Otatso Wetlands clarice...your case file

She watched, touched with sorrow and regret that she could not help, as Lecter turned in in a circle so ponderous it was like watching him swim in haze, revealing to her several things: firstly, that he had lost his cunning glint of eye and wore instead the expression of desolate hopelessness; second, that his injury was likely still fresh, as she could tell it pained him to move. Neither “lady” nor “wench” pulled his lips apart, and the realisation of this silence, to her, was almost more startling than her finding him here at all. Even from her time as a babe, Lecter had been there to teach her, albeit scornfully and with a great lack of pleasure, or scold her, or say the rude things he often said; he had never been one for the children, but all the same, she had come to respect him as he ought to be respected, and he had stood by her, in his own way. To see him now so dejected was to feel her own heart sinking into the floor beneath them both.

Yet the power of it compelled her to remain silent even as he moved toward her, with that slow and halting gait that made her yearn to hold him up and remind him who he was. He paused before her, and his eyes were the icy polar regions that could be touched by nobody's sun; not even Atka, although Lecter had always vehemently hated the Light Goddess, much more than Jinx did now. She had never moved him, not like Sos. A heavy sigh lifted Jinx's chest as she murmured a quiet, “what has happened to you, dear afatkuq?” The word was said reverently, another term for Shaman that Jinx had always considered much more formal than its simpler counterpart. The rank he had held in her youth had since escaped her memory, so that she could recall only his permanent title of Shaman.

He did not explain in so many words as to give her any indication as to how he had drawn his conclusion, but in many ways the conclusion was enough. She had felt the very same thing. “His designs are beyond us now, He does not reveal anything,” she said. “He compelled me to come here but has given no hint as to why; I've abandoned all I held dear for Him and He repays with only silence.” And a dream, that may or may not have been telling of anything. Maybe knowing that Jinx too had felt abandoned by her God would make Lecter feel less hopeless, or maybe it would merely incite his anger; she never really knew, with him. “You are His own, as I am… He would never forsake you, who gave so much for Him. You are the greatest of His disciples.”

She wanted desperately to believe that what she said was true, and that Lecter was mistaken; but then, he would not have said he was forsaken without a sign of it. Boldly, with only faint faith that he would not rip her face off the second it drew near, she lowered her head and cleared the final distance to him, and gave a gentle nudge beneath his snout; if Sos had forsaken them both, and both were left without their Gods, then the sole truth for them was that she would never forsake him. He was Shearwater Bay, and Sos' own; they were, in this way, forever linked.