He had wanted too long for his God to feel the lash of his anger; Jinx was correct. Lecter had been the most devoted of his kith to the causes of Sos. And yet, as he bathed the wound in his shoulder, and spat crushed comfrey into it, he understood that he could no longer be angry with the Dark One for His decisions. It was not for the madman to know, the inner workings of Sos, and Lecter swallowed this knowledge, though a bitter cup it was.

His eyes swam with sudden confusion; he drew himself up, halting in his steps. She was here, and shock mingled with awe and an icy sort of joyous relief in his heart. But he was silent; the girl, like her mother, was unmoved by the physicality. Lecter moved to her side, limp lessened by time and by his delight at seeing his daughter once more, and kept pace with her in quietude as the dying sounds of the summerkissed lands danced around them.

Lecter was too taken with his daughter's continued existence in the foul world to correct her piping praise of Sos, though his jaw tightened somewhat. But perhaps He had not discarded Clarice; the girl had always traveled a straight path, a narrow path, carved out no doubt by the Dark One himself. The pale shaman watched his pet oddity clean the foxblood from her chestfur for a moment; she was at once both the same and changed.

"How did you find your way here?" he inquired softly, fighting the foreign urge to embrace her and chastise her for ever leaving his side.

"Jinx has come as well," Lecter proffered; perhaps the name would evoke the more pleasant memories of her childhood.

He watched the colour of her innermost being shift — though Clarice kept to her own, he was still her father, and sensed such things with paternal intuition — but he was silent. He recalled briefly the child she had been, already then death-touched, her mind all but spirited away by the souls that surrounded her. A strange girl, but his child nonetheless, and not for the first time since their meeting, he wished to touch her, to allow his cold love for her be manifested.

And so he reached out, intending to brush her pale cheek with the end of his muzzle. She was his, blood of his blood, and while Clarice perhaps would disappear again, driven by her own inner voices, Lecter would remain her father, would remain rooted, a rock against which her chaotic storms could lash.

The man could not help the chill that kissed the base of his spine and sent sprang the fur on his nape upright; he himself had received such visions in his dehydrated, drug-induced haze upon the mountain cliffs, and it struck him that they had shared such dreams. But he did not ask her what it was that she meant; he understood, well enough, and his icewater eyes remained impassive.

"Will you stay?"

His jaw tightened in shock; here was a side of Clarice that he had not seen before, and he watched, bereft, as she drew into herself, both physically and mentally. She could not answer him, and somehow he knew that she would not. And so, attempting to scrape her expression of revulsion from his mind's eye, Lecter motioned with a careful muzzle toward the formerly stained fur of her chest. "A hex?" the madman inquired, wanting on some level to relate to his strange child, to grasp hold of some aspect of Clarice before she was gone, carried off by her voices and their thrall upon her.

Lecter was still somewhat grieved by her reaction to him, but Clarice quickly redeemed herself with her piping little voice, so disjointed and yet full of passion and verve for her voices, her Loa. His grim face slid grudgingly into a small smile; he settled his haunches on the ground and nodded in her direction. "I asked of Him your life, to preserve it. When you did not follow us here, when you departed and did not return, I —"

His throat clenched with the remembrance of the fear he had experienced that day, the thought that his odd little girl had been lost forever. "I thought you had died in the Fire," the madman finished simply. Her words.

"No!" he hissed suddenly, then caught himself. "No," Lecter repeated, shutting his eyes for a long moment at the shifting of her own clear gaze. "I could not." He had lost Shearwater, Koios, Nanuq, Valkari. He had lost Starling. He had even lost his God, and his faith had been in danger of waning before he had discovered the three lost souls besides himself who had straggled here. Damned he would be if he lost Clarice, also.

But his body, perhaps it would go on swelling his lungs with air, forcing him to eat, to slumber, even to breed. "I do not wish to live without you, Clarice," he muttered, quite put off by his own rusted and incomprehensible emotions. I love you, his icewater gaze whispered momentarily, but he did not speak in such concrete terms to his little one because she did not understand them. The world was evershifting, and Freyja Clarice had melded herself to its movements; she was as fluid as the Loa, and he marvelled that she had held so long to reality.

Her emotions shook him so; she was cold for a moment; then filled with tears the next, her small voice breaking, reminding Lecter of her childhood and the chaos she had struggled with even then. The breath was all but knocked from him; pale audits slid back against his skull, and he held her eyes with his own for a gentle heartbeat, for what seemed an infinite amount of time, a millennia, before he locked back his own churning heart and proffered her a small grim smile.

"It is settled, then, but neither of us have passed on yet. We are both still breathing. Tell me what you have learned." And with that, the weathered shaman turned their conversation onto its proper track, one that would surely be of interest to his wayward oddity.

Lecter listened quietly, for this was the most coherent she had been thus far. He secretly wished she would expound upon this coven to him, these women who had obviously been far beneath his pet in skill, but she seemed happy enough rambling to her father, and so he allowed this with pleasure. Always the pupil, her bright mad eyes glinted upwards into his, and he nodded. "Always."

In the service of one so brash and shifting as Sos, a true follower must be ever-ready to be educated further in His wants, His demands. Clarice knew this, as did he himself. "Your knowledge of herbs, how far does it reach?" By which he meant to extend an invitation for the girl to list that which she knew about the surrounding foliage and its uses.