreadable. die?

there was already chaos in asperas;
she had already drawn first blood, but merrick did not yet know the difference in the child. was it only instinctual, the malevolence that had been meant for her at conception? black feathers, red leaves, all between.
"his body no longer moved. his spirit entered my chest. i am also the bear, and you as well."

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.

he heard, and in the small voice, he also sensed another. "your mother, she has a sister. this sister, she hears. spirit," the man said back to asperas, and looked at her closely with his remaining eye.
who called to her tiny veins; did the bear already whisper? but he had seen how the child looked upon the bones, and it was not with his reverence.
in time, the bearwitch, told himself, and settled upon his greyscale haunches, scar-wrapped muzzle gesturing toward the skull again. "ursus."

new words, and new interest to keep them company; asperas perked at the revelation, mind opening to new possibilities. a sister to the caretaker, like her; another subject to the voices of the voiceless and the unseen. but asperas did not entertain the thought of further similarity; none could be as the unchild was, surely, and this meant something in itself. perhaps the power of the bear did not encroach on their own... but what that meant, they could not fathom. even a strange child such as asperas, eldritch and other from first breath, was subject to the limitations of youth. her imagination stretched far for one her age, but not far enough. asperas watched merrick's gestures carefully, eyes alight like never before.
where, they said at last, gaze questioning for all that their tone lacked. where sister.

i hope you don't mind me experimenting and making your daughter strange as hell :')

never <3

"gone. for now."
"she might come back."
merrick began to search asperas, her small and hell-formed features, seeking the rooting of that felfire spark suddenly leaping to life in the child's eyes.
"she speaks to spirits. leads where they command."
merrick did not blink.
"do you hear them also?"

gone. asperas contemplated this, expression far-away as her father continued. mind journeyed miles in mere moments, only winking back to the here and now when merrick laid a question of his own at the unchild's paws. for several long moments, asperas stared.
horrors, she said, in a tone of agreement. and then: hear. whether this was a correction or elaboration, asperas did not clarify.

horrors.
"isn't that interesting," merrick drawled, settling down and folding one forepaw under his scarred chest. 
his blackbird had named these two as surely as she had their first brood. a sensation, and merrick took this silent missive, interpreting it for himself.
horrors.
"what do they say, snakeling?"

what do they say, snakeling?

lips curled, peeled back in a flash of mismatched canines. what do they say? and she might never have answered, but the unchild needed to know it too. eyelids fluttered, slowly, down down down until the world was black —
and asperas listened. she drank in the quiet, picked apart the threads of deepening silence til they split and frayed into a million thin keening voices. lips parted, and she reached for a thread, willing it to materialize in the depths of her throat.
it started low and guttural, the creak of a hundred year old door — and it deepened, groaned, growing fast in her throat like a dark nimbus unfurling into cloudburst. and then, abruptly, up — sharp and shrill, stone on metal, screaming as eyes flew open with pupils blown and reflecting the other god, the bear, that damnable skull —
and then it stopped. and then asperas blinked away the dark of dilated eyes, and saw her father once again.
die, the snakeling licked her lips. spirits. die.

ju-on: the curse of the furries