She had seen the Omen, and her lips had writhed over her teeth uncontrollably in a silent snarl of victory, while her heart tore itself asunder with the crushing knowledge that came with it. It was knowledge she would carry to her grave without ever uttering to another soul: the Omen had shown All.

Kaskae Kesuk was dead. Kerberos Aok was dead. Nutaaq. All followers of Atka, those wolves of Light, that had once stood upon Shearwater soil, dead. The massive black bear had hulked over the carcass of the white, with frothy blood pooled in the cavern of its maw. Its tongue and teeth had been baptised in her blood when it turned to Jinx, and in the dead bear's side, a gaping wound from whence the blood had come.

She was a simple wolf, and conclusions came easily: Sos had slain Atka. Dark had consumed Light. Victory had come at last for the Father, who had slipped malignantly back into his realm of shadow and spirits with the gleeful chuckling of an amused child.

(There was no room in her brain for the possibility that the white bear had died prior to being found by the black, nor that the black had become so terribly hungry, and diseased with a parasite unknown, it had succumbed to consuming the flesh of its own kind. There was no room in her brain, addled by the gods and the circumstances of her birth and the knowledge she had been raised with, to believe that the bears had been coincidentally there where the river had slowed enough for her to find footing, and that their presence did not irrefutably mean the death of all the wolves she love. That bear had then gone into hibernation, but she had merely witnessed it slip into the earth and disappear, a ghost come from the underworld.)

This knowledge now was sealed behind black lips that tightly sheathed a tongue bitten bloody within, and with it came a grief so powerful it drove her to the brink of insanity. Her paws took leaden steps along the river as she shivered with it, clinging to a resolve that Sos' victory was imminent, and had been known from the beginning. The fire was the first sign. She had missed the other signs, if they had been presented to her. Her memories were dashed with every step she took, so that when she came upon Blackfoot Forest soil, she scarcely remembered where she'd come from.

The vision faded; it was not for her to keep forever, yet it would be burned into her subconscious memory eternally, perhaps to reawaken on the eve of her death.

Her wolves were not where she had left them. A tired frown marred the wretched, starved, addled Kesuk's brow as she stepped gingerly along the once strong borders of Bon Dye, which had grown to be the largest of the packs here. Who were they? she wondered, wracking her brain for the names buried deep within it. Hawkeye. Pied. Leto. Vires. Some others she couldn't quite remember. Their scents had faded, as had Lecter's, she realized with a silent lurch of her heart. Her shaman, her mother's shaman and the one wolf she longed to possess above all others, had abandoned her cause as well.

The fine skin over her snout crinkled with displeasure as a sudden wave of anger rose in her throat like bile. Swallowing any desire to release it as violence, the Kesuk pressed on, investigating further the territory that was to be her crowning achievement, but it was all gone. Atka's last act, she internally wondered, but there was no confirmation. Her god was silent, and the loa were silent, but active; as she walked amidst the sacred trees, she could feel their presences pluck at the hair on her back, as acutely as though lightning sparkled across her coat and sent her skin tingling.

Wrathful steps had taken her gaunt body from that hallowed place of abandonment and carried her to the sea, where she could enjoy in the last throes of her sanity the crash of waves on shore. In the distance, the porpoise totem of her youth might have signalled her, but her eyes stared unseeing past the horizon. And then… A sound caught her attention and snapped it away from memories of her past. A cautious tilt of her head and lift of ears allowed her to discern the message, and though loyalty had long become a thing of Jinx's past, there was no denying the requirement of pack. Snow was fleeting on the coast here, but it was nonetheless winter; security in numbers was an instinct to the wolf, not a choice.

Without second thought, for feral wildness had gripped her as hunger turned to starvation and as grief turned to numbness and rage, the she-wolf lifted her snout to sing the song of claiming with the nameless male who first uttered it. Her body tensed as the last note died on the wind; it was a certainty that he would soon locate her and determine her status, which was pitiful at best, far from the glory of her time as Mambo of Shearwater Bay and Alpha of Bon Dye. But she no longer cared for that glory; it was survival, now.

Sos had won the day against Atka, and would rule everyday henceforth, and Jinx was Sos' own. Death was not in the cards for her, and it was her duty as one of Sos' to see to that.