Otatso Wetlands clarice...your case file

Jinx had scarcely thought about home in the entire week she had spent away from Neverwinter, exploring and cataloguing, and hatching plans that had no place in spoken word yet; for the first time in all that week, memories of the Bay besieged her, reminded her that she was still very much out of place here. She was surprised, and devastated, to think of her late grandmother, Nauja, and her brother Arktos, and her other brother Vex, and realized she barely remembered what they looked like. She was devastated to know that Silatuyok's very name had begun to fade from her memory, and the distinct colours of Nukilik's eyes were muddied and uncertain in her mind. Time away would erase even the closest of companions, but knowing that was no consolation to her.

She had reached the edge of what appeared to be a wetland when the memories began to overtake her, and for a long time she stood there and thought; and the more she thought, the more crushing her sorrow became. Before long, she had to force herself to move to keep her paws, steeped in chill water, from becoming numb. Thankfully, the movement seemed to dissolve her memories, and walking and the unusual scenery served as a fitting distraction to keep her from sinking within herself. She told herself that Sos would snatch her soul for His own if she did not continue, and fearing that, she did.

She had made her way a quarter around the wetlands' perimeter when she saw him; it was like a dream, in a way, and she didn't want to believe it even as her steps quickened. Lecter had always been a strange topic for the girl, whose feelings were conflicted; on one hand, she had resented him as all others resented him, for being a recluse and grouchy and strange and smelling like rotting blood and flesh; on the other, she had felt… Well, something probably inappropriate, and deeply hidden. The opposition of it had swirled in her mind any time he was around so that eventually, she had suppressed all feeling at all; but it had always been there, somewhere in her character, and hinted in her behaviour.

Now, she felt fury, and fear, and anxiety. He was wounded; although the young Kesuk desperately wanted to draw close and sweep her tongue over his injury and sooth it, she knew better than to approach the madman so directly. Instead, she paused a short distance away, unsure whether he had even noticed her, or even cared or recognized her at all, and said simply, for lack of knowing whether compassion might console him or incite him, “how did you come to be here?”

It would also allow an opportunity for him to prove he was not, in fact, Lecter at all; perhaps he would turn his head and address her as “lady” and not “wench”, would not bare his teeth with wild hatred of all else that lived, and he would be a creature of different make, and therefore not Lecter, but somebody who looked and smelled much like him. While Jinx was secretly hopeful that Lecter was here, because it meant that Sos had brought to her the greatest gift He possibly could, she desperately hoped he was not; for if he was, what of Shearwater Bay? What if her vision, her one true terror, had come to pass anyway, and her leaving had been for naught?

What if they were all dead?