the world is more interesting with you in it

There was a voice praying, but no matter how she craned her head or preened her ears, the fallen Alpha could not identify the speaker. Lecter appeared in the skin of a huge black polar bear, but there was no priest in sight. She smacked her wet lips together, choking out a breath past the collected drool, and rattled a query to the Dark Father: “Houn... gan?”

That word seemed to come to her from a consciousness deeper than her own. It was ingrained in her memory and her blood as surely as the fact that she was a wolf. She was the daughter of a Houngan, loyal to Sos. Koios Iqniq had been his name, though when she tried to ask Sos if that was who prayed in unidentifiable words, she found she could not recall even the words for his existence. Koios' memory drifted away from her dwindling sanity... Even if it had only been the memory of a name.

She could not understand that Lecter was begging their God for her life. Her comprehension was shot. “T... Take meeee,” she hissed, willing Him to just end her suffering. The way her vision twisted and warped reality inappropriately was maddening. The constant buzzing in her head and the firing of her nervous system and the way she jerked and frothed and lost control of herself left her in a state of constant fear and alarum. At first, it had been funny and convincing, but now it was no such thing. She could not handle it any more than she could handle the inherent knowledge that she was dying a slow and torturous death, sure to end in paralysis and coma.