Bearclaw Valley La mystique divine, naturelle, et diabolique. . .

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They crept through the dark together, hungry bellies pressed to the dirt and eyes wide, roaming and wild. It was not two sets of eyes but several; a company, slinking between the trees of their once-home and then deep in to the valley. If they could not find solace in the glade tonight then other accommodations would be made; but they did not know their way, and their nervous chattering soon filled the eaves.
Something pursued this skulk of immigrants from the foxwood; it was larger than them by some measure, gaunt, as wild and as hungry and as insistent about living as they were. Where they ducked to weave between the trees, it followed. They did the trickery known to every tod, finding a narrow creek and then doubling back, hoping to mask their scents; but they were young—mere children by wolf standards—and the growing panic in their scent would draw the ghost to them regardless.
A shriek pierced the night, something unholy, and it set the skulk in to a deeper state of frenzy; a pair of vixens writhed together in the darkness as they sought shelter, and would not be seen again—and the youngest, a tod, was stranded for some time by his fear, which rooted him to the spot a moment too long. There was nothing around him that was familiar; then, the strike. A crunch. The befouling of the air came next, not from the foxes but from their discarded viscera—seepage that would turn the dry dirt black like tar.
Over this last body the lean creature lingered; hunched, picking at the flesh, peeling it away to expose more and more, though no piece satisfied them.

For @Merrick; written by JB.

insensate violence was on the tip of his tongue, but for merrick, there was only sense in blood. to any watchful eyes, even those who had beheld him long, the bearwolf was on the very sort of prowl that had begun to hone him, knife-sharp and cunning.
the boy who had taken his eye. where had he gone, off the mountain? had his bones cracked? did he lie crushed and dying, lips catching 'father' against the nighttime sky?
"but daddy didn't come, did he?" merrick purred, a sibilance, dried leaves skittering over a stone surface. and neither had mommy. hadn't he killed a mother once before? a mommy. a daddy. the boy's belly filled with blood. the child screaming into the night as he was hurled into its embrace.
sharp.
tongue dragging over teeth
"mommy could never leave me alone," he sighed in a fervent moment of clarity. no, she was back. 
sharp, that scent on the air, the taint of tangled entrails turned inside out.
indra was back and now she wore the fur of a child, a cool-eyed being of fire who did not worship him. aventus knew his place behind the hock of the bear witch. it had been driven into him, as near instinct as could be gotten.
jaws snapping bone in his forest on his land; that blood a spilled vial that he had not gotten to taste. the hope of it gave way to curiosity, then to anger, and then the serpent roiled once behind his single eye.
stirring its coils
silent, sure-footed. you can't come with me this time, indra, merrick chided inside his head, slithering over moss-sewn logs, circling, circling.
a lamb,
teeth flashing in the half-light to nip gristle from the edge of freshkilled foxbone.
ursus seemed to inhale about the boy; his scarred muzzle cut slowly from the bushes, that horrid eye with it's ring of scars burning, burning above a glasgow slash of glinting fangs.
"she won't save you. she only saves the young. the worthless," he tittered, and then the shadows seemed to swirl forth and merrick in the miasma latched himself ticklike to the straining flank of the one who had so lovingly offered throat for the endless need merrick could not keep quelled.
if he was struck he did not feel it. ceaseless — indra glowing near. scarlet poured through his jaws; he twisted limbs to see if they might break,
slowly began a patient skinning of the figure that twitched warmly in the welcome throes, washed up like so much flotsam against his ankles.
"breathe and i'll let you go," merrick purred, sides pierced with exertion. a lie a glib lie; all he could see was the mapleleaf burning of his eternal autumn dam and how she had switched her hateful visage for one that he did not yet dare to harm.
cat paws upon sparrow body; merrick frolicked and twisted and bit until his jaw was sore and the sky threatened new paleness in an few hours' time.
a crumpled wraith. nameless. honorless. merrick swallowed slowly a tuft of fur, lipping it into his mouth. the pelage scratched; he forced it down to soak the crimson he already carried in his gut, lifeblood from this — breathless husk.
a lift of his lip. a scowl. but his hunger had been satisfied for now, and the serpent flicked its tongue toward the earth. a great inhale of his own; he licked gently the loam where fox had converged with wolf in a reddied channel. 
paws down; he tossed clods of soft dirt aside, working down into the surface until it was cool beneath his feet, a half-hearted charnel house for this one's bones.
he dragged the body forward, nudged it into the grave he had built. a well-aimed kick sent the warm corpse downward, and unhurriedly merrick covered the torn fur and splayed legs with the yielding rich dirt that fed the valley's trees.
caked in mahogany and cerise, the boy lapped crumbles of mud from his bottom lip. the small pit would hold; he need not explain himself, and in time the bones would become proper gifts for red avicus and reticent aventus.
off he went, a quick saunter carrying him away. merrick would not think of the deposed body again except in the fondest terms of the sweet burgundy droplets that still soothed his tongue, tastes clucking softly until merrick found some shadow or another and went to sleep.